Now that Carl Icahn has his seat on the Yahoo board, he'll presumably be too busy correcting the company's corporate governance abuses to blog properly at the Icahn Report (and by "blog properly," we mean "complain about the mainstream media"). So he's hired hedge fund reporter Dane Hamilton from Thomson Reuters to help out. If Google CEO Eric Schmidt is so worried about the fate of investigative journalism, maybe he should take a page from Icahn and adopt the de Medici model — commission work as a latter-day patrono. (Photo by AP/Shiho Fukada)

“I was more creative when I started ... Then I started to restrict what I put up there … I’ve ducked a couple of issues recently." So says a blogger quoted in an excerpt from Making Online News: The Ethnography of New Media Production. The book, penned by a pair of journalism and communication profs, claims that "the more relevant bloggers become in terms of audience and influence, the more their production routines resemble those of professional journalists." Which really only means: We hate our jobs, and so will you.

Blame Jonathan Schwartz. Sun Microsystems' ponytailed Mission-hipster foodie CEO complained in 2006 that he couldn't post corporate news on his blog. SEC chairman Chris Cox stepped to, initiating a two-year study that has just concluded that yes, posting "non-public material information" on a website might suffice as a means of disclosure. What this will really accomplish:Driving kids away from blogging once and for all. When blogs are safe for announcing corporate earning reports — when Mom and Dad drive an hour each way just to pull down a salary for clicking "Save" in Movable Type — you know they won't touch a blog, even if you paid them. Well, maybe if you paid them.

"I am really trying to get off of the PR bandwagon," declares the formerly PR-friendly Robert Scoble. "We write something is amazing in the morning and then total junk in the afternoon," gripes Web 2.0 event regular Sarah Lacy. You see, neither Scoble nor Lacy got one of the secret advance "pre-briefings" from overhyped search engine Cuil prior to the site's launch on Sunday night. So they didn't get to lead the charge of Cuil is kewl! announcements, nor the backwash of Umm, maybe not retractions. Don't dismiss the pair's lengthy posts as sour grapes.Instead, read them aloud: This is the sound of two industry insiders observing the dreary results of the canned, controlled and scheduled "news" crafted by Valley publicists and parroted by self-styled "reporters" whose sole metric of success is pushing the Publish button first. All Lacy and Scoble needed was one morning on the outside. Yes, you two, this is how it looks to your readers every single day.

An email I got this morning reads, "Bloggers Wanted. Are you one the bloggers? I mean ... do you write blog?" Why yes, I do! A prediction: This idiot-savant spam illustration will end up on CafePress as T-shirts, mugs, and bumper stickers before the day is out.

Who's most poised to break "blogging's glass ceiling?" The New York Times pegs BlogHer, the yearly convention and ad network, as the center of discussion on how women ought to get more attention online — and the cash that comes with it. The core issue is that there are at least two very divergent camps within BlogHer.

To be honest, I didn't think Fake Steve Jobs author Dan Lyons would be able to keep it coming under his own name. (And also to be honest, I looked into getting his old job at Forbes.) Anyway, now that Dan is up and running at realdanlyons.com, he's got me laughing orange soda out my nose. Right onto my brand new iMac keyboard, Dan. That superflat one Steve worked so hard on. Dan's secret? He really does talk like this. All the time. Drives waitresses crazy. Three must-read, will-cringe excerpts from his recent posts:

We rarely miss a chance to pick on relentless egoblogger Robert Scoble. But today, RoboScoble is hurting, and his hurt hurts like our hurt. Only his hurt runs about 2,000 words longer. How has tech blogging failed Robert since the halcyon days of 2003? Here's the executive briefing:

I blame Guy Kawasaki. Ten days after the relentless listmaker joined the advisory board of Vancouver-based citizen journalism hub NowPublic, the site published a link-baiting "The 50 most influential people in New York." We've had this piece in our inboxes since Friday morning, but we couldn't figure out how to get anyone in the Valley to care about a list topped by Noah Brier and Jeff Jarvis. More interesting is me-blogger Anil Dash's take on the genre: "First and foremost, organizations create these lists to promote their own authority." Exactly. We've been pitched to do a Valleywag 100 or Valleywag 40 or whatever by consultants who crank out marketing events for a living. But they balk when we ask for a deck of playing cards emblazoned with the faces of 52 People We Want Gone.

