In humor, timing is everything. And death just ain't that funny. That's why Dan Lyons is quitting the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs blog. True, he's planning to turn his Fake Steve Jobs schtick into a second book. And his new job as Newsweek's gadget columnist may require more decorous relations with Apple — note that Newsweek, usually the object of favored treatment by Apple PR, didn't get an early iPhone 3G to review. But the real reason why Lyons is dropping Fake Steve? Because the state of the real Apple CEO's health had Lyons scared.

Valley marketer Louis Gray and Outside the Beltway editor James Joyner agree: Blog links account for less and less of the traffic to their sites, falling an order of magnitude behind search engines. "Search engines, social media sites, and aggregators delivered much more traffic than links from very popular blogs such as Scobleizer, TechCrunch, and Micro Persuasion," Joyner summarizes from Gray's data. His theory? The geeks who read blogs all day in 2003 are now following Twitter and other speedier media.

Ruthless reporter Kara Swisher didn't get invited to superbanker Herb Allen's annual VIP gathering in Sun Valley. So she's taking matters into her own hands and ... complaining on her blog? Kara, stop it. I've seen you in action. You're The Bride of tech reporting. When you enter the room, security guards flee. PR bunnies chew off their own heads rather than face you. You disembowel Old Boys Club members with questions so sharp they barely feel a thing until it's too late. So quit whining and man up, Kara. Just get yourself to Sun Valley. You'll get in. You'll have the head table before dinner is finished. I almost feel sorry for the poor sonsabitches they send to stop you. Send us your posts and we'll lazily relink them. Now GO.

What's the classiest finish to an Internet catfight? The shining example will be July 2008's Boing Boing vs. Violet Blue. It wasn't about player-hating and girl-on-girl sex, we'll all say. No no, it was about freedom and blogging and privacy and good versus evil. Now that we've all moved on, the New York Times steps in a week later to clean things up with a G-rated rehash that suggests Violet Blue may be the real winner. What have each of the participants learned?

Boing Boing's readers, hopped up on free-speech rhetoric, continue to find the tech-culture blog's act of unpublishing unspeakable. Hoping to put the Internet's most enduring drama llama this month to bed, the Los Angeles Times rounded up four members of Boing Boing's staff yesterday for a late-night confab. The result is transcribed here and there, but for those about to launch into a three-day weekend, we salute you with only the most wonderful bits, perfect for around-the-barbeque reblogging. It is at once brilliant and brain-numbing in its inconclusiveness. But if the answer to bad speech is more speech, why not answer an act of unpublishing with more nonwords?

Sex blogger Violet Blue may have tried to ride the Boing Boing coattail express to microfame by airing grievances publicly. But once upon a time she waged the same kind of war on Boing Boing cofounder Xeni Jardin's side against Matthew Neal Sharp, curator of xenisucks.com, and the New York Times. Now, after the bad breakup between the two bloggers became serious business, another gentleman has put a thumb in the third eye of the popular catalog of eclectic ephemera by creating violetbluevioletblue.net — a directory of formerly wonderful things from Boing Boing that featured Blue, deleted by Jardin from the site a year ago.

What turned culture-jamming tech blog Boing Boing into the kind of censorious monster it normally ridicules? Beyond its initial statement that the reasons are "personal," Boing Boing hasn't elaborated, but all signs point to the foundering of a once-romantic friendship between Boing Boing editor Xeni Jardin and Violet Blue, the sex blogger whose many links from Boing Boing were erased last year. (Full disclosure: Jardin is Valleywag's favorite gendertastic sex-robot space princess from the future, while Violet Blue has contributed to Fleshbot, a porn blog published by Valleywag owner Gawker Media. Blue once approached Valleywag contributor Melissa Gira Grant for sex, but was rebuffed.) In an email to Valleywag, pasted below, Blue continues to profess ignorance of what she did wrong; she also dismisses her entanglement with Jardin as a friendship laced with casual sex. Blue's own photo of the two at Kink.com party, shown here, suggests, in its entangled limbs, that the relationship was more serious than that.

As new media gets big, it remains small at heart - and not in a good way. Boing Boing, the popular tech-culture blog, has offered a tardy defense of its mass deletion of posts mentioning a sex blogger from its archive, and it amounts to this: Because Boing Boing started as a personal blog, it's entitled to be as petty, as hypocritical, and as inconsistent as a 14-year-old girl with a MySpace page. Never mind the fussing about so-called "censorship" - though one would be sure that, had this happened at another website, we'd be reading all about it at Boing Boing, with its editors in a righteous nerd froth. The excuse that "it's personal" would ring more true if we weren't talking about a media enterprise whose audience exceeds that of Conde Nast's Epicurious.com, or the publicly traded finance site TheStreet.com. While Boing Boing's revenues are unknown, the site formed the cornerstone of Federated Media, an online-advertising startup which has already made founder John Battelle - Boing Boing's "band manager" - a multimillionaire. Oh, and did we mention that Violet Blue, the sex blogger in question (and contributor to Gawker Media's Fleshbot), shown here at right, used to be the lover of Boing Boing editor Xeni Jardin, left?

Carl Icahn has finally gotten his online soapbox working so that he can start talking candidly about his proxy battle with Yahoo board, but posts so far have been few and far between. Some are noting that maybe it's just too hard to keep up with the rigors of blogging, but Icahn is now insisting it's the SEC prohibiting him from speaking out. Rather, he's just going to go on the attack against Yahoo management. Maybe he should have just setup a Tumblr account instead? That seems easier. (Photo by AP/Mark Lennihan)

Violet Blue, a popular local blogger, columnist, sex educator and contributor to Gawker Media's smutty sister Fleshbot, seems to have rubbed someone at Boing Boing the wrong way. She discovered that nearly all the posts on the site that mentioned her or her work had disappeared - save for one, a post from last year on the Top 10 Sex Memes from 2006. Shortly after that post was discovered via Google site search, it disappeared as well.

We figured something was up when former TechCruncher Duncan Riley created his own tech news spinoff, the Inquisitr. We figured there was probably even more backstory when he suddenly became one of our most reliable caption contest commenters (and occassional winner). Now there seems to have been a split between Riley and his old boss Michael Arrington, who in a rather passive-aggressive farewell said "My sincere hope is to have the opportunity to buy that blog some day and bring him right back into the fold." But yesterday, Riley bookmarked "Is Mike Arrington a Dick?" and then wrote an only slightly cryptic message:

The shrill cacophony of wealthy Democrats from Hollywood you've come to know and love on the Huffington Post will be coming to a major market near you soon enough, as the site will manicure content gardens for urban markets. Chicagoland bloggers now have any exciting opportunity to not get paid to contribute their opinions about local politics. [Guardian UK] (Photo by AP/Evan Agostini)

No wonder Carl Icahn thinks that Yahoo's search advertising deal with Google has merit — turns out that his blog, The Icahn Report, uses Google to help readers search. Not that there's much content to search, as it just went live today, with an archive only going back a week to June 12. Which just happens to be the day that talks with Microsoft ended and the partnership with Google was announced. One keyword you won't be able to find with a Google-powered search of Icahn's blog? The word "Yahoo."

A couple of bloggers have gotten their panties in a bunch because the Associated Press, a coop that offers original reporting to its 1,500 member newspapers and syndicates to other outlets, is asking that they go a little easier on the copy-paste. TechCrunch's Michael Arrington is having none of it!

Pete Cashmore, the blogger impersonator and CEO of Mashable, waves his wad at an Internet Week party in New York. Can you suggest a better caption? Do so in the comments. The best one will become the new headline. Yesterday's winner: "I'm leaving, Larry said there'd be girls here," by 26footjasontaylor.
(Photo by Brian Solis/Bub.blicio.us)

They'll let just about anyone blog these days, won't they? News.com's latest addition: recovering adman Chris Matyszczyk, who writes under the rubric "Technically Incorrect," and reminds me a bit of Dan Lyons's alter ego, Fake Steve Jobs — except that, having met Matyszczyk briefly, I think this is the real thing, not a put-on person. Matyszczyk's fantasy phone call between Hillary Clinton and Mark Zuckerberg is hilarious: Clinton blames Zuckerberg for her loss to Obama, and then hits the paper billionaire up for a donation. What's really funny: Matyszczyk is outsidery enough not to mention the fact that Zuckerberg's cofounder, Chris Hughes, left the social network early on to run Obama's Web campaign. Zuckerberg's posse really is at fault, and not in a metaphorical Facebook-generation way.

Women do rule the web, Flickr cofounder Caterina Fake told the New York Times, but with a "crushing sameness." Loads of blogs aimed at the moneyed portion of the lady demographic are launching, including Jezebel (published, like Valleywag, by Gawker Media) — ostensibly part of the "sameness" Fake alludes to. A BlogHer study even deems blogging now mainstream among women. Fake is not swayed:

In their endless quest for authenticity, marketers have latched onto bloggers as their new spokespeople. They're less demanding than celebrities, and far cheaper than copywriters. In this spirit, Bombay Sapphire, a brand of Bacardi Limited, which sold $5 billion worth of booze last year, has recruited bloggers for its Spirit of Exploration website. In exchange for writing paeans about exploration, Bacardi is allowing them to enter a contest, and linking to their blogs. At least Federated Media, the ad network, sold out its bloggers' credibility in exchange for a large Microsoft advertising buy; Bombay Sapphire's ad agency has cut out the middleman and persuaded bloggers to whore themselves out for free. Impressive!

CARLSBAD, CA — One of the best things about AllThingsD.com is John Paczkowski, the site's sardonic tech blogger, whom Kara Swisher cleverly poached from the San Jose Mercury News's Good Morning Silicon Valley blog. At the D6 conference, there has been no sign of John Paczkowski — only an overly sincere reporter impersonating him. There is no speaker the normally acidic Paczkowski can't find something nice to say about. Who is this guy, and what has he done with the real John?

We live in an overfamiliar age. Why should our flacks be any different? Even so, Startup-PR consultant Renee Blodgett has raised the bar for the rest of her industry. Blodgett, PBS informs us, "is one of the PR folks who understands how to communicate with bloggers." A blogger who forwarded me an email from Blodgett begs to differ. Blodgett and said Web scribe have never met, and yet Blodgett feels perfectly comfortable proposing "social" time, planning a "small group dinner," and asking for hotel recommendations. All this with four smileys thrown in for good measure. The email: