7 Formerly Popular Sites that Are Dying

Indications are that Slashdot, Blogger, Digg and other sites are on their way out.
John Brandon, FoxNews.com
Thu Aug 25, 2011
http://news.discovery.com/tech/seven-popular-website-dying-110825.html

Today's hot new website is tomorrow's old news.

Sunny days sometimes turn dark and dismal. A shirt that looked good on the rack at Target now sits in the bargain bin at Goodwill. And, that new car with the Hemi engine and the third-row backseat? It now drives like a crusty tank.

The same is true of websites. What seemed so fresh when you first registered now seems like a ghost town. What happened? According to Gartner analyst Michael Gartenberg, site visitors routinely check the door to see if anyone else is leaving for better services. Like lemmings, they can pull up stakes and leave in a heartbeat. (Facebook, are you listening?) All you can hear are the crickets.

1. Gawker.com

This popular gossip site's traffic has dropped 75 percent this year, according to Compete, and has wallowed in its own bad press over the years: cuts in freelancer budgets, a stalker map that showed the location of celebs, and several site changes. At the same time, tech sister-site Gizmodo has risen in the ranks, growing views by 10 percent this year.

2. Chatroulette.com

Sometimes, it’s hard to say whether a Web site is actually dying. Chatroulette.com is a site that lets you chat with a stranger; sometimes, the stranger is naked. Visitor counts are on the rise again, hovering around 1 million after a 25 percent drop this year, per Compete.com. The site went live in late 2009, and Wired wrote about it early last year. Andrey Ternovskiy from Russia created the site when he was 17. What has died out is the press coverage: the tech media is not touching the site anymore. Most critically: the site offers nothing extra beyond what you can do on Skype. “Chatroulette was a fad, an interesting one for a while, but was invaded by male exhibitionists, and most people aren't into that sort of voyeurism,” says Roger Kay, an analyst with Endpoint Technologies (http://www.ndpta.com/).

3. Digg.com

Statistics don’t lie -- they just help explain the mystery. Digg.com started out in 2004 as the brainchild of San Francisco whiz-kid Kevin Rose and allowed visitors to “digg” a link so that everyone could see what was popular. In the past year, the site has been bleeding users by the boatload. There were 8 million visitors in January; this month, there were only about 3 million, per Compete.com. That’s a 60 percent drop. Competitor Reddit, which has maintained an interest level, is not so ad-centric. But the real killer is Twitter, which has become a link aggregator and social medium. Kay agrees: many people find their Web links on Facebook these days.

4. MySpace.com

You would think MySpace would have gotten the message by now: we don’t like ugly banner ads that fill the page, and a consistent user interface is more appealing to most than one that allows crazy customizations. MySpace had 30 million visitors in July, per Compete.com, but Facebook squashed them like a bug with 150 million. The real story: MySpace had 64 million visitors in last year in July. That’s a 54 percent drop. Gartenberg says the drop is almost inexplicable: users just gave up on visiting. Kay argues that the brand was somehow tarnished and uses antiquated technology.

5. Bebo.com

Going from 2M users to just 600,000 in one year might seem like a crushing blow. But consider this: AOL bought the upstart social network in 2008 for $850 million. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, AOL sold it for just $10 million last year. So what happened? This one is a mystery. Kay says that there is no real explanation, because the site offers similar services to Facebook and even Tumblr.com.

6. Salon.com

One of the oldest and most-beloved online magazines, Salon.com has sunk like a rock lately, losing about one million regular visitors over the past year, per Compete.com, a 37 percent decline. Once again, there is no reasonable explanation for the sharp decline, but there are a few clues. The user-hemorrhaging started almost immediately last November when the main editor, Joan Walsh, took a back-seat to write a new book. Many online magazines have struggled to balance free content with paid services, and Salon tends to be a little ad heavy at times. Kay says Salon has had a hard time competing with classier mags like The New Yorker.

7. Blogger/Typepad

Blogging is dead – or at least it has shifted to another medium. Now, instead of typing several pages worth of material, most Web users just tap in a 140-character sentiment on Twitter. “Long-form” blogging is not as popular, and we all know the jokes about the blogger in his parent’s basement. Sites like Blogger.com and TypePad.com have declined considerably of late, dropping about 25 to 30 percent in user visits per Compete.com. Granted, some have discovered the streamlined blogging tool WordPress.com, which has enjoyed steady growth the past few years.

8. Slashdot.org

Sadly, one of the best tech sites on the Web has seen declining user involvement. Started as a home project focused mostly on computer tech, the site grew to almost one million users back in 2008. Quantcast.com shows a bar graph that looks like a ski slope: user counts dipped down to just over 100,000 in April, although the latest counts are in the 500,000 range.

12 Reasons Why The AOL-Huffington Post Merger Is Going Down In Flames

Here Are 12 Reasons Why The AOL-Huffington Post Merger Is Going Down In Flames
Nicholas Carlson
Business Insider
Friday, June 3, 2011
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/06/03/businessinsider-aol-insider-here-are-12-reasons-why-the-aolhuffington-post-merger-is-going-down-in-flames-2011-6.DTL

AOL bought Huffington Post for $315 million earlier this year.

So far, according to a reader, the intergration is going very badly:

Twelve reasons why the AOL – Huffington Post merger is going down in flames.

The tragedy here is that not only will the deal ruin AOL, but it will also ruin the Huffington Post.

It is the Peter Principle on a grand scale. None of AOL’s senior editors (Huffington, Roy Sekoff, and Nico Pitney) have ever managed more than a few people. Now they have hundreds and lack the experience to manage a team this big. Behind the scenes, long time Huffposters say that Jai Singh’s departure has eliminated the key adult in the room. Now they need to grow HuffPost and save AOL – not possible.

Dissension in edit. The editorial team is miserable and views Arianna as unpredictable and her leadership unsteady. Several editors are racing to close book deals to be write the “Devil Wears Prada” of the digital age. Others are aggressively pitching unflattering profiles to New York Magazine, Vanity Fair, and the LA Times. The lack of maturity and loyalty among editors is stunning – even those close to her are extremely negative behind her back – which is surprising because she has done a great job taking care of her people.

Hasty launches. New site launches, like AOL Healthy Living, are little more than Huffington Post channels and very poor quality The real URL is www.huffingtonpost.com/aolhealthyliving - it is a joke.

Dissension in tech. CTO Paul Berry is miserable in his new role and refuses to create an org chart. Most of the tech team is miserable that they have to do things that large, complicated, advertising based sites require. They would prefer to focus on huffingtonpost.com.

No product function. Huffington Post effectively eliminated AOL’s product function – design and development of the sites is handled by editors via email list serves, creating enormous amounts of churn.

Unclear lines of authority. Editors are turning down sponsorships – refusing to allow McDonald’s or K-Mart sponsor AOL’s fashion week coverage.

Traffic is down. The integration is likely destroying the Huffington Post. The sales demands and content over-reach are destroying huffpost’s focus while the org is trapped trying to save AOL when the huffpost team should be focused on building huffpost. Traffic on huffpost is up – but only due to the redirects from aol sites…. Net net, aol plus huff post traffic is in decline and the situation is not improving.

Imperial over-reach. AOL will eliminate Popeater and Parentdish this month and roll them into the Huffington Post. Arianna’s people are plotting to eliminate all non huffingtonpost.com websites and redirect all traffic to the huffingtonpost.com. No one thinks consolidating to huffingtonpost.com is a good idea from a consumer or an advertiser perspective, but no one will stop Arianna.

Fear and paranoia. Large parts of the org recognize the strategy is bad for the business but everyone is afraid to speak out. Arianna is rumored to have created an enemies list across the company and has directed her loyalists to collect dossiers on other managers across the company and report back on conversations. Her list includes several key business, sales, technology, and marketing executives she wants to eliminate and replace with her people. Anyone who disagrees, even if backed by data and clear rationale’s – goes on the enemies list. Facts don’t matter.

Nepotism. Huffington is also quietly positioning several of her senior folks, in particular, Chris Davis, to take over the business, marketing, and distribution functions of the Huffington Post Media Group, do away with the business edit split, and eliminate COO John Brod. Davis, like the rest of the team, has never managed a business of this size or complexity.

Lack of exec buy in. Several senior execs are actively positioning themselves and their businesses for the eventual private equity takeover – few have confidence this will work.

Waiting for Tim. CEO Tim Armstrong remains enamored with the Huffpost team and has created a double standard – huffposters can launch poor sites, create low quality articles, and launch low quality video programming and get away with it. He believes they can do no wrong and that the integration is going fantastic.

What do AOL and HuffPo employees think of this take? Let us know below or at nicholas@businessinsider.com or 646.376.6014. We're discreet.

Obama Wants to Read Your Email...

From Wired.com:

The Obama administration is urging Congress not to adopt legislation that would impose constitutional safeguards on Americans’ e-mail stored in the cloud.

As the law stands now, the authorities may obtain cloud e-mail without a warrant if it is older than 180 days, thanks to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act adopted in 1986. At that time, e-mail left on a third-party server for six months was considered to be abandoned, and thus enjoyed less privacy protection. However, the law demands warrants for the authorities to seize e-mail from a person’s hard drive.

A coalition of internet service providers and other groups, known as Digital Due Process, has lobbied for an update to the law to treat both cloud- and home-stored e-mail the same, and thus require a probable-cause warrant for access. The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on that topic Tuesday.

The companies — including Google, AOL and AT&T — maintain that the law should be changed to reflect that consumers increasingly access their e-mail on servers, instead of downloading it to their hard drives, as a matter of course.

But the Obama administration testified that imposing constitutional safeguards on e-mail stored in the cloud would be an unnecessary burden on the government. Probable-cause warrants would only get in the government’s way...

Justice Dept. to Congress: Don’t Saddle 4th Amendment on Us
David Kravets
April 7, 2011
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/04/fourth-amendment-email-2

Hard Lessons from the HuffPost Sale

Robert Parry
February 11, 2011
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2011/021111.html
U.S. progressive media has had a tough few weeks. First, Keith Olbermann, the pioneer for liberal programming during MSNBC’s evening hours, was sent packing. Then, Arianna Huffington allowed AOL to subsume her Huffington Post into AOL’s right-of-center content for the price tag of $315 million.

Leftist bloggers who had provided free content to Huffington Post, enabling it to become a valuable property, found themselves quite literally sold out, with Huffington pocketing $18 million while making clear that she won’t battle for the liberal banner inside AOL.

Huffington joined with her new boss, AOL Chairman Tim Armstrong, to declare that their focus will be on how many eyeballs can be drawn to AOL, not in pushing progressive causes.

"Arianna has the same interest we do, which is serving consumers' needs and going beyond the just straight political needs of people," Armstrong said.

For her part, Huffington noted that her Web site was already shedding its political identity, providing more celebrity news and scandal stories, including a new section devoted to divorces. While about half of the traffic was on politics a couple of years ago, she said, that is now down to about 15 percent with only one of two dozen “sections” centered on politics.

Huffington, who burst onto the national stage in the 1990s as a right-wing talker denouncing President Bill Clinton, indicated in the wake of the sale to AOL that she may be shifting her ideology again.

"It's time for all of us in journalism to move beyond left and right," Huffington told PBS's "NewsHour." "Truly, it is an obsolete way of looking at the problems America is facing."

As Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank noted, Huffington used almost the same words when she changed her political colorations a decade ago. In 2000, she told Fox News, "The old distinctions of right and left, Democrat, Republican, are pretty obsolete."

Milbank wrote: “Anybody who expects her to continue as a reliable voice of the left is a poor student of Huffington history. I first came across Huffington in 1995, when she was working at [Newt] Gingrich's Progress and Freedom Foundation, preaching social consciousness to fellow conservatives.

“She railed against ‘big government’ and pronounced: ‘We do our part and God meets us halfway. That's why I'm a conservative.’ That version of Huffington called for strict immigration restrictions. She favored Bill Clinton's resignation and floated the rumor that a former ambassador had been buried in Arlington because Clinton had slept with his wife.”

She thrived as a rightist talking-head during the height of the Clinton-bashing in the 1990s, decrying his marital infidelity even as her own marriage to Rep. Michael Huffington, R-California, had the look of a political arrangement. She divorced the multimillionaire Huffington in 1997, shortly before he disclosed that he was bisexual.

A Second Divorce

Emerging from the divorce with a sizeable settlement, Arianna Huffington also separated from her right-wing ideological family. She moved leftward, filling what turned out to be a lucrative void as an outspoken leader of Hollywood's liberal community.

While many on the Left embraced Huffington’s ideological transformation then – with some wealthy progressives contributing substantial sums to her liberal projects – others remained skeptical, in part, because she never fully explained the reasons for her political shift.

She spoke only generally about how the Right had "seduced, fooled, blinded, bamboozled" her. But some of her critics saw instead an opportunistic calculation in her chameleon-like approach to politics.

In 2005, Huffington founded Huffington Post, which operated with a business model that relied on activists, politicians and entertainers contributing free content. The Web site soon became an important center for progressives critical of George W. Bush’s presidency.

Over time, Huffington Post also featured gossipy articles about popular celebrities. Like other left-of-center sites, such as Salon.com, those stories often emerged as the best-read, encouraging a further drift in that direction as a means of securing advertising dollars.

The commercial success of Huffington Post – resulting from its low overhead due to the work of some 3,000 bloggers writing for free and from Huffington’s effective self-promotion – caught the eye of Wall Street investors and obviously AOL.

Though AOL generally provides right-of-center news content to subscribers – for instance, AOL joined in last week’s hagiography of Ronald Reagan – its management concluded that it could do business with Arianna Huffington.

The sale of Huffington Post to a corporation that positions itself in the right branch of the mainstream media – what many on the Left deride as the MSM – upset a number of the site’s bloggers, including some who vowed to withdraw their work.

A Twitter account, called #HUFFPUFF, urged “jammers, creatives and revolutionaries” to strike back at Huffington’s sell-out. “Arianna Huffington has betrayed us,” the message declared, “so let’s huff and puff her house down.”

The broadside continued: “Socialite Arianna Huffington built a blog-empire on the backs of thousands of citizen journalists. She exploited our idealism and let us labor under the illusion that the Huffington Post was different, independent and leftist. Now she's cashed in and three thousand indie bloggers find themselves working for a megacorp.

“But the Huffington Post is not Arianna's to sell. It is ours: the lefty writers and readers, environmentalism activists and anti-corporate organizers who flooded the site with 25 million visits a month. So we're going to take it back. We'll stop going to her site. And we'll stop blogging for her too.”

In another big disappointment to progressives, Olbermann abruptly left MSNBC last month, announcing his departure in a brief signoff at the end his regular Friday broadcast of his “Countdown” program. Olbermann’s unceremonious push out the door would never have been matched by Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing Fox News toward its media stars.

In that way, Olbermann’s treatment was a reminder to the surviving liberal hosts on MSNBC – the likes of Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz – that they are expendable, too, and that MSNBC experimented with liberal-oriented programming only after its attempts to out-Fox Fox had failed.

In his nearly eight years at “Countdown,” Olbermann was the brave soul who charted the course for other mainstream media types to even mildly criticize Bush. More typical of NBC Universal’s cable shows was the fawning treatment that Chris Matthews afforded Bush in 2003 during the heady days of what was viewed as the victorious invasion of Iraq.

Fish to Fry

NBC’s owner, General Electric, was a charter member of the military-industrial complex and – as a major international conglomerate – had more corporate fish to fry than the modestly higher ratings that Olbermann provided MSNBC. Comcast, the cable giant which is assuming a majority stake in NBC Universal, similarly has more lucrative interests amid the regulatory world of Washington.

This week, Olbermann announced that he would become “chief news officer” at former Vice President Al Gore’s “Current Media,” a struggling media operation that is available mostly over the Internet and in households with digital cable connections.

“Nothing is more vital to a free America than a free media, and nothing is more vital to my concept of a free media than news produced independently of corporate interference,” Olbermann told reporters. “In Current Media, Al Gore and Joel Hyatt have created the model truth-seeking entity.”

Though Olbermann may draw new attention and more viewers to Current, the overall impact of his departure from MSNBC is that far fewer Americans will have access to Olbermann’s influential commentaries which were important in rallying progressives especially during the peak of Bush’s power.

A lesson for progressives from AOL’s purchase of Huffington Post may be that they should be a bit more leery of converts from the Right, especially those who don’t explain adequately what led to their ideological switch.

While liberals seem especially eager to reward ex-conservatives by lavishing them with financial and other support, progressives might consider showing their generosity more to people who have proven their commitment to worthy causes or honest journalism with years of hard work.

All these points, however, go back to the overall weakness of progressives in the field of media. If a powerful liberal cable network did exist, MSNBC might have had second thoughts about treating someone like Olbermann so high-handedly, since he could jump to a competing channel that could badly dent MSNBC’s ratings.

Similarly, progressives behaved in an overly credulous manner toward Arianna Huffington, thrilled that someone with such an outsized media profile – gained from her service as a foot soldier in the right-wing war on Clinton – would turn the bright light of her celebrity on liberal causes and create a home for progressive content.

Having suffered these recent painful reminders of where they really stand in the thinking of corporate media, progressives may want to rethink their own media strategies, forgoing shortcuts and returning to the difficult work of building an effective media infrastructure.

For more on these topics, see Robert Parry’s Lost History and Secrecy & Privilege, which are now available with Neck Deep, in a three-book set for the discount price of only $29.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there.

AOL & Huffington Post: BFF

AOL has paid $315 million to buy the Huffington Post. I know this because there's hundreds of posts on HuffPo linking to real news articles reporting the fact.
The yuppie-friendly liberal blog was snapped up, in a strategy similar to the merger of Newsweek and The Daily Beast. Arianna Huffington will be named editor-in-chief of the merged company's media group. Maybe this one will work out better than AOL's last great combo.

How will this change journalism? As noted by Tim Rutten of the L.A. Times, "To grasp the Huffington Post's business model, picture a galley rowed by slaves and commanded by pirates." In other words, not much.

What will AOL-Huffington Post merger mean?
Bryony Jones
February 7, 2011
http://www.cnn.com/2011/BUSINESS/02/07/huffington.post.aol.merger
AOL Hearts HuffPo. The loser? Journalism
Tim Rutten
February 9, 2011
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-rutten-column-huffington-aol-20110209,0,2992862.column

Yahoo Mail still king as Gmail lurks

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10311150-265.html

Tom Krazit
August 17, 2009
Yahoo Mail still king as Gmail lurks
Yahoo is still king of the e-mail market as of June 2009, but Gmail has the most momentum.

Google's Gmail is the fastest-growing e-mail service on the planet, but it has a way to go to catch Yahoo's still-growing market share.

ComScore's latest figures for the e-mail market show Yahoo added almost 20 million users last year, growing its share of the market by 22 percent from 87.2 million users to 106.2 million users in June. Only Gmail grew faster--a 46-percent clip--but just 36.9 million people are currently using Gmail. Microsoft's Hotmail is the second-most widely used e-mail with 47.1 million users, up 3 percent from last year.

Some outlets, such as TechCrunch, zeroed in on Google's performance, noting that it has now surpassed Web 1.0 stalwart AOL's steadily falling share of the e-mail market. Others, such as Daring Fireball, noted that Google has better mindshare among the digerati than Yahoo or Hotmail.

But Yahoo, currently rebranding itself around content and services after dumping its search business on Microsoft, should be thrilled at 22 percent growth starting from such a large number. Now that Yahoo will be dependent on attracting eyeballs to its vast network of Web content, pushing that content to those logging into Yahoo to check their e-mail becomes extremely important.

Google has had to make some changes as Gmail has grown larger, tweaking the "labels" sorting structure it uses inside Gmail to behave more like the traditional folder-based organization used by other e-mail services. Still, there's no doubt that Gmail has breathed new life into the original killer application for the Internet since it made its debut five years ago, and Yahoo Mail will have to make sure to stay on top of evolving usage patterns to maintain its edge.

Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Internet search, including Google, Yahoo, online advertising, and portals, as well as the evolution of mobile computing. He has written about traditional PC companies, chip manufacturers, and mobile computers, spending the last three years covering Apple.

Yahoo, AOL in due diligence on combination

http://www.reuters.com/article/innovationNews/idUSTRE49S7EQ20081029

Yahoo, AOL in due diligence on combination: source
Wed Oct 29, 2008
By Anupreeta Das

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc and Time Warner Inc's AOL unit are looking at each other's books to figure out how much money they could make together and where costs can be saved, a person familiar with the talks said on Wednesday, indicating a merger may finally be on the way.

While noting a deal was not imminent, the source said the two companies have engaged in "meaningful" due diligence about a possible combination for the past couple of weeks.

Talks are focused on how to integrate AOL's content and advertising business into Yahoo, said the source, who was not authorized to speak publicly because the discussions are confidential.

Yahoo and Time Warner began talks several months ago, when the Internet company was looking for an alternative growth strategy to fend off a $47.5 billion takeover bid from Microsoft Corp.

Yahoo had repeatedly rejected Microsoft, which finally withdrew its $33-per-share proposal in June after Yahoo cut a search advertising partnership with Google Inc.

But the Google deal, also part of Yahoo's alternative strategy, is mired in the regulatory process because critics have said it is anti-competitive. Meanwhile, Yahoo shares have plunged to around $12.

Time Warner shares are down about 45 percent from year-earlier levels, while Yahoo shares have fallen about 63 percent, as fears of an economic recession curbed corporate spending on advertising while Google continued to dominate in the Web search market.

Under the deal Yahoo and Time Warner have discussed, Yahoo would fold AOL's content and advertising business into its own operations, and Time Warner would get a stake in the combined company.

Executives and advisers from both sides met last week as part of the due diligence process, the source said. Both sides are being cautious because any potential deal carries "a lot of risk," the source said, without providing further details.

Integration concerns would likely revolve around how to fold AOL's advertising network into Yahoo's operations, choosing whether to keep separate portals and email services, and squeezing out cost savings by reducing duplication, one former AOL executive said on condition of anonymity.

Yahoo and Time Warner declined comment. News of the due diligence was first reported by the AllThingsDigital blog.

Shares of Yahoo were up 4 cents at $12.40 in late trading, while Time Warner shares were down 15 cents or 1.5 percent at $9.95.

(Editing by Gerald E. McCormick and Brian Moss)

Time Warner AOL discussions

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-9992465-93.html

Yahoo and Microsoft step up Time Warner AOL discussions
July 16, 2008

Yahoo and Microsoft have both accelerated their respective deal-making talks with Time Warner's AOL, as a proxy fight looms less than three weeks away between Yahoo and investor activist Carl Icahn, according to a source familiar with the discussions.

"The ongoing talks between all the companies have recently picked up," said the source.

That may come as no surprise, given that Yahoo over the weekend rejected a sweetened Microsoft offer to buy just its search assets and the board of directors for the Internet pioneer will be up for grabs when Yahoo and Icahn face off at the August 1 annual shareholders meeting.

Specifics about the types of deals that are currently underway in these two separate discussions and the likelihood of an outcome are not clear.

But previously, talks between Yahoo and AOL reportedly involved discussions of Yahoo acquiring AOL and, then, Time Warner taking an investment in Yahoo.

And as noted in the Silicon Alley Insider last month, a Microsoft buyout of AOL could come sooner than later. In fact, Silicon Alley Insider posted this nugget Tuesday that a team from AOL was in Seattle to talk about a potential deal with the software giant.

And a report in Reuters Tuesday was the first to note talks had "heated up" among the three parties.

Yahoo, Time Warner step up combination talks

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080305/bs_nm/yahoo_timewarner_dc

Yahoo, Time Warner step up combination talks: report
Wed Mar 5, 2008

Yahoo Inc (YHOO.O) and media conglomerate Time Warner Inc (TWX.N) have stepped up talks to create an alternative to Microsoft Corp's (MSFT.O) offer to take over the Web company, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday citing people familiar with the matter.

The paper reported that the talks center on a deal that would fold Time Warner's AOL Internet unit into Yahoo, according to the people, who still consider a Yahoo purchase by Microsoft as the most likely outcome.

Last month Microsoft made a $41 billion offer to buy Yahoo, which was rejected as undervaluing the business.

Yahoo and Time Warner were not immediately available for comment.

(Reporting by Yinka Adegoke, editing by Elizabeth Fullerton)

Yahoo’s Unlikely Alternatives to Microsoft

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/13/a-guide-to-yahoos-unlikely-alternatives-to-microsoft/

February 13, 2008
A Guide to Yahoo’s Unlikely Alternatives to Microsoft
By Saul Hansell

In the course of a terminal illness, a person will often start to cast about for alternative therapies: herbs, acupuncture, fasting on a Tibetan mountain. This exploration is simply part of the process of coming to terms with the painful truth.

That’s the best way to understand all the reports of possible deals coming from Yahoo. Jerry Yang, Yahoo’s chief executive, has engaged a bevy of creative bankers who are busy trying to concoct all sorts of fanciful business arrangements. They tried and failed to find any takers in the private equity world, and they have run proposals by the business development departments at all the usual suspects -– Google, AOL and News Corporation, among them, according to executives at those companies.

There is indeed some active discussion between News Corporation and Yahoo now (as first reported by Silicon Alley Insider). But News Corporation senior executives say they don’t believe anything will come of this.

The diagnosis is even more clear now than it was 12 days ago when Microsoft first announced its unsolicited bid: Yahoo will get sold to Microsoft. All that’s left to work out is the price.

In the meantime, here is a guide to all of the alternative therapies that Yahoo has been exploring, and why they are not safe or effective.

The key to understanding this is to realize that Yahoo is considering two types of procedures. The simplest would be to sell itself outright to some other company or group willing to outbid Microsoft. This is a long shot. No one but Microsoft and Google have the cash or stock market valuation to make this work. Private equity funds in this market can’t get their Visa credit limits raised, let alone borrow $50 billion.

The other possibility is that Yahoo could restructure in some way, perhaps taking an outside investment, so it can try to convince a majority of shareholders that it is better off as a standalone company than as part of Microsoft. This is unlikely to work because shareholders may well prefer the certainty of Microsoft’s offer, particularly given the lack of confidence in Yahoo’s current management. But it is at least possible to consider such a deal, so that is what is being discussed.

A big variable in any possible deal structure is the role of Google, which has indicated that it would like to help Yahoo fight off Microsoft. Presumably this means having Google sell search ads on Yahoo in return for a stream of guaranteed cash payments. There has been a lot written about how such an arrangement would undergo a lot of antitrust scrutiny. That’s true.

But another problem came up in the negotiations about this last week. Some people who toyed with making a run at Yahoo figured that they would get a big guarantee from Google and then borrow a lot of money against it in order to help finance their bid for Yahoo. It turns out, several dealmakers told me, that Google insists on minimum traffic levels in return for a guarantee of ad revenue. That provision doesn’t stop companies like AOL and News Corporation from cutting search ad deals with Google. But they are enough to stop a bank from backing such a buyout.

And if Yahoo simply announced a deal with Google, and no outside investment, it would have a hard time convincing shareholders that the extra money from search alone is reason enough to turn down Microsoft.

The deal under discussion with News Corporation, according to an executive briefed on the talks, involves a variation of a deal that it proposed to Yahoo last year. It would give Yahoo MySpace, its other Internet properties, some advertising credit and perhaps some cash, in order to take a 20 percent to 30 percent stake in Yahoo. A search deal with Google might be part of that too.

The hope would be that synergies with MySpace, as well as management help from News Corporation, would seem appealing enough to investors to rebuff Microsoft. Moreover, if News Corp. had a 25 percent stake, say, along with the 10 percent of the shares owned by Mr. Yang and David Filo, his co-founder, they would have enough of a voting bloc to win a shareholder vote if it came to that. Whether Yahoo really could play that tough, given its corporate governance structure, is an open question, however.

The deal proposed with Time Warner was similar: Trade AOL and perhaps some cash for a big stake in Yahoo. This has all the problems of the proposed deal with News Corporation and one more: Unlike News Corporation’s chief executive, Rupert Murdoch, who has already expressed interest in Yahoo, Jeff Bewkes, Time Warner’s new chief executive, is skeptical, according to an executive who has spoken to him. He soured on big Internet deals after Time Warner’s disastrous combination with AOL. Still, fixing AOL is one of Mr. Bewkes’s key challenges. So his business development staff is firing up its spreadsheets to consider the possibilities with Yahoo, according to a person familiar with the analysis.

But this person said that like Mr. Murdoch, Mr. Bewkes thinks it would be hard to win this one away from Microsoft.

Internet, AOL, Google, Microsoft, News Corporation, Time Warner, Yahoo, Yahoo In Play

Who on Earth Would Want to Buy Yahoo?

http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/01/who-on-earth-wo.html

Who on Earth Would Want to Buy Yahoo?
By Betsy Schiffman
January 02, 2008

While pundits yap away about how Yahoo is fresh acquisition meat, we find it hard to believe. The company is pretty pricey, with a market cap of roughly $33.5 billion, and the number of businesses that could actually swing it is minuscule.

We understand why internet industry watchers think Yahoo is in play. At the very least, it's in flux. Former CEO Terry Semel was ousted last spring, management is fleeing the scene in droves, and the stock is drifting.

But even if Yahoo's business has been dwarfed by Google, its revenue is still growing (it grew by about 12 percent in the third quarter); and more importantly, co-founders David Filo and Jerry Yang, who own roughly 10 percent of the company, are dead set on executing on a turnaround plan.

The bigger question is who would want Yahoo? The major media players (Time Warner, News Corp., Viacom) are desperate to build out their online media businesses, but probably not to the tune of $33.5 billion. We asked a slew of analysts to weigh in on the odds of potential acquirers, and here's what they had to say:

NBC - The network, which is owned by conglomerate General Electric, has flailed on the web over the last decade, and while it needs to grow its online business, at least one analyst, who asked not to be named, thinks GE is more likely to sell NBC in the next couple years than it is to grow the business. The upshot? The chances that GE would have any interest in buying Yahoo are slim to none.

Microsoft - It just won't die: For at least a year, gossipers keep rehashing the same old rumor that Microsoft is in talks to buy Yahoo. While the company is one of the few businesses positioned to do it (Microsoft has plenty of cash on hand, a rich market cap, and would have no problem raising additional financing) such a deal would be a total disaster for Microsoft, according to Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry. "Microsoft has all the pieces it needs to build its Live brand. A Yahoo acquisition will disrupt Microsoft's execution, confuse customers, and dilute -- without repair -- Microsoft's brand," Chowdhry says. "The Live brand is youthful, while Yahoo resonates as an internet site for old people."

News Corp. - Rupert Murdoch is in it to win it, and he's willing to spend exorbitant sums of money to own the internet (as evidenced by his $580 million acquisition of MySpace). Still, an outright acquisition of Yahoo isn't really his style. "I think Rupert's been willing to take minority stakes in companies where he can take control," says Pali Research analyst Richard Greenberg. "I'm skeptical of the portal business in general and with the MySpace acquisition, I think News Corp. has some big opportunities to attack portals' core business."

Time Warner - It's been eight years since AOL announced its bid to buy Time Warner in a $165 billion deal. Since then, the AOL business has deteriorated dramatically, and Time Warner has even toyed with the idea of spinning it off. "We've seen how the AOL Time Warner merger just didn't work," says Greg Gorbatenko, an analyst with Jackson Securities. "Now AOL's dragging Time Warner down. If you were to introduce Yahoo into the mix, it would be like . . . you gotta be kidding me!"

Viacom - Although Viacom is expected to shop around for acquisitions this year, Yahoo is probably not on the shopping list. "We would expect Viacom to be more active in buying online assets in 2008, but these acquisitions would be small-to-medium moderately sized deals. A large acquisition, the size of Yahoo, would surprise us," says Laura Martin, Soleil-Media Metrics analyst. "It's more important for Viacom to get their core business in shape, and resolve issues with DreamWorks."

We're not saying a deal won't happen -- anything is possible -- but it seems a little far fetched to us.

AOL to End Support for Netscape Browser

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,140903-c,netscape/article.html

AOL to End Support for Netscape Browser
Once the dominant Web browser, AOL has discontinued development and active support for the Netscape browser.
Stephen Lawson, IDG News
Friday, December 28, 2007

An historic name in software will effectively pass into history in February as AOL discontinues development and active support for the Netscape browser, according to an official blog.

AOL will keep delivering security patches for the current version of Netscape until Feb. 1, 2008, after which it will no longer provide active support for any version of the software, according to a Friday entry on The Netscape Blog by Tom Drapeau, lead developer for Netscape.com. The Netscape.com Web site will remain as a general-purpose portal.

Netscape was the original mass-market Web browser and helped to popularize the Internet in the mid-1990s, but it has long taken a back seat to Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. Firefox itself traces its roots back to Netscape software that was made into open source. The Mozilla Foundation was founded in 2003, with support from AOL, and has released successive versions of Firefox while AOL continued to develop Netscape on top of the same platform, Drapeau wrote.

Groups within AOL have tried and failed to revive Netscape Navigator and gain market share against Internet Explorer, according to the blog entry.

"AOL's focus on transitioning to an ad-supported Web business leaves little room for the size of investment needed to get the Netscape browser to a point many of its fans expect it to be," Drapeau wrote. "Given AOL's current business focus ... we feel it's the right time to end development of Netscape branded browsers, hand the reins fully to Mozilla and encourage Netscape users to adopt Firefox," Drapeau wrote.

The Mosaic Netscape browser was posted for downloading in 1994 by Mosaic Communications, which later changed its name to Netscape Communications. That company kicked off the dot-com boom with its hugely successful initial public offering in August 1995 and was acquired by AOL in 1999. But Internet Explorer, introduced in 1995, eventually dominated the browser market. Microsoft's bundling of its browser with Windows operating systems was a key issue in antitrust lawsuits filed against it in 1997.

As of this month, Netscape had only 0.6 percent of the browser market, which was still dominated by Internet Explorer with more than 77 percent, according to Web application and analytics firm Net Applications. Firefox was gaining, however, with market share just over 16 percent.

The Top 25 Web Hoaxes and Pranks

http://msn.pcworld.com/article/id,131340-c,scamshoaxes/article.html

The Top 25 Web Hoaxes and Pranks
Steve Bass
PCWorld.com
Thu May 3, 2007

Whether they take the form of a comic image of a giant cat or a desperate plea from a sick child, chain e-mail messages and Internet frauds are elements of the online landscape that we've all encountered. No topic is off limits: a medical warning, a promise of free money, or a believably (or shoddily) Photoshopped image. But at the end of the day, they're just elaborate hoaxes or clever pranks--and we've collected 25 of the most infamous ones ever to have graced the Internet or our inboxes.

Though some of these deceptions originated years ago, the originals--and dozens of variants--continue to make the rounds. If you keep a patient vigil over your e-mail, you too may eventually spot a message urging you to FORWARD THIS TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW!!! And if you haven't had enough when you finish reading this article, take a hoax test at the Museum of Hoaxes, and then hop over to Snopes, the premier myth-dispelling site for coverage of zillions of other falsifications.

Hoaxes 1 Through 5

From the supposed last photo taken at the top of the World Trade Center to the endlessly revised request for assistance from a Nigerian functionary, here are our top five Web and e-mail hoaxes.

1. The Accidental Tourist (2001)

Quite possibly the most famous hoax picture ever, this gruesome idea of a joke traveled around the Web and made a grand tour of e-mail inboxes everywhere soon after the tragedy of September 11. It depicts a tourist standing on the observation deck of one of the World Trade Center towers, unknowingly posing for a picture as an American Airlines plane approaches in the background.

At first glance it appears to be real, but if you examine certain details, you'll see that it's a craftily modified image. For starters, the plane that struck the WTC was a wide-body Boeing 767; the one in the picture is a smaller 757. The approach of the plane in the picture is from the north, yet the building it would have hit--the North tower--didn't have an outdoor observation deck. Furthermore, the South tower's outdoor deck didn't open until 9:30 a.m. on weekdays, more than half an hour after the first plane struck the WTC. The picture is a hoax, through and through--and not a particularly amusing one, under the circumstances.

Image courtesy of Snopes.com.

2. Sick Kid Needs Your Help (1989)

This gem had its roots in reality. It all began in 1989, when nine-year-old cancer patient Craig Shergold thought of a way to achieve his dream of getting into the Guinness Book of World Records. Craig asked people to send greeting cards, and boy, did they. By 1991, 33 million greeting cards had been sent, far surpassing the prior record. Ironically, however, the Guinness World Records site doesn't contain any mention of Craig Sherwood or a "most greeting cards received" record, presumably because the fine folks at the site don't want to encourage anyone to try to break his mark. (Astonishingly, Guinness doesn't have an entry for world's stoutest person, either, but it does honor the World's Largest Tankard of Beer.)

Fortunately, doctors succeeded in removing the tumor, and Craig is now a healthy adult, but his appeal for cards has turned into the hoax that won't die. Variations on the theme include a sick girl dying of cancer, and a little boy with leukemia whose dying wish is to start an eternal chain letter. A recent iteration tells a tragic tale of a girl who supposedly was horribly burned in a fire at WalMart, and then claims that AOL will pay all of her medical bills if only if you forward this e-mail to EVERYONE YOU KNOW!!! Okay, enough already.

Image courtesy of Snopes.com.

3. Bill Gates Money Giveaway (1997)

No, it's true. I thought it was a scam, but it happened to a buddy of mine. It seems that Microsoft is testing some new program for tracing e-mail, and the company needs volunteers to help try the thing out. He forwarded me an e-mail that he received from Microsoft--and get this, from Bill Gates himself! Two weeks later, as a reward for participating, my pal received a check for thousands of dollars! Sure he did. Another version of this hoax claims that AOL's tracking service is offering a cash reward. Tell you what--when you get your check, send me 10 percent as a finder's fee, okay?

4. Five-Cent E-Mail Tax (1999)

"Dear Internet Subscriber," the e-mail starts. "The Government of the United States is quietly pushing through legislation that will affect your use of the Internet." It goes on to reveal that "Bill 602P" will authorize the U.S. Postal Service to assess a charge of five cents for every e-mail sent. Not a bad way to cut down on the number of dopey e-mail chain letters and lame jokes people let loose on the world. But credulous curse averters and connoisseurs of boffo laffs can relax: This e-mail alert, which popped up in 1999 and comes back for a visit every year or so, just isn't true. Still, it sounded plausible enough to fool Hillary Clinton during a 2000 debate when she was running for the Senate.

5. Nigerian 419 E-Mail Scam (2000)

"DEAR SIR," the e-mail starts. "FIRSTLY I MUST FIRST SOLICIT YOUR CONFIDENCE IN THIS TRANSACTION; LET ME START BY INTRODUCING MYSELF PROPERLY..." I'm sure you've received one of these--a confidential, urgent e-mail message promising you a reward of mucho dinero for helping this person convey money abroad. All you need do in return is entrust your name and bank account number to the government bureaucrat (or his uncle, aunt, or cousin, the ostensible "credit offficer with the union bank of Nigeria plc (uba) Benin branch") who needs your help.

It's the Nigerian con, also know as an Advanced Fee Fraud or 419 scam (so called because of the section number of the Nigerian criminal code that applies to it). Ancestors of these scams appeared in the 1980s, when the media of choice were letters or faxes--and they're still wildly successful at snagging people. In fact, Oprah recently featured a victim of the Nigerian scam on her show. And if you think that smart, educated folks couldn't possibly fall for it, you'll be surprised when you read "The Perfect Mark," a New Yorker magazine article profiling a Massachusetts psychotherapist who was duped--and lost a fortune.

To see how the hoax works, visit Scamorama, a fascinating site that features a progression of e-mail messages stringing along 419 scammers, sometimes for months at a time. Finally, check out the 3rd Annual Nigerian E-Mail Conference, an absolutely perfect spoof.

Hoaxes 6 Through 10

The lower half of our top 10 ranges from a kidneynapping scare to a cookie recipe worth its weight in saffron.

6. It's Kidney Harvesting Time (1996)

The subject line is laden with exclamation points: "Travelers Beware!!!" If that's not enough to get your attention, the chilling story certainly will. The message warns that an organ-harvesting crime ring is drugging tourists in New Orleans and Las Vegas, snatching their "extra" kidneys, selling the organs to non-Hippocratic hospitals, and leaving the victims to wake up in a bathtub full of ice and find a brief note that explains the situation and conveniently identifies the phone number of the nearest emergency room. Hey, maybe they'll get lucky and the hospital will have a compatible replacement kidney on hand. But travelers, fear not!!! According to the National Kidney Foundation, this scenario has never actually occurred--though it does have the makings of a great horror flick. (Freddy's Last Harvest, anyone?)

7. You've Got Virus! (1999 and on)

There's isn't a Teddy Bear virus. Nor is there a sulfnbk.exe or A Virtual Card for You ("the "WORST VIRUS EVER!!!...CNN ANNOUNCED IT. PLEASE SEND THIS TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW!!!").

The jdbgmgr.exe hoax (also known as Teddy Bear because the jdbgmgr.exe file is represented by a teddy bear icon) warned recipients of the e-mail message that they were at risk of infection from a virus sent via address books or Microsoft Messenger, and that they should delete the file immediately. But in reality there was no virus--and unfortunately, jdbgmgr.exe was a necessary Java file. The sulfnbk.exe hoax nailed even advanced users with its insistence that the file--a legit one that's used for fixing long file names--was a virus. Lots of people removed it.

Similarly, A Virtual Card for You claimed that McAfee had discovered a virus that, when opened, would destroy the hard drive on an infected system and would automatically send itself to everyone on the user's e-mail contacts list. Of course, it didn't do anything except scare people. So before you forward an e-mail virus warning to anyone (especially to me), look it up on Sophos or Vmyths to make sure it isn't a fraud.

8. Microsoft Buys Firefox (2006)

Talk about scaring the entire open-source community. In October 2006, a previously unknown Web site popped up, announcing Microsoft's acquisition of Firefox and promoting the company's new Microsoft Firefox 2007 Professional. The site talks glowingly about the browser's new features and provides a video advertisement for the product. It was a great prank, and the image of the Microsoft Firefox 2007 box was so elaborate and professional looking that the blood pressure of real Firefox users went sky-high.

9. The Really Big Kitty (2001)

There are big cats and then there are even bigger cats. This one, reportedly tipping the scales at almost 90 pounds, was enormous. The claim seemed plausible and even snookered a lot of e-mail cynics (I'm raising my hand)--until they read the accompanying copy, that is. With nonsense about the owner working at Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, and more balderdash about nuclear reactors, the jig was up. Eventually, the cat's owner fessed up to a creative Photoshop session, though he claimed that he never expected anyone to believe the photo was real.

Image courtesy of Snopes.com.

10. $250 Cookie Recipe (1996)
The woman loved the cookie she had just nibbled at a Neiman Marcus cafe in Houston, so she asked her waiter for the recipe. "Two-fifty," he said, and she agreed without hesitation, instructing him to add it to her tab. But when the woman's Visa bill arrived, it read $250, instead of $2.50. Bent on revenge, she proceeded to ask you to blast the recipe to--okay, ready?--EVERYONE YOU KNOW!!! Like many hoaxes, this one predated the Internet, only to resurface in the electronic age. It appeared in a cookbook in the late 1940s as the $25 fudge cake, popped up in the 1960s as the Waldorf-Astoria red-velvet cake recipe, and re-emerged in the 1970s as the Mrs. Fields cookie recipe.

Hoaxes 11 Through 15

This group of five begins with a phoney e-mail message promising money and other prizes from Disney, and ends with the classic deaf-to-reason arguments of the Apollo moon landing deniers.

11. Free Vacation Courtesy of Disney (1998)
Dear Goofy... Forward this e-mail chain letter to everybody under the sun and, once 13,000 people have received it, Walt Disney Jr. will send five grand each to 1,300 lucky people on this list. And "the rest will recieve a free trip for two to Disney for one week during the summer of 1999." Is that Disney World, Disneyland--or Walt's house? The "Jr." after Disney, in reference to a nonexistent person, ought to have been the first clue that this was a hoax. And the misspelling of "receive" was the clincher--remember, hoaxters, "i" before "e" except after "c"). Yet people forwarded the message around the world using the time-honored e-mail chain letter adage: I'm sending it to you... just in case it's true.

12. Sunset Over Africa (2003)
Now that's a dazzling photo of Africa and Europe, taken right around sunset from the Space Shuttle Columbia. What makes the image especially amazing is that, while London remains in daylight, night has fallen in Italy (a little to the southeast) and the bright lights of Rome, Naples, and Venice are blazing. Too bad it's a digitally altered photo, most likely layered from multiple satellite images. To see an accurate, computer-generated illustration, check out the World Sunlight Map.

Image courtesy of Snopes.com.

13. Alien Autopsy at Roswell, New Mexico (1995)
Roswell, New Mexico: ground zero of UFO controversy. It's also where the movie of the Roswell alien autopsy was filmed 60 years ago. The story goes that a UFO crashed at this site, and the U.S. government performed a hush-hush autopsy on the dead alien.In the mid-1990s, unnamed individuals "discovered" the secret film and posted it for the edification of a disinformed public. Looks pretty real, right? Now fast-forward to 2006 and a conspiracy-deflating admission: The movie is a hoax created in 1995 by John Humphreys, the animator famous for Max Headroom, in his apartment in north London....Or was it???

14. Real-Time GPS Cell Phone Tracking (2007)
SunSat Satellite Solutions knows where you are.Have you heard about the Web site that can track the location of your cell phone in real time? It uses satellite GPS in combination with Google Maps, and it's amazingly accurate (not to mention a disturbing invasion of privacy). Go ahead, check it out yourself by going to the SunSat Satellite Solutions site and tracking your own cell phone's location. Select your country, type in your cell phone number, click the Start Searching button, and wait for it. (This is one of the year's best pranks. And I won't give away the ending.)

15. Apollo Moon Landing Hoax (1969)
You're aware that we never landed on the moon, right? It was all just an elaborate hoax designed to score Cold War points for the United States against the Soviet Union in a world of falling dominoes. The whole lunar landing thing? It was a video staged at movie studios and top-secret locations.

Okay, you can stop laughing now, but some sites, such as Apollo Reality and Moon Landing, still insist that the Eagle never landed. Of course, enemies of Flat Earthism will point to the Rocket and Space Technology site, which does an in-depth job of debunking the hoax. But true disbelievers should check out this terrific video spoof, complete with outtakes showing lights and cameras.

Hoaxes 16 Through 20

The world of weird eBay auction items starts off this page, which concludes with a photo hoax purporting to show a 1950s-era vision of the home computer of tomorrow.

16. Sell It on eBay! (1995)
You won't believe what people have sold on eBay--some of the items pranks, some of them for real, and some, well, it's hard to tell. For a sampling of the weird, you need look no further than a haunted tree stump and a pork chop shaped like a grizzly bear. The Internet itself once went on the market at a modest starting bid of a million bucks, as have a dozen spontaneous images of the Virgin Mary (on toast, on windows, and heaven only knows where else). Bidders have also had a shot at someone's soul, a guy's virginity, and a human kidney, with the price of this last item having reached $5.7 million before eBay pulled the plug. (Hey, guys, don't you know that what you lose in Las Vegas is supposed to stay in Las Vegas?)

But my favorite eBay offering involves a tattooed guy who, as a joke, dressed up in his ex-wife's size 12 wedding gown and put it up for auction. Only, the dress ended up selling for $3850, and the guy got five marriage proposals. Nice.

17. Chinese Newspaper Duped (2002)
Information on the Internet may want to be free--but if it's posted by a for-profit publisher, you'd better take it with a grain of salt. That's the lesson learned by China's Beijing Evening News, which was taken in by the Onion's Capitol Dome spoof. Famous for its authentic-sounding but tongue-in-cheek articles steeped in the language of the Associated Press, the Onion reported that Congress had threatened to leave Washington, D.C., and head for Memphis unless the District agreed to erect a new domed Capitol building with a retractable roof and luxury box seating. Having accepted most of the Onion article at face value, the Chinese newspaper at first stood by its source in the face of international derision and refused to back down. When it finally published a retraction, it blamed the Onion for the confusion: "Some small American newspapers frequently fabricate offbeat news to trick people into noticing them with the aim of making money." Right.

18. The Muppets Have Not Already Won (2001)
Osama and Bert: a Sesame Street connection to terrorism?In early October 2001, just prior to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, protesters at an anti-American rally in Bangladesh showed their support for Osama bin Laden by marching, chanting, and waving placards. One of the posters captured on film by Reuters News Agency was a photo-montage of the Al-Qaeda leader, and in one of the shots a yellow felt puppet to his right glowers furiously at the camera. It's...Bert of Sesame Street. Originally a Zelig-inspired creation of San Francisco Webmaster Dino Ignacio, the satirical Web site Bert Is Evil depicted Bert hobnobbing with the worst of the worst in history, tormenting his roommate Ernie, and generally reveling in wickedness. After Ignacio retired from active efforts to expose Bert's career of evil, others filled the Photoshop void, capturing the cone-headed miscreant with all the latest baddies-du-jour.

Evidently, the company responsible for printing the pro-Osama poster found the doctored dual portrait irresistible, although (according to the Urban Legends References Pages) its production manager claims to have produced about 2000 copies of the Osama-and-Bert poster without realizing "what they signified." Well, if you can't trust pictures you find on the Internet, what can you trust?

Image courtesy of Snopes.com.

19. Chevrolet's Not-So-Better Idea (2006)
The ad folks at Chevrolet thought they had a winner: Let site visitors create their own 30-second commercial for the company's 2007 Chevy Tahoe SUV. It'll be fun, they probably thought. We'll give them a choice of video clips and soundtracks, and let them add their own text captions. Yep, viral marketing at its best.

Unfortunately for Chevrolet, a few pranksters decided to use the opportunity to express what they thought of the SUV. One commercial said, "Like this snowy wilderness? Better get your fill of it now. Then say hello to global warming." Another lambasted the SUV as a gas guzzler: "Our planet's oil is almost gone. You don't need G.P.S. to see where this road leads."

20. Rand's 1954 Home Computer (2004)
This intriguing image of a room-size computer made the rounds of the Internet, accompanied by a breathless blurb: "This article is from an issue of 1954 'Popular Mechanics' magazine forecasting the possibility of 'home computers' in 50 years." The steering wheel in the picture is the predecessor to today's mouse, and the keyboard looks like those on teletype machines. It even comes complete with a guy right out of the Eisenhower era.

Cool stuff, and easy to believe--but it's not a 1950s Rand Corporation mockup of what a prototype home computer might look like. It's actually a shot taken of a submarine display at the Smithsonian Institution and subsequently modified for inclusion in a Fark.com image-manipulation competition.

Image courtesy of Snopes.com