The new debate is whether blogs are dead. Today's featured commenter, macbeach, shares his opinion about why the blogging bigs of a few years ago are abandoning the medium:

Today was your last day to register to vote in California. Coincidence or not, today was also the day Google CEO Eric Schmidt decided to stump for Barack Obama. Is Schmidt trying to sway undecided voters, or just aiming for a government post? Either way, today's featured commenter, Churchill, explains why this wouldn't work:

Get some foil, hack it into a hat and try to connect the dots with me here. Google stock gets kicked down a couple notches the past few weeks. Google is now testing gambling ads. Google's stock is now up. What's going on? Is there some magical checklist of doom Larry, Sergey, and Eric are working off of? I don't have the answer but today's featured commenter, RarneyBubble, thinks he does:

Why do I love Boing Boing as much as I hate seeing Mark Frauenfelder in an Adobe ad? steampoweredboy files a tidy 3-paragraph reply:

Poor Elon Musk. It's not easy taking on establishments in the auto and space industries. Add to that the pressures of trouble at home. The lesson here? Aim low. Aim so low no one will even care if you succeed. While you're looking down, consider what Parkington, today's featured commenter, has to say on Elon Musk's pending divorce:

Ed Sussman, the fired head of Fastcompany.com, isn't sweating the downturn. He already had a startup ready. The takeaway MBA lesson is that if your employee has 4,000 man-hours to waste on a side project, it's more of a reflection on you as a manager. Today's featured commenter, dorian, points out why this isn't that big of a deal:

We extended the Camp Cyprus kids' 15 minutes by attempting to deconstruct their videographed masterpiece. But nothing we write can be as eloquent and as pithy as what our featured commenter, Rock tha Hizzee, shared:

Will the punishment fit the crime? Migrant Blogger catches an important loophole in the punishment planned for David Kernell, the college kid charged with hacking into Sarah Palin's email:

You know that scene in Fight Club where Ed Norton beats the crap out of himself to walk away with off-the-books pay severance and free flight vouchers? Those lazy eBay employees didn't even have to go through that much for their sweetheart deal. Yahoos, on the other hand, would count themselves lucky to get the chance. If living in California hasn't made your heart bleed liberal juice yet, read what CaliforniaCajun, today's featured commenter, says:

Let's just put it out there: At the exact moment that it's poised to dominate the world, Facebook has jumped the shark. With over 100 million users, even your dad — who's probably as old as Fonzy — is on the social network originally meant to get you laid in the dorms. Today's featured commenter, raincoaster, has a theory about what's wrong:

Recovering from his heart scare, GigaOm head honcho and namesake Om Malik is on a tear. Having taken in $4.5 million Malik's set for his new career as a VC. Today's featured commenter, scoobydoo, chimes in:

They always drop it on you on a Friday, don't they? Get the most work out of ya before sending you off. How best to describe what it's like working on Valleywag — needling those Silicon Valley pricks that needed needling? Today's featured insidery commenter, Paul Boutin, says it best:

Facebook's management is certainly innovative in figuring out how to pocket a little spending money from their profitless enterprise, but not necessarily so innovative in actually building a solid revenue model. But when you can't make money, you can at least save some by outsourcing work offshore to tax-havens with English-speaking populations. However, could COO Cheryl Sandberg have killed two birds with one stone? ScalaWag offers a modest proposal on how Facebook could generate some revenue in the Hibernian hills:

Yes, Stanford Law grad and former escort Christina Warthen is back in the news, and this time it's criminal — though don't worry, supporters of San Francisco's Proposition K (which would decriminalize prostitution in the City), it's just a tax rap. My question is why a law student wouldn't know to pay her income taxes? But WagCurious has a far better koan to meditate on:

Apparently there's a major financial meltdown of tech stocks happening that's going to crush the US economy. Or something. I don't know, I'm not daytrader, In fact, I only buy the stocks listed by default on my iPhone because I don't know how to add new symbols. But the issue is apparently important enough for Microsoft to weigh in. Well today's featured commenter, macbeach, has managed to notice a peculiar pattern:

Google's world-domination plans involve airwaves where neither television nor wireless devices play. This issue is so important that Larry Page personally went to Washington to complain to the FCC. Today's featured commenter, WagCurious, weighs in with some field knowledge. Stick around and learn something:

In Facebook's struggles to build the worlds largest and most thorough database for marketers and advertisers, the site can be more than a little uptight when it comes to users with less-than-common names like "Elmo Keep." But is the policy, which reminds me of Germany's law that requires parents to clear the names of new children with the state, more sinister than just poorly paid customer service drones with ban-happy habits? That's ghunda's theory:

Google's new Chrome browser may have lots of cool technology under the hood that I don't completely understand — all I know is that hardly anyone uses it. That said, Spy from the Land of Rainpeople wins commenter of the day for mentioning 50-year old programming language LISP, regardless of the context.

While you can't legally say Harvard MBAs are the reason to blame for our economy tanking or your company imploding, you can slyly hint at it. Especially if you've got Ray Soifer's papers on the long-studied effect of Harvard Business School graduates to point to. Today's featured commenter, Valleygrrl, most likely didn't go to HBS, but she's going to tell you the real live experience of working in the field:

What a day! First, Eric S. Schmidt, Ph.D., has a webpage that looks like it was made with GeoCities from 1997 — and to top it off he's also using Yahoo Mail. Hey, Jerry Yang, screw that "Wear Purple" boondoggle and just hire our featured commenter, eknirb, who already has an effective ad campaign in mind: