There are a lot of posts popping up from various Rackspace customers apologizing to their customers and readers for the Web host's downtime caused by an errant truck. Here is a selection:

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This update sent to us by a customer of Rackspace, the Texas Web host which temporarily lost a datacenter when a truck collided with a nearby power transformer. Posted on my.rackspace.com, the company's customer support website, it reveals this was the third power issue in two days: one Sunday morning, one Monday morning and another this evening. Not all customers were affected by all three outages, but three outages at one hosting facility is not good.

A tipster writes that his ISP blamed a service disruption on Rackspace issues.

Rackspace, which promises 100 percent network uptime, was tied with two other companies for "most reliable webhost" in September 2007 according to Netcraft. We doubt the company will be number one this month.

Previously:
Truck driver in Texas kills all the websites you really use

MerchantCircle has secured an additional $10 million in series B funding from past investors Rustic Canyon Partners, Scale Venture Partners, and Steamboat Ventures (Disney's VC arm), as well as new investors including Barry Diller's IAC and Square 1 Bank. The press release claims, "the investment validates the company's 'merchant-first' business model." I'd say, rather, it confirms that investors who should know better will sink cash into a disreputable business.

When we first began to cover the many close relationships between flauntrepreneur Scott Jones's ChaCha search engine and Indiana University, the Indiana Herald-Times was one of the few local newspapers to closely question the relationship. Steve Hinnefeld of the Herald-Times was even following Valleywag's coverage, and came to similar conclusions: Although nothing legally wrong occurred, IU officials' failure to disclose their ChaCha ties was suspicious. However, since then the newspaper has provided the issue little attention. Why?

All the attention might be on Facebook's advertising aspirations, the Microsoft investment, and Google's OpenSocial initiative. But don't think Facebook has forgotten about MySpace, which still has a lock on the music market, thanks to bands which discovered the site as a way to connect with fans. One report has Facebook launching a long-rumored platform for musicians at the Ad:Tech conference.

We were wrong about the identity of the Viking-clad Facebook founder living it up on Friday night. It wasn't Sean Parker, who, we hear, is in Spain. (Sorry about that, Sean!) VentureBeat claims it was Dustin Moskovitz, Facebook's VP of engineering and one of the three official Facebook cofounders. The person in question wore a Viking helmet and a fur skirt. Nothing else. (Ed.'s note: Rawr!) Our tipster must have been pretty hammered, because the description supplied — "tall, has dirty blond hair and glasses, and is not particularly attractive" — fails on two out of four counts. Moskovitz has brown hair and is, according to AllThingsD's Kara Swisher, "such a fox." Again, our apologies. But we're glad Moskovitz is taking notes from Parker on how to get down. Update: We now hear Moskovitz was in Palo Alto Friday and Saturday. Can anyone identify that fur-skirted man for us? (Image by VentureBeat)

Thanks to commenter yarbles, we were alerted to evidence of two more members of the PayPal Mafia posing, like YouTube founder Jawed Karim, in mafioso costumes. Pictured, above, Yelp cofounders Russell Simmons and Jeremy Stoppelman. (Stoppelman's the one with the fake mustache. At least, we hope it's fake.) Any more evidence out there? Join the gang.

A reader emailed Comcast to complain about its blocking the Bible and received back a typical PR-speak response. Within was this gem: "We have a responsibility to manage our network to ensure that our customers have the best broadband experience possible." Aha! I hadn't realized the "best broadband experience" excluded BitTorrent. That's Comcastic! Also a nice touch: Dismissing a story that ran over the Associated Press wire service as "web gossip." The full email after the jump.

A new deal for MySpace execs Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson is worth $30 million over two years, says Silicon Alley Insider's Peter Kafka, confirming our earlier report. That's almost enough to buy a new jet. Or 0.2 percent of Facebook. [Silicon Alley Insider]

Remember ChaCha, the "human-powered" search engine based in Indiana with curiously deep — and poorly disclosed — ties to local power brokers? Now, Indiana University contends its decision to select human-assisted search engine ChaCha had nothing to do with those ties. University president and former ChaCha board member, Michael McRobbie, had nothing to do with it. Neither did newly appointed university trustee and Chacha investor and advisor, Jack Gill. The decision was made solely by the university's CTO Brad Wheeler. Oh, but never mind that Wheeler was appointed by McRobbie, his predecessor in the CTO post. A new Fortune profile of Chacha CEO and founder Scott Jones makes this telling of events even more suspiciously convenient.

Snocap may have started as Napster creator Shawn Fanning and bad boy Jordan Mendelson's baby, but we've heard both Valley hipsters have washed their hands of their failing creation. A tipster reports that Fanning is long gone and focused on his latest startup, Rupture, a social network for videogamers. Mendelson, too, is working on a new project and is likely to leave Snocap in a few months. As for the cause of the layoffs, a tipster says the CD Baby deal's failure isn't the proximate cause. Instead?

What led to yesterday's layoffs at Snocap, the digital-music startup founded by Napster creator Shawn Fanning? The breakdown of a deal last week with online retailer CD Baby, if not the proximate cause, was surely a signal of the startup's incipient meltdown. CD Baby is a music store that allows independent artists to sell their music at their own price, and Snocap's most significant partner besides MySpace. But, judging by the comments of CD Baby artists whose songs were being sold through Snocap's MySpace stores, that partnership has had little value.

Earlier, we scoffed at the idea that Facebook's traffic could have dropped in September. Compete.com — the poor man's ComScore, which makes its traffic data publicly available — just released September data that shows a similar drop. Maybe Facebook has peaked. More likely: since the kids returned to college, the free time they had to screw around on Facebook this summer has disappeared in favor of schoolwork and frat parties. MySpace, Orkut and Bebo were all down in September too. Amid the hysteria about Facebook's traffic dropping, everyone seems to have forgotten that Facebook traffic was down last September as well.

Last week I (and many, many others) wrote about AT&T's DSL Terms of Service. When taken literally, they suggested that if you wrote disparagingly about Ma Bell, you would have your service disconnected. Some fuzzy-minded bloggers, confusing AT&T with the government, called it censorship. I said that was nonsense. AT&T has come out with updated Terms of Service making their intentions very, very clear. The new TOS and our take on it, after the jump.

Felix Salmon of Portfolio thinks online auction-house eBay should sell Internet telephony service Skype to News Corp. for use in its social network, MySpace. Salmon thinks that a free calling service fits more naturally with MySpace, which is, after all, about communication. While that may be true, eBay will likely have to accept a much lower price than what they originally paid. Even Skype cofounder Niklas Zennstrom is conceding that Skype was overvalued from the beginning. If even a founder is doubtful of Skype's value, though, why should eBay strike a private deal to sell the unit? We say let the marketplace rule. eBay should list Skype on, well, eBay, and auction it off. Just imagine how much profit it will make from the listing fees.

TiVo has cancelled a Pay Per Post advertising campaign promoting its new TiVo HD digital video recorder. One wonders: Was it because of concerns expressed here and elsewhere? Or was it because Pay Per Post, a startup which pays bloggers to tout customers' wares in posts and videos, isn't actually that effective? Regardless, TiVo's effort appears to be an experiment gone wrong. Even though TiVo embraced a spirit of disclosure — each paid video was supposed to include a five-second "bumper" segment explaining that it was a paid post promoting TiVo's "Hook Up with TiVo" campaign — the mere fact of working with Pay Per Post may have ruined TiVo's good intentions.

Earlier today, we reported on Twitter cofounder Evan Williams's plans to make money by charging advertisers for the privilege of spamming users with Twitters. Supposedly, the "microblogging" startup doesn't want to insert ads within Twitters. But it looks like it's testing how receptive Twitter users might be to such a program, by appending helpful "tips" to the end of messages. [This Is Going to Be Big]

Having finished the fight to bring out hot new shoot-'em-up videogame Halo 3, and in the process helping Microsoft rake in $300 million in sales, Bungie has, as rumored, reclaimed its independence from Microsoft, which acquired the studio in 2000. As part of the deal, Microsoft is holding onto a small equity stake and will continue to churn out Halo titles with the aid of Bungie. Meanwhile, the studio will be free to develop new titles and publish games with Microsoft Games Studio — so there's really no need to overreact. Sure, Bungie put Microsoft's Xbox videogame console on the map — but as the Xbox morphs into a set-top box for the living room, bringing Internet music and video downloads straight to your flat-screen TV, it's not clear that hot videogame titles are what's going to drive sales in the future.