Anyone have a handkerchief? What? Oh, nothing in particular — just the tearjerking phenomenon of seemingly intelligent people like Jake Tapper, Rachel Sklar, and Paul Carr spending so much time sharing so little on Twitter:

More detail on the layoffs at Conde Nast Digital today (which is not an April Fool's joke, okay): Wired.com was reportedly hit hard. Internal turf war?

The accountants have taken over the Googleplex, once a hotbed of amiably unprofitable innovation. The notion that ads would pay the way for everything has been dropped — and "fee" is replacing "free."

Today, a media elite replete with tweets thought about all the things they no longer have. And boy, did Wired's editor get mad at a Danish reporter! Also, food, food, and more food:

Today on Twitter: Media people being pretentious, from Bonnie Fuller to Wired's Chris Anderson and beyond!

Twitter users are a sorry bunch. Especially the media! Errata, excuses, and eye-rolling from today's tweets:

There's no time like a recession to reassert the conventional economic wisdom that making money is harder than those guys on cable pretend. Viral marketing was huge in the mid-90's before the dotcom bubble burst and everyone realized that eyeballs didn't necessarily translate into dollars. It was only a matter of time before the next crop of counterintuitive pop business theorists — from Malcolm Gladwell to James Surowiecki to Chris Anderson — were doused with the cold waters of cash flow. What's so interesting about this latest cycle of backlash and disillusionment, though, is that the assailants are almost all former apostles turned heretics. After the jump, the spats and surprisingly friendly debates about whether the new memes of trendsetting will remain trendy for very long.

Thanks for the cover, Julia Allison writes to Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson, with the curious caveat: "I would never want your editorial prowess to be called into question over me," and a heavily dropped hint that she's not done with Wired yet. What's her game?

Julia Allison posted an email conversation with the editor of Wired, the magazine that, in case you missed it, put her on the cover this month and thus made her famous for being famous for nothing. Ever the crafty self-promoter, Allison asked if her cover was as good for Wired as it was for her: "I hope - that as time goes on, you'll be proud you took the leap," the Time Out New York dating columnist wrote. Remember aspiring fameballs: follow up is key. Wired editor Chris Anderson replied, "I feel great about this one." So sweet. In another moment protocelebrities should study, Allison makes a thinly-veiled pitch for some kind of Wired writing gig by pretending she's tired of all the self-promotion (for real this time!) and wants to get back to her "roots" (what??) as a writer:

Wired's August cover, featuring Internet nobody Julia Allison, wouldn't normally be going online for another week or so, when the ink-on-dead-trees version hits subscribers' mailboxes. (How pre-postindustrial!) We asked Wired executive editor Bob Cohn why the magazine rushed it online. He told us the posting got pushed up a few days owing to "all the attention online" for the as-yet-unseen cover story — whose subject is how to stir up attention online.

The Internet was supposed to have turned us all into niche market consumers instead of the herd-driven bestseller fanatics we've always been. In 2006, Wired editor Chris Anderson published The Long Tail, a book which argued that because commercial sites like Amazon and Netflix weren't constrained by the same brick-and-mortar inventories as Borders and Blockbuster, people who shopped online would do so in less concentrated packs at the "head" of the demand curve; instead they'd spread the wealth around the "tail" end of it. As Anderson wrote, "narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare," or George Romero can compete with Steven Spielberg. Well, now a Harvard Business School professor says the Long Tail theory is bunkum. Even online, we're as bovine and conformist as we've always been offline.

Harvard associate professor Anita Elberse has penned a long article for the Harvard Business Review that used data from Rhapsody and Australian DVD-by-mail distributor Quickflix to demonstrate that rather than the Internet enabling a "long tail" of niche media which publishers should embrace, the blockbuster strategy is still what pays dividends for content producers. In other words, Elberse argues that media is still a hits business, and that the Internet is not necessarily the democratizing force The Long Tail author Chris Anderson says it is. Anderson says that Elberse's analysis isn't wrong, per se, just that they disagree on exactly what the "head" and "tail" mean. Except that Elberse worked with Anderson on researching his book, so one imagines the Wired magazine editor explained it thoroughly. Funny, it's as though two different people analyzing the same data have come to entirely different conclusions about the "truth."

Google worship has gone too far. The latest prayer to the pretender to God-like omniscience comes from Wired editor Chris Anderson (and if it drums up enough controversy, it's bound to end in a book deal). He argues that we should give up on the allegedly outmoded maxim that "correlation is not causation," because now we're in the "Petabyte Age" and we can manipulate so much data that we can solve our problems without having to understand them.

LOS ANGELES, CA — Jeff Bezos pitched the Kindle to attendees at Book Expo America today in downtown LA, and then sat down with Wired editor and author of The Long Tail Chris Anderson for a little chit-chat. The takeaway? Much like Apple, Bezos uses the euphemism "customer experience" for "vertical integration," especially when it comes to the new Kindle and the requirement that print-on-demand publishers work with Amazon subsidiary BookSurge. After the jump, some choice quotes from before Anderson's questions (presumably from his notes, on regular old paper, pictured here) started to veer into extreme audience irrelevance when he brought up EC2 and Bezos' space ambitions.

MIDTOWN WEST — "You're a normal person," Wired editor Chris Anderson asked me at Wired's 15th anniversary party last night in New York. "What do you make of all this?" He nodded his head toward the four corners of the roof top, crowded with the Wired set. In response, I said something about the thick-rimmed black frames and all the scarves. But for reading-comprehension points, I should have said I felt like I was in the midst of a cult. Because that's what Conde Nast's Wired is all about, Anderson and Wired cofounder Louis Rossetto told us in their speeches: turning the cult of technology into a culture, but keeping it as fervent as a cult. That and covers of a nude Jenna Fischer and LonelyGirl15 in bed, of course. Below, photos of the faithful.

Wired editor Chris Anderson tonight came face-to-face with the "Long Tail," his oft-cited metaphor for low-grade internet fame, via an encounter after the National Magazine Awards with fameball Julia Allison. Star Editor-At-Large Allison worked Anderson hard, no doubt as part of her relentless effort to take the "proto" out of her protocelebrity — to be more than tail, basically. She reports on her blog that she chatted Anderson up for 20 minutes and ended up "bopping him enthusiastically." Wait, Julia. Didn't you just tell the Times you were going to stop using your "pink-encased loaded weapon" this way?? Anyway, alternate photo captions for the picture above are totally welcome after the jump. Even if you're drunk. Especially if you're drunk. [Julia Allison: 1, 2, 3, 4]

Over the years, Charlie Rose has hosted Silicon Valley titans like Wired editor Chris Anderson, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, and Google cofounder Sergey Brin on his late-night public television interview show. When Facebook launched its Beacon advertising program in New York, Rose played master of ceremonies. But not until now, with the discovery of this clip titled "'Charlie Rose' by Samuel Beckett," has Rose effectively explicated the industry.

From Wired editor Chris Anderson's big cover story/book excerpt on how most products will soon be free: "Externalities [is] a concept that holds that money is not the only scarcity in the world. Chief among the others are your time and respect, two factors that we've always know about but have only recently been able to measure properly."

We heard through the grapevine that copies of this month's Wired were being taken off newsstands without payment — because unsuspecting readers thought the giant "Free!" on the cover meant the magazine was available no charge. Wired editor-in-chief Greg Anderson tells Valleywag:

The February 2007 issue of Wired contained 67 pages of advertisements. The maker of this document — we hesitate to call it "art" — placed their logos in the exact same positions as they appear in the magazine. Get your signed copy for €50.