With nary a crotch-covering laptop shot among them, the latest hot blogger list distinguishes itself by rounding up ten guys. My sweaterbear editor insists this is the most important list ever — probably because it features ursine crush object Alex Blagg from VH1's Best Week Ever. I'm just waiting for when the nudity gets as gratuitous — Jason Kottke! — as the linking.

What's not nearly as sexy as Mashable CEO Pete Cashmore? Having to tease out an audience with discoveries like "An Almost Perfect Web-Based Twitter Management Tool." Yes, Twitter traffic is growing fast, but the vast majority of people in the world haven't discovered Twitter yet, let alone realized it's something they need to manage.

Silicon Alley Media, disgraced tech-stocks analyst Henry Blodget's recently formed blog collective, has raised a modest $1 million from wealthy investors, Tech Confidential reports. The A round's A list included Tacoda cofounder Dave Morgan and former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz. With the proceeds, Blodget is hiring editors for two new sites: Clusterstock, a spreadsheet-heavy analysis site, and Business Sheet, a tabloidy take on business personalities.

BlogHer, the world's largest network of mommybloggers and women who are not mommies, has a new deal with NBC Universal: $5 million from their Peacock Equity fund, and a partnership with iVillage, the leading pastel content provider for ladies. More baby stuff and diet ads will follow at BlogHer, yes, but "we've been able to syndicate ads that make our bloggers happy," says BlogHer cofounder, Lisa Stone. Ads are just the acrylic tip of it.

BusinessWeek sent us a press release touting the launch of their 25th blog. Quick, name the other twenty-four!

Time Warner's AOL and TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington have been talking for the past two months, with AOL offering Arrington $20 million to $30 million to acquire tech's most dutiful clearinghouse for startup PR. Kara Swisher says that TechCrunch wants more than $30 million; we've heard he's looking for more like $100 million. Arrington has perpetually shopped his site around; all this deal talk reminds us how, just the other weekend, we overhead him wishing he could just sell out and move to Hawaii. Which makes for a nice pipe dream, but a weak negotiating position. Another reason to be skeptical: This is not Arrington's first flirtation with Time Warner.

"Thiel makes me sick!" read the note from Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton. His oddly personal declaration was prompted by a brief in the New York Post about former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel's success as a hedge-fund manager. Thiel will make an estimated $500 million this year running Clarium Capital, a hedge fund. (We reported this a few weeks ago, boss.) It hit me hard: Could Denton actually be jealous of Thiel?

Fun-loving millionaire Jason Calacanis (right) is not joking: He's quit blogging. In a quickie phone call, Calacanis told Valleywag that he felt blogging was taking too much time away from both his work and his family, because of the blogosphere's always-on, why-haven't-you-replied-it's-been-5-minutes nature. Instead, Calacanis is posting his thoughts and observations to an old-school mailing list. He says the list has gathered 500 subscribers since its launch last week. Don't worry, you haven't seen the last of blogging's fair-haired boy. I just subscribed tips@vallewyag.com to the list, and I give it a week at max before someone sets up an automatic system that reposts every one of Calacanis's emails — to a blog. (Photo courtesy of Jason Calacanis)

Is blogging the future of the media business? If so, it's in a very small way. That's what I gather from the purchase by Guardian Media Group, a British ink-on-dead-trees concern, of PaidContent.org for $30 million or so. It's a satisfying outcome for Rafat Ali, PaidContent's founder; he now has bragging rights to a bigger blog deal than the sale of Weblogs Inc. to AOL for $25 million by Jason Calacanis, his former boss.

ContentNext, the parent of media technology blog PaidContent, was purchased by the UK's Guardian Media for $30 million, pending the site meeting performance expectations in the coming months. The company will continue to report independently in the meantime under new CEO Nathan Richardson and the editorial direction of founders Rafat Ali. It's certainly more than the $15 million deal blog prospector Michael Arrington thought would only afford Ali, Kramer and Co. "spending money," and it's in line with other recent deals such as MediaBistro's $25 million sale to Jupiter and ArsTechnica's $25-30 million sale to Condé Nast. So, which tech news entrepreneur might follow?

In a more innocent age, much earlier in this decade, bloggers traded links out of a sense of camaraderie. Over time, it turned into more of a quid pro quo: You scratch my back, I boost your pageviews. Now, blogs routinely auction off space in their blogroll. CollegeHumor, the IAC-owned juvenile-jokes site, has refined this business model even further. A come-on from CollegeHumor's marketing department encourages Valleywag to participate in its Linkswap program. Every link to CollegeHumor, it promises, will be returned one for one with a link to Valleywag. Thanks, but I think we'll pass.