Charles Forman is currently building Blockles, a surprisingly Tetris-like online game for his dating site, Iminlikewithyou. Why do we suspect he's not going to be making any friends at Tetris owner Electronic Arts?

Remember 'Dilbert,' the comic strip that pillories meddlesome bosses and deadening corporate culture? In the late 90s, its creator Scott Adams made millions of dollars licensing everything from the strip itself to dolls to "Accomplish-mint" to the "Dilberito", "a vitamin-packed meatless burrito." Now he manages a failing restaurant in a strip mall in California. Surprisingly to no one yet pleasingly ironic to all, he's a horrible horrible boss.

Gabriel Ortiz and Paul Starr are attempting to eliminate stupid comments from the Web with the open-source project StupidFilter. On first mention, it sounds great. We wish there was a StupidFilter for blog posts and magazine articles too. On looking into it, though, we realized that what we really need is a StupidFilter for startups like this.

After adventurer Steve Fossett disappeared flying over the Nevada desert two months ago, Amazon.com joined the search party for his crash site by uploading satellite photographs covering 17,000 square miles. The idea was that volunteers on Amazon's Mechanical Turk service could pore over the photos and find Fossett's remains. But after 50,000 volunteers spent two months on the the effort to no avail, Amazon pulled the plug. Why?

One lifecasting video entrepreneur makes it big, and suddenly the Internet is crawling with me-too networks and absurd self-broadcasting mashups. The latest such venture moves from simple audience observation to audience participation. Mod My Life pegs itself as a new form of virtual reality. One of its "modstars" (a witless if not unwitting chap armed to the teeth with broadcasting equipment) is unleashed in New York City. Think of it as Digg meets Subservient Chicken: Viewers submit actions for the bloke to perform, and in Digg-like fashion, the most popular suggestions are voted on, and then the lifecaster is forced to perform them. Genius examples include "pretend to be the bouncer at the Taco Bell" and "try and sell a free newspaper." I'm waiting for "have a quickie in a needle-laden alleyway" or "defecate on Prometheus at the Rockefeller Center." Bonus points awarded for "holding my attention for more than five minutes" and "making its way out of beta."

Now that we all understand that there will be no Googlephone, what are we to make of the laughable "industry initiative" Google has come up with in its place? The most notable thing about it is not who's in the Open Handset Alliance group, but who's out: Microsoft and Nokia. And why are they out? Because they already make cell-phone operating systems. Much has been made of the notion that Google will license its new cell-phone OS, Android, for free. And much has been made of the possibility that Google will introduce compelling new mobile apps. But will either promise amount to much?

"I know that most publishers and agents don't like to receive unsolicited proposals from un-agented authors," began the non-bcc'd email received today by almost every agent and editor currently working in book publishing. "But I am a new author who is trying to get her first novel published and I am hoping you will give me a chance and take a look at my novel ...My novel is entitled, "To Catch A Master Thief" and it is in the genre of contemporary romance/thriller. It is about the daughter of a master thief named Claire Barnes, who is a master thief herself. Her father is kidnapped by Don Qui Hon, a ruthless Chinese antiques collector, and held prisoner in Beijing when her father steals one of Don Qui Hon's prized Ming Dynasty vases. Don Qui Hon threatens to kill her father in five days, if Claire doesn't bring him the vase in China. With another master thief chasing after the vase for her own designs and Interpol agent Jack Norton chasing after her to use her as bait to catch her father to further his own career, Claire is in a race against time to save her father. As Jack and Claire are forced to work together, the sparks and passion between them fly, and so does the danger. In the end, Jack will have to decide on whether he wants to advance his career or lose the woman he loves." Oh, well in that case!

Seeking to expand his company's storage offerings, Michael Dell is buying EqualLogic for $1.4 billion. This is a monumentally bad move. Leave aside the details of what EqualLogic does. (Something to do with tying storage servers together on a network.) Let's remember what Dell does. Dell is a highly skilled repackager of commodity tech, like Intel microprocessors, Seagate hard drives, and the Windows OS. Add a few extra parts, slap some plastic around it, and you've got a PC. Sure, it can make some money installing that PC, too. But what it doesn't do, and shouldn't do, is try to advance the state of the art on its own. His own hard experience should have told Michael Dell not to make this deal.

Remember when the asinine office policy was to wear a Hawaiian shirt on Fridays? Serena Software, some boring company in San Mateo, has begun a policy of "Facebook Fridays," where the entire 900-person company is forced to spend an hour on Facebook, updating their profiles, throwing virtual sheep at each other, and, hopefully finding potential Serena employees while they're trolling for hotties. God, what is this economy coming to? Companies that force their employees to share information on a social network? Doomed to fail.

O'Reilly Radar notes one aspect of the announcement, the appearance of a "CampFire" (their capitalization) which will bring together thirty developers to celebrate OpenSocial, Google's also-ran answer to Facebook's app platform. The "CampFire" mentioned? Not a euphemism. We hear that Google is hosting, outside on its main campus, an invite-only, s'mores-cooking, go-gather-some-kindling bonfire to let platform developers get their kum-ba-ya-yas on. "Someone from our team is heading there to roast marshmallows, who knows," says one participant. Google has been secretive throughout this process. But in its efforts to hide the project, there's one legal nicety Google hasn't observed.

Something I blocked from my memory after last night's Meebo party: In announcing the launch of their new platform, the company announced a new slogan: "I want to ______ with you." ("At the same time," Meebo's site helpfully clarifies.) The fill-in-the-blank answer, in Meebo's eyes, would be "talk" or "play games" and the "with you" portion highlights Meebo's sales pitch — the ability to do such activities in real time, while others are online. Our question: What happens when that blank is answered with "share kiddie porn" or "plan a terrorist attack"?

Hey, what are you being for Halloween? It falls in the middle of the week this year, which is lame, but this is New York, so please do go ahead and dress up as Amy Winehouse in order to sit on your stoop and pass out candy to children! Other decent ones we have heard:

Remember Angel Hess, the "dance photographer" who lives in a '50s bread truck parked in Williamsburg? Good news! Now you can be just like him! Hello Miami Craigslist! "$1000 Artist House Williamsburg Brooklyn" you say?

Stealth startup Introfee has announced a $1,000 bounty for clear footage of a live baby birth to use in a planned Super Bowl commercial. In order to enter the contest, Introfee is asking for interested parties to upload videos of childbirth to video services like YouTube and Veoh and tag the clips with "Introfee" so the company, and, presumably, the rest of the world, can easily judge the entrants. And, no, this is not a hoax.

Google gets a lot of credit for its clean interface. But site operators feel pressure to clutter up their own interfaces with extra links and keywords in order to boost their rankings in Google's search engine. In public statements, Google employees say they doesn't encourage the practice, called search engine optimization, or SEO, but the reality is that it works, even though the results can be ugly. What would happen if Google had to butcher its own site the way its desperate hangers-on do? Startup executive Gene McKenna's mockup, after the jump.

When all else fails, blame Napster. The file-sharing startup, in its first incarnation, pretty much gutted the music industry. The progeny it spawned has ruined the life of Minnesota single mom Jammie Thomas, who was fined a $222,000 fine for illegally downloading music. Now, reborn as a tedious iTunes wannabe, the company is ruining my morning with its latest bad idea. Napster 4.0 is a $10/mo. subscription service which ever so kindly allows users to access and play their music on any Internet-connected computer without downloading any software. The advantage, in short, is that you can hijack your friends' computers to play your own music. Tell you what, Napster: I'll keep my money and listen to Pandora for free instead.

We're used to venture capitalists having, um, "wild" and "exciting" hobbies in their downtime. Like Bill Tai of Charles River Ventures, who spends his time kitesurfing. Or Kleiner Perkins founder Tom Perkins, the yachting enthusiast. Or First Round Capital's Josh Kopelman, who dabbled in indoor skydiving. Venture capitalists are supposed to be daring and innovative, which is why we can't get our heads around this latest trend: VC as poet. After the jump, a brief history of the genre — and the latest atrocious example.

The more popular this social networking thing gets, the more exclusive the communities become. For an evil example, there's the site Newsaxon.org, a MySpace for racists which bills itself as "an online community for whites by whites." Though we suspect that the clientele of this network is a little less powerful than the mega-moguls on Facebook — five of the twenty available job descriptions are "Looking for Work," "Laid Off", "Unemployed," "Billionare" [sic], and "Millionare" [sic]. What, no "Entrepreneur in Action"?

For Wall Street, it's a juicy notion: Could Microsoft buy Research In Motion? It's the kind of high-concept idea that gets traders afroth and keeps analysts busy churning out reports. It's also — how to put this delicately — completely stupid. Yes, Microsoft could buy RIM — and yes, you could go out and buy a gun and shoot yourself in the face. Both are in the realm of possibility, and both are suicidal ideas.

Sure, maybe this HarperCollins HR initiative is just the result of the kind of silly makework that every company's human resources department engages in to make it seem more like they have actual jobs between dealing with random sexual harassment complaints. Or maybe they're subtly implying that layoffs are imminent and that the job market is so bad that people will have to support themselves by entertaining at children's birthday parties.