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

Has Second Life, the weird, clunky virtual world, ever been good for anything except strange computer sex and time-wasting? For about a year there, you couldn't pick up a magazine without seeing 2L touted as the next big thing for business. For business! Yes, why wouldn't an imaginary land packed with flying monsters and huge selections of virtual penises become corporate America's preferred communications medium? Christ. Lots of the hype was the fault of BusinessWeek, which bought into it with wide-eyed enthusiasm. And the magazine is still trying to get your employer to drag you off to a fantasy computer island for fun team-building exercises:

BusinessWeek Magazine sure is one big hellhole, judging strictly by the internal backstabbing, sniping, and intra-office gossip wars that go on there. The latest scathing editorial criticism comes in the form of a comment on a blog interview of BW.com editor John Byrne. A helpful reader takes the opportunity to point out that Byrne's predecessor was the widely despised Kathy Rebello, infamous for once hyping stories on her own site with praise from a fake commenter. Also discussed by the angry commenter: a celebrity gossip-refugee news editor with a shelf full of Barbie dolls, and a napkin-folding Rebello underling who fetched his boss water on command (we need one of those!). The provocative comment-along with some context from a BW insider, and our request for more information-after the jump.

Today, the New York Times profiles Gary Stern, the owner of the last pinball-machine manufacturing company in the world. "To most," Times profiler Monica Davey says, "the story seems familiar." Well, it seemed familiar to us! Because in March of 2005, BusinessWeek profiled Gary Stern, the owner of the last pinball-machine manufacturing company in the world. Let's see what else these stories have in common!

The problem with lists like BusinessWeek's collection of 13 under-30 entrepreneurs: Inevitably, in an effort to fill a demographic quota, editors scrape the bottom of the barrel. And presenting a balanced picture of these business novices cuts against the goal of serving up fresh faces. (Whether they're supposed to make BusinessWeek's 50something readers feel either young again or even older, I'm not quite sure.) Here are some things that BusinessWeek would just as soon you not know about members of its boy band:

Back in my pre-glamour blogging days, I worked for a little trade magazine called Sales & Marketing Management. You may have heard of it: It was about sales, marketing and the management therein. It was awesome. And while there, I did a story about LinkedIn, the social networking site for business people. As part of my reporting, I joined the site. Now every month, some jerk I emailed once asks me to be a part of their LinkedIn network. Look, social networking is for witnessing the downfall of high school stars, not getting a job as a regional sales manager in Scottsdale, Arizona. Oh, by the by, BusinessWeek is partnering with LinkedIn. [Folio]

With great fanfare, BusinessWeek released a compilation of twenty "free, independently developed Web-based games" on its website today. "Casual games," free games that are easy to play and addictive (think Tetris), are big business. Nickelodeon recently announced it was developing 600 games for its websites. Why is BusinessWeek playing tastemaker in this market, though, under the guise of praising the outlandishly simplistic videogames for their "design"?

BusinessWeek reporter Catherine Holahan dropped in on BitStrips, a Web-comics startup showing off its wares at SXSW. (Really, who goes to the SXSW trade-show booths?) In Holahan's blog post on the subject, she faithfully transcribed BitStrips founder Ba's thoughts on why he created a website that automates the production of cartoons which look like they were drawn by 5th-grade students. But oddly, she didn't hit on something far more topical: How Ba himself attacked her colleague Sarah Lacy for her keynote interview with Mark Zuckerberg in an "editor's pick." That comic strip, which I'm betting you won't see on BusinessWeek.com anytime soon:

TED is the Bono of conferences. (Except Bono wasn't even on this year's guest list.) The Technology Entertainment Design conference is so bold-name, so visionary that you have to like it, which is why you can so easily hate it. But in 2006, the conference awarded its annual $100,000 prize to a man named Larry Brilliant who's heading up Google's non-profit arm, and how do you top that? This year, B-list tech press have rejected the conference they were never invited to. But they really do have a point:

Whatever you do, don't try to boost BusinessWeek's web traffic! Turns out they don't want your stinking clickthroughs. As a recent story subject discovered, should you be inclined to push traffic their way via a direct "deep link" to a story, the McGraw-Hill magazine will even go so far as to ask you not to link to their site, and point you to their snooty user agreement. This is pretty much the dumbest thing we've heard in the last, oh, two hours or so, and after the jump, we'll tell you why.

