Merrill Lynch, under financial pressure, is selling one of its more valuable assets, a 20 percent stake in Bloomberg, the financial-information business, for $4.5 billion to $5 billion. The sale marks the business's value at $22 billion to $25 billion — four times or more what Rupert Murdoch paid to tuck the Wall Street Journal's publisher, Dow Jones, a far more prestigious name in business news, into News Corp. Under Murdoch's ownership, Journal staffers are groaning about new expectations for productivity. Several highly paid, but not highly prolific, writers have been laid off, including George Anders, one of the biggest names in technology reporting. Join the club, Bloomberg writers would say; they are constantly measured, and perpetually disgruntled. What Bloomberg's high valuation tells us: Expectations of productivity in the news business are here to stay. Prestige and quality are well enough — but only if they make a noticeable difference. Being read matters just as much as being right.

Google employees must avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest, according to the company's code of conduct. But Sergey Brin is exempt from such bureaucratic trifles. The cofounder skirted ethical lines when he loaned money to 23andMe, a genetic-testing startup cofounded by his wife, Anne Wojcicki, and later had Google repay that loan in the course of investing in that company. The Google board's audit committee and CEO Eric Schmidt blithely signed off on the deal, however. Now, Brin has found a new way to route money to 23andMe, this time through a charity — thereby boosting, at least notionally, the value of Google's investment and his wife's net worth. Brin can claim it's all for a good cause, but the deal stinks to high heaven.

[Editor's note: Tim Woolery, aka Tim the IT Guy, works hands-on in IT in the Bay Area. With nearly 15 years' experience at everything from CAT 5-cabled steel furnaces to intercontinental remote-controlled radio stations, Tim's able to spot and plug holes in the coverage of important tech news. Rather than bone up on change management best practices ourselves, we decided to let Tim post for himself once a week.]

"Thiel makes me sick!" read the note from Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton. His oddly personal declaration was prompted by a brief in the New York Post about former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel's success as a hedge-fund manager. Thiel will make an estimated $500 million this year running Clarium Capital, a hedge fund. (We reported this a few weeks ago, boss.) It hit me hard: Could Denton actually be jealous of Thiel?

If you weren't up past your bedtime spilling wine on your Performa in 1994, then you probably weren't on Usenet reading alt.gothic's "Most Gothic Way to..." epic threads on the same. Usenet predated the World Wide Web by over a decade, well before Mosaic was a glimmer in Marc Andreessen's eye. But the advent of the Web certainly boded Usenet's end. If you used the distributed collection of special-interest newsgroups to follow the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 flame wars and octo-hentai binaries, then you likely had an email address ending in .edu and a lot of time to spend late at night in the comp-sci lab. (Think FriendFeed is overwhelming? Try the chatty Cathys over in comp.os.minix.) It all seems like half a lifetime ago. That's what seems so unbelievable about politicians' crusade against child porn on Usenet — my first reaction was to wonder if it was really still around. It is — and, surprisingly, Usenet still has its uses.

Apple's new, faster 3G iPhones go on sale in the U.S. tomorrow, but a new store where Apple will sell third-party iPhone applications opened for business today. (Something to do with when the iPhone 3G went on sale in New Zealand. Those international date lines are so confusing!) The apps mostly range from free to costing $10, and you buy them on iTunes like you would an album or a TV show. Here are ten that will crush your last remaining resistance to Apple CEO Steve Jobs's demands.

The six big TV-and-movie conglomerates — CBS, Viacom, Disney, NBC Universal, News Corp. and Time Warner — suffered in a handicap yesterday by Lehman Brothers analyst Anthony DiClemente, who downgraded the companies' ratings and stock-price targets. CBS fared worst, but even News Corp. didn't come out unscathed, and all six saw their respective share prices drop on the news. DiClemente's "color" had a familiar refrain — while DVD sales are only down 5 percent over 2007, the analyst doesn't expect digital downloads and other new media distribution revenues to keep pace with the decline in lucrative sales of packaged plastic. In other words, movies and television will take the same hit that music labels and newspaper publishers have. But what does this mean to your average plebe blogger with a script treatment busy shooting sketches on digital cameras and looking for a break?

Do we still have to pity Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang? Or is it, at long last, acceptable to simply hold him in contempt? With Microsoft backing corporate raider Carl Icahn's replacement board of directors, and major investor Gordon Crawford also lining up to support Icahn, Yang's time at the company is coming to an end, and he seems to know it. Yet he's trying to stay on anyway. Like any leader facing certain failure, Yang has begun to indulge in pure make-believe. Here's a short list of Yang's Yahoo fantasies.

A relentless neophilia is Silicon Valley's signature characteristic. One must have a new iPhone, a new Twitter, a new electric car. You're either in beta or in the grave. That's why I'm intrigued by two decisions by Dell and Sony. Dell has figured out a way to wriggle around Microsoft's licensing rules and still sell its discontinued Windows XP operating system. Sony, meanwhile, is profitably selling its nine-year-old PlayStation 2 videogame console in markets like India. This just isn't done.

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?

Tired of fielding lawsuits from patent trolls and scared of court injunctions like that faced by RIM which nearly shut down the company's BlackBerry service, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Verizon and Ericsson are among the companies rumored to be behind the formation of the Allied Security Trust. Ponying up $250,000 down payments and $5 million in escrow to make purchases, the trust seeks to buy patents before they fall into the hands of patent trolls. (That's the polite name the group's founders use for companies which seek to make money litigating infringers rather than by create products.) But the real bogeyman here is the rise of a possible patent troll to rule all patent trolls, Intellectual Ventures, which has close ties to Microsoft.

Yahoo shares are almost below $20 in morning trading and as the company approaches its August 1 annual meeting, Yahoo's directors have finally begun to fear for their jobs and their reputations. They're negotiating with Yahoo's major shareholders and, along with agreeing to renew talks with Microsoft and approach AOL for acquisition, some on the board are offering to promote CEO Jerry Yang into a non-executive chairmanship and fire Yahoo president Sue Decker. Reporter's reporter Kara Swisher reports that shareholders and some board members have already come up with a wish list of names for the top jobs.

Microsoft co-founder, former CEO and executive chairman Bill Gates should be just about wrapping up his last day as a full-time employee of Microsoft and moving on to head up the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. While I never met the man, he certainly loomed large in my life growing up in Seattle and beyond. While the classic "Tiger Beat" style photo here tried valiantly to make Gates appear a little sexy for the publicity machine surrounding the launch of the original Windows operating system, it failed where Gates succeeded. While Gates was a ruthlessly competitive capitalist who used and abused Microsoft's monopoly position to maim and sometimes kill the competition, he did make being a computer nerd something to aspire to, if not exactly cool.

What's going on over at FriendFinder Networks, née Penthouse Media Group? Apparently the effort to migrate into an online publishing and social networking powerhouse is being hampered by developers dissatisfied with working conditions and an inability to hire new staff — even though supervisor Anthony Previte threatened he could replace the disgruntled employees at a whim, according to a tipster. An internal email obtained by Valleywag features Previte scolding the mutineers for disappearing from work early and being insubordinate. This news might put off the investors necessary to bankroll the company taking itself public — assuming the rumor that the big money has already demurred, delaying the planned $250 million IPO, isn't true.

If you were over 30 years old when you signed up for Facebook, you never got the option to look for "Random Play" — that's what the "kids" are calling it now. Sheryl Sandberg's new No Fun regime at Facebook has taken it a step further: They've removed the Random Play option from some people, including me, who'd already checked it. Now all users' inner sluts have been caged, at least as far as the interface is concerned.

Second Life, the 3D virtual world favored by furries and the digital departments of ad agencies desperate to convince clients how cutting-edge they are, is celebrating its fifth anniversary this year. In that time, little has changed — the same poorly-rendered polygons and textures move through the same largely empty world, where quite honestly the most innovative users have been the griefers who turn up at any of the arranged publicity events featuring corporate shills and politicians desperate to convince anyone how cutting-edge they are. Linden Lab may shuffle on like a zombie, but that doesn't change the fact that it's time for a post-mortem.

The microfamous are set to lose one of their own to the squealing hordes who follow the macrofamous when sk8r pop sensation Avril Lavigne's Girlfriend becomes the most viewed video on YouTube, surpassing Judson Laipply's Evolution of Dance. How are tweens planning to storm the gates of democratization in order to install their über-trendy God-queen atop YouTube's throne?

The cycle of music has found its way back to its 80s roots with the "comeback" of Aquanet-era boy band New Kids on the Block. Gone, however, are the days of cassette mixes and recording songs off the radio; thrust into the world of YouTube and Muxtape, the 'Kids are trying to catch up with the band's new oh-so-relevant website, complete with soon-to-be-launched "NKTV" and mobile ringtones. With the recently released song, "Summertime" flooding Yahoo Video and YouTube, how are our former tween heartthrobs faring online?

Metcalfe's Law, first forumlated by Robert Metcalfe, states that "the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system." The problem is, that as actual humans connect, the number of people you can connect to instantly swells far past Dunbar's Number, or "The Rule of 150," another popular concept among social network theorists, which Robin Dunbar uses to describe the typical amount of other people a person can realistic communicate, connect and relate to.

After EarthLink abandoned a citywide Wi-Fi project for Philadelphia after only 6,000 customers signed up for the $20/mo. service. Now local investors Derek Pew of Boathouse Communications and Mark Rupp, a former Verizon executive, are planning to take over the network, which will be free and ad-supported. When first announced, the project was on of the largest Wi-Fi buildouts proposed. But after being completed, few users signed up because it was slow, didn't reach far into the city's signature row houses if at all, and was not much cheaper than adding Internet to your cable or phone connection. Earthlink had previously attempted to hand the network off an Ohio-based non-profit. But Wi-Fi was never a particularly good technology for these projects, and it's high time to abandon the pipe dream.