It's the middle of summer, which means two things: It's hot and you want to eat a bunch of bad food. What better way to indulge your hunger and beat the heat than by looking at a bunch of pictures of our favorite frozen summer treats? We dare you to not go in search of the nearest ice cream truck.

[Image via JPhilipson's Flickr]

Rumor had it that the pioneering social bookmarking company Del.ic.ious was going to be shuttered amid Yahoo's Christmas layoff rampage. A "save delicious" petition was even circulated! It's actually being sold, not shut down. All four Delicious users, rejoice.

While cooking competitions are wildly popular, there remains the problem that audiences are not able to taste the contestants' culinary offerings. Luckily, Gawker.TV, was treated to some pulled pork provided by the Southern Soul team from TLC's BBQ Pitmasters

When opening the first outlet of your chain of ice cream stores in India here is a hint: Do not use a catch-phrase in advertisements which specifically bars Indians from entering the store. Haagen-Dazs did, and they are in trouble.

A brilliant and imaginative group of food artists make an exact replica of the London skyline—using food. And instead of using traditional English dishes to make the skyline, they used fruits and vegetables—so it's edible, too!

In a warm dystopia many years from now, New York City will be underwater and ginormous mutant crustaceans will roam the globe, mouth-wateringly. Here's hoping the cows don't die, because we're going to need butter. [NatlGeo]

Twitteronia is a scary place to be. A Googler got violent, an NBC TV host swore, and we frightened a top AP editor — while Michelle Malkin had a breakdown. Today's twittiest tweets:

Bare-bones but eminently useful bookmarking site Delicious has gotten a long-awaited makeover, dropping the dots that confounded copy editors ("Del.icio.us") in exchange for cupcakes. It only took two and a half years from the time Yahoo bought the startup from founder Joshua Schachter — and a month after Schachter quit Yahoo in frustration with company's bureaucracy. The new layer of visual frosting is likely meant to help give the site mass appeal, though wonky top links on the hompage like "A simple unix/linux daemon in Python - Lone Wolves - Web, game, and open source development" won't help.

Del.icio.us, along with Flickr and Upcoming, was a Web 2.0 darling acquired by Yahoo a few years ago. Also like Flickr and Upcoming, Del.icio.us hasn't rolled out much in the way of new features — though don't blame founder Joshua Schachter, who quit today last Wednesday. Blame Yahoo's management, who pushed Schachter aside.

Microsoft is asking News Corp. to help it buy Yahoo. Yahoo wants AOL and Google to help it remain independent. Meanwhile, writes VC blogger Fred Wilson, websites and services acquired by these companies like Flickr, AIM, Del.icio.us, Yahoo Groups, and FeedBurner continue to languish. Which is why Wilson thinks venture capitalists need a new path to liquidity besides flipping startups to a big company (too easy) and going public (too hard). He'd like to see a private-equity marketplace, where entrepreneurs can cash out without selling out. His 1,104-word argument cut down to size, below:

Jeff Bonforte, Yahoo's vice president of "social search," was among those laid off today. Yahoo's attempts to harness its vast user base to improve search results has never borne fruit. Since Yahoo has said it's cutting back in areas not deemed critical to its future, is Bonforte's departure a sign that social search no longer matters? Unlikely, since Yahoo recently incorporated Del.icio.us, the Web bookmarking service it bought from Joshua Schachter in 2005, into its search results. And management of Yahoo Answers, another Bonforte responsibility, was moved to Europe. More likely Bonforte, ostensibly Schachter's boss, was deemed inessential to the effort. Yahoo's layer-cake bureaucracy is being sliced away.

Andy Baio, the entrepreneur who created group calendar site Upcoming.org and sold it to Yahoo two years ago, is leaving the company. Not surprising that a company founder would leave after an acquisition, especially after two years, since that's a typical length of time for shares to vest under a deal's earnout provision. But Baio was part of a generation of startuppers brought in to transform Yahoo in the wake of that company's groundbreaking acquisition of Flickr — like, for example, Del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter, shown here rocking out with Baio. Schachter is still a presence at Yahoo. But what's most notable about the list of people Baio thanks in his farewell post are the ones who are no longer there — or are on their way out.

While other startup founders have to stay home and, you know, work, these guys have the time and the spare $3,000 to spend hanging out at a zero-agenda conference in Hawaii. (For the record, we're jealous.) Spotted in Yahoo executive Bradley Horowitz's Flickr stream: Benchmark entrepreneur-in-waiting Nirav Tolia; "stepped-up" LinkedIn chairman Reid Hoffman; FeedBurner founder Dick Costolo, who's rolling in Googlebucks; Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale; Evan Williams from Twitter; Mashery's Oren Michels; and
Kevin Rose (and his new haircut) from Digg with Joshua Schachter from the Yahoo-owned Del.icio.us. One question: Is this really Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg? I don't recognize him looking so unnerdly. (Photo by: bradley23)

Turns out that when readers can actually select news stories that they're interested in, their choices are somewhat different from what traditional media wants to feed them. A Project for Excellence in Journalism report reveals that what people Digg and Reddit never happens overseas.

Notable bombs like Pets.com and Kozmo.com at the height of the Internet bubble scared Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos out of the acquisition business. But he now appears to be cautiously filling up his cart again. So far this year, he's done three publicly announced acquisitions of or investments in startups — more than he did, as far as we can tell, in the Internet-depression years of 2002 through 2004. And that's just through Amazon.com — we're not counting any of the deals he's made on his own through Bezos Expeditions, his personal investment vehicle.



Data

8/6/2007 - Amie Street (demand-based pricing music download service)

2/25/2007 - Shelfari (book-centric social networking)

2/16/2007 - Atomic Moguls (fantasy sports)

12/5/2006 - Wikia (search)

10/2006 - TextPayMe (wireless payment system)

2/27/2006 - Shopbop.com (women's apparel retailer)

6/1/2005 - CustomFlix (download and burn DVDs)

4/10/2005 - Del.icio.us (social bookmarking, later sold to Yahoo)

4/4/2005 - BookSurge LLC (on-demand book-printing)

4/1/2005 - Mobipocket.com (eBooks for mobile devices)

2/9/2005 - 43 Things/Robot Coop ("goal" blogging/social network)

8/19/2004 - Joyo.com Limited (Chinese web retailer)

12/1/2001- Egghead.com (electronics retailer)

12/1/2001 - OurHouse.com (online hardware retailer)

11/9/2001 - Catalog City (catalog merchants)

2/1/2001 - Living.com (online retailer)

4/18/2000 - WineShopper.com (win retailer)

3/28/2000 - eZiba (handicraft retailer)

2/18/2000 - Basis (internationalization technology for web sites)

2/3/2000 - Greg Manning Auctions, Inc. (collectibles)

1/31/2000 - Audible (audio books)

1/24/2000 - Drugstore.com (online drugstore)

1/21/2000 - Greenlight (online car retailer)

1/11/2000 - Kozmo.com (grocery delivery service)

12/1/1999 - Ashford (luxury web retailer)

11/4/1999 - Convergence Corporation (mobile connectivity)

11/1/1999 - Tool Crib of the North (online and catalog tool and home improvement retailer)

11/1/1999 - Della.com (gift registry and suggestions)

11/1/1999 - Back to Basics Toys (toy store)

7/14/1999 - Gear.com (sports merchandise)

5/18/1999 - HomeGrocer.com (online grocer)

4/25/1999 - Accept.com (financial transactions)

4/24/1999 - e-Niche Incorporated (Exchange.com, Bibliofind.com, and Musicfile.com - online marketplaces)

4/1/1999 - LiveBid.com (live internet auctions)

3/29/1999 - Pets.com (online pet supplies)

2/1/1999 - Drugstore.com (online drugstore)

2/1/1999 - Geoworks (wireless communications)

1999 - MindCorps Incorporated (web applications - exact date unknown)

8/4/1998 - Sage Enterprises/PlanetAll (web-based personal management)

8/4/1998 - Junglee (web-based databases)

4/27/1998 - Bookpages (UK online bookstore)

4/27/1998 - Telebook (German online bookstore)

4/27/1998 - IMDB (movie and television directory)

Can we, at last, put to rest any whispers by jealous Sand Hill Road rivals about the strengths of Fred Wilson's portfolio? The New York-based venture capitalist, a partner at Union Square Ventures, has ably spotted the most profitable segments of targeted marketing and online publishing, from social bookmarks (Del.icio.us, sold to Yahoo) to RSS-feed advertising (FeedBurner, sold to Google) and now, behavioral ad-targeting firm Tacoda, sold to AOL for a reported price of more than $200 million. This deal is more than just a financial win for Wilson — it's a vindication of his entire strategy. Here's why.

Del.icio.us, the social-bookmarking website people use to track, categorize, and share their favorite webpages, is testing a new version. But did its engineers really mean to give the whole Web a glimpse of the redesigned site by snapping photos of the usability lab? It's hard to make out details of Del.icio.us 2.0, but we know this much: As insiders have been hinting for a while, the pink highlights showing a bookmark's popularity are gone. (Photo by nzdave)

In addition to sporting one of the most hilarious illustrations ever to appear in the Wall Street Journal, the "Wizards of Buzz" article trend piece on social media "influencers" really should be the reddest of red-meat linkbait, right? So how's the article doing on the sites it mentions?

Digg - 420 diggs as of this writing. Not bad, but not stellar. Reaction ranges from congratulatory to disappointment and getting interviewed but not quoted.

Reddit - 82 points. Much investigation into the identify of Reddit user "Adam Fuhrer," a supposed 12-year-old from Toronto. More here.

StumbleUpon - 435 stumbles. Little comment.

Del.icio.us - No sign of the WSJ article getting much bookmark love. 287 bookmarks actually.

Newsvine - 31 votes. Discussion is all citizen-journalish, of course.

Netscape - 95 votes. Commentary somehow devolves into a strange internecine squabble. Jason Calacanis present, though uninvolved in squabble.

"Now serving 1,000,000," says del.icio.us. That user count sounds solid — and Yahoo's social bookmarking service has usage data to back it up — but sketchier companies have wildly inflated their numbers before. User counts, just like page counts, get inflated as companies fight for the PR limelight. Let's take a look at some of the worst offenders.

Online branding is more sophisticated than the old dot-com days (when, for example, fishing company Zapata moved into Internet media just because it owned zap.com), thanks to Google rank and word-of-mouth marketing. It's still brave to launch a site using any address other than "sitename.com," but several popular sites do just fine without.