At MySpace headquarters in Beverly Hills, playbooks are stacked on desks as Rupert Murdoch's minions desperately try to make the numbers on a Yahoo deal work. Murdoch's News Corp. has joined forces with Microsoft in an effort to counter a deal with the mogul's old enemy, Time Warner. Google, which all old-line media companies fear, is approaching a bid with languorous rigor, running a small test of placing its ads on some Yahoo pages. It's all rather depressing.

When will the Pulitzer committee allow online reporting to be considered for an award? People have been asking that question for more than a decade. But blog-sympathizing critics of the prize really need to ask is whether including online news would make a difference in who won.

StyleDiary's Patricia Handschiegel just posted a picture that was taken of her the day she sold her online-fashion startup to StyleHive in November 2007. In it, she's at her least glamorous — and most gleeful. "I love that picture because I was so fucking happy," she tells us. We wanted to know how she got that way. At first, Handschiegel wouldn't talk. "I know some things," she said, "But if anything, this shit makes you humble. You see how small you are and how big business and everything is." Fortunately, persistence and well-placed guilt trips paid off. And so below, her bullet points for the wantrepreneurs out there — girls' girls or not — looking to actually accomplish something.

Shawn "Jay Z" Carter signing with LiveNation demonstrates that one of the most entrepreneurial artists of our generation has decided that the business of recording music is advertising. The No. 1 digital music retailer, iTunes, has understood this for some time — Apple sells iPods, and iTunes is a service to make it relatively cheap and easy to fill those iPods. Carter will be happy to make a little chump change from digital sales, but the MC knows the real money is in branded events and merchandise. What the labels call "piracy" is actually free distribution of promotional material, and such a model is not without precedent.

Are we in a bubble? Far too late to be asking that question, says Chris Nolan, a former Valley newspaper gossip who now runs a startup, Spot-On. She weighs in on the current market crisis and its effects on the tech business. Her thesis: New regulations will on investment banks will bring an end to the tech-stock bubbles on which Valley VCs have feasted. (I asked if this meant she was back in the tech-gossip game; Nolan's column served as one of this website's inspirations. "I'm writing about business and politics," she demurred.) Nolan compares sketchy mortgages approved by banks to the wafer-thin startups taken public by stockbrokers a decade ago. A brief version of her 887-word argument, followed by my take on where Nolan goes wrong:

The rate that my employer, Gawker Media, pays its contract writers was adjusted tonight at midnight. The staff of this site has not been told the details of the new pay rate, but we do know that everyone at Valleywag is getting a per-view pay decrease. Senior management is promising the hit is only a "modest reduction." I'm told we'll find out the new pay plan by the end of the week. In the mean time, writers are getting a paycut, but are expected to continue working even though we don't know what we're getting paid. Read on for some background and an explanation of how Gawker writers are compensated.

We've been hearing that impending layoffs have DoubleClick employees fearing for their jobs after Google finishes its takeover. Why? Working there sucks. Ask any Googler. Below, four reasons why DoubleClickers should welcome their liberation from the Googleplex:

Why is Apple suddenly in talks with record labels about bundling an unlimited music plan with new iPods, after resisting such a move for years? Steve Jobs has scoffed at music subscriptions in the past, saying customers want to "own their music." Never take Steve at his word: For years, he shot down the idea of iPods with video or an Apple-branded cell phone — until he made them happen. The same is about to happen for music subscriptions, I suspect — but not because Jobs has suddenly changed his mind about consumers' tastes.

Commenter Matthew O'Ryan is on to us. He's noticed how a throwaway line has become our new catchphrase: "That seems easier." In an industry full of people who claim to be obsessed with efficiency, why do we have to keep explaining over and over the simple way to do things? Because Valley denizens secretly love doing things the hard way — and they hate it when people point out we're doing it wrong. Neophilia, cast as a love of innovation, is actually an algorithm for generating ever-changing shibboleths that keep outsiders away. They make things complicated because it entertains them; because they love challenges and puzzles; because they can. But the world that pays their bills? Customers like things simple. Why not keep them happy? Ah, but you know how that would seem.

In January a pair of money managers, Fidelity and T. Rowe Price, bought 9.1 percent of Slide for $50 million. Fortune asks, "Are these widgets worth half a billion?" The mag doesn't come up with anything more than "maybe," but I'm willing to go a little further. Slide worth $550 million? No, despite its huge traffic numbers. While it's true that advertisers are desperate to reach the 18-24 market, I hardly think SuperPoke is what they had in mind.