Scoops are important to journalists. But do readers care? Some writers persist in thinking so. I can't remember ever seeing such backbiting over a humdrum funding announcement: Kara Swisher of AllThingsD scooped everyone last Friday with a rumor that Slide, Max Levchin's Web widget maker, was raising a big funding round. Sarah Lacy of BusinessWeek had more details of the $50 million round in an already-written column published to the Web after Swisher's post. Brad Stone of the New York Times weighed in that afternoon. And that's when the knives came out.

Anyone at BusinessWeek know how many positions are going at the formerly peppy business magazine? Tip us. (There have been other cuts at McGraw Hill, the parent company, but we don't care quite so much about Aviation Week.)

Was Portfolio's production team projecting just a smidge when they chose to illustrate a column this month about the city's declining commercial real estate market with a "foreclosure"-stamped photograph of the Time-Life, Simon & Schuster News Corp and McGraw-Hill buildings? The buildings house most of Portfolio's big competitors: Time Inc.'s Fortune and Money, as well as McGraw-Hill's BusinessWeek. While we wouldn't put a little petty retaliation past editor Joanne Lippman, a bored (or clueless) photo editor is likely behind this one. Artful art there, kids!

Paul Barrett, Assistant Managing Editor for investigative projects at BusinessWeek, will be "returning to The Wall Street Journal to write on non-business topics for the front page," according an email from Businessweek EIC Stephen Adler. A former WSJ editor himself Adler brought Barrett to the magazine in 2006. Barrett's departure is reversing a trend wherein WSJ staffers, fearful of life under Murdoch jumped ship. Now it seems at least one of them is clamoring to get back on board. [Romenesko]

"2008 is the year Facebook grinds to — not a halt — but definitely a slowdown. The backlash is already here. I've said it before; I'll say it again: Facebook flight." Ah, the sweet, juicy sound of BusinessWeek's Arik Hesseldahl plopping his cojones on the table. We credit his bravado, but he's wrong. Beacon was bad for Facebook on the blogs, but users hardly noticed.

455 words into a 623-word memo about staff changes, Business Week editor Stephen Adler announces layoffs of a dozen editorial and business staff. [TBN]

BusinessWeek is trying to call a halt to Larry and Lucy's wedding! We get that Google is killing your print-ad sales. We get that being dependent on Web searches for, say, half of your traffic or whatever scares the bejeezus out of you. But really, mainstream media, this is a low blow — trying to put a pause on marital bliss with a conveniently planted scare story on billionaire prenups?

Rolling Stone and Us Weekly owner Jann Wenner and his partner, Matt Nye, (for whom he dropped his wife, Jane) are expecting twins in January, according to Business Week's Jon Fine. The newest little Wenners will join his current army of four. But this party is just beginning—the interview transcript is something to behold. Some highlights!

In the category of "the best defense is a good offense": The editors at BusinessWeek are not interested in anyone's analysis of why their website's traffic lags Forbes.com and Fortune.com—even when it says they're not to blame. Silicon Alley Insider's Peter Kafka tried to give them a break, yesterday, saying that a 24/7wallstreet.com report blaming their crappy numbers on crappy content was faulty analysis; they were actually the victims of poor distribution. Fortune.com, for example, benefits from all the traffic at CNMoney.com, while BusinessWeek.com stands alone on the web. Yet editor-in-chief John Byrne responded by saying that the ComScore numbers were completely wrong. Yes, they probably understated the case, but they weren't completely out of the ballpark, even according to Kafka. So the question remains: why DO they lag so far behind the other financial sites? I'd pick poor distribution. It's a lot easier to fix.

At McGraw-Hill's business newsweekly, someone decided, apparently, to do some late-summer database cleaning. BusinessWeek accidentally updating its RSS feed with some really thrilling stories. Headlines include: "More news today than ever," "Headline bla bla," and "just another headline that we need to fill in." Subheads — known in the news business as "decks" — also suffered: "Deck bla Deck bla Deck bla," "But this time we are testing FedEx campaign handling," and "testing the pp9 ad."