In the wake of his SXSW keynote talk with BusinessWeek columnist Sarah Lacy, is there anyone Mark Zuckerberg hasn't granted an interview? Caroline McCarthy, Stacey Higginbotham, and Nick O'Neill landed chat time with Zuck. Who, you ask? Exactly. Zuckerberg used to privately tell colleagues he didn't want to talk to anyone besides Wall Street Journal reporters (an obligatory move, while he was raising money) and Fortune's David Kirkpatrick (a man constitutionally incapable of writing an unkind word about a tech mogul). That he's talking to anyone who will listen suggests that Zuckerberg is trying to change his ways. He needs to stop, now, before he does more damage to his personal brand.

I agree with the popular take on Sarah Lacy's Zuckerberg interview at SXSW to this degree: The audience was revolting. Lacy threw an unbecomingly petulant tantrum on stage. But the Twitter reaction was equally self-indulgent. The debates over her performance obscured the man who should have been under the microscope: Mark Zuckerberg. As a speaker, Facebook's CEO is trying to model himself after Steve Jobs. He's gotten help from Bill Clinton's former speaking coach. But so far, all he's learned is the fine art of saying nothing.

In the Yahoo-Microsoft takeover battle, Yahoo's 40 percent stake in Yahoo Japan is treated as an afterthought: Spare goods to be sold off to boost shareholder returns. But Yahoo Japan, in its home country, is Google, eBay, and Yahoo rolled into one. It's worth $29 billion — more than Yahoo itself was worth before the Microsoft bid. Which raises the question: Why isn't Yahoo Japan the one buying Yahoo? Before you dismiss it, consider the precedents.

The elaborate Kabuki routine being acted out in Microsoft and Yahoo's boardrooms serves one purpose: To cloud the notion that the takeover is about money. It is, of course. Watercooler talk at Yahoo's Sunnyvale HQ is that management is pushing for $36 a share — conveniently more than halfway between Microsoft's initial $31 bid and Yahoo's $40 counter. But Jerry Yang seems opposed to a sale at any price. And he has a secret plan to reboot Yahoo.

In-the-know journalists like to tell readers that the Microsoft-Yahoo merger has been plotted out in advance. "Microsoft executives have followed a carefully crafted script to woo Yahoo's board and management," writes the Wall Street Journal. "Yahoo's directors must follow closely a long-established script," a story on CNNMoney informs us. The notion of a script — understood by elite reporters and insiders who graciously expatiate it to their eager readers — is appealing. But as the writers' strike proved to us, we live in an unscripted era. The Microsoft-Yahoo deal is M&A in the age of reality TV.

VC blogger Fred Wilson argues that a Microsoft-Yahoo merger will be bad for users and for the Internet as a whole. "If you think about the Internet, it's a huge distributed network of loosely connected services owned and operated by literally millions. We don't need or want consolidation of services on the Internet," Wilson writes. But you know who the Microsoft-Yahoo deal is even worse news for? The incompetent executives who landed Yahoo in this pickle in the first place. They're ferociously spinning gullible reporters with rescue fantasies. Here are the five most widespread rumors — and why they're unlikely to happen.

Like a child actor, Yahoo has always lived its life in public — and suffered for it. Its April 1996 IPO, when the company had a mere 49 employees, cast it in the spotlight long before it was ready. And like Hollywood, the stock market looks coldly on a fallen star. Microsoft's offer of $44 billion is less than the company was worth in October 1999 — before the tech-stock bubble's grotesque inflation more than doubled that to $97 billion. It has never regained its swagger.

Forbes has released its Midas List of top venture capitalists. New York-based investors make up 2 percent of the list, and that has the writers at Silicon Alley Insider confused. But since it's the same confusion that led Henry Blodget, the disgraced tech-stock analyst, to found the tech blog in the first place, one can hardly blame them.

Remember CinemaNow, the Marina Del Rey-based movie-downloads service backed by Lionsgate, Microsoft, and Cisco, among others? Its video-streaming service has been left in the shadows by Apple, Netflix and Amazon.com, but CinemaNow's found a way to survive: porn.

eBay CEO Meg Whitman could announce plans to retire as soon as today's earnings call. The most likely candidate to replace her? Consensus suggests auctions chief John Donahoe. But how'd that happen? A quick look at other viable contenders shows Donahoe's candidacy owes much to the process of elimination. Here's how the discarded contenders stack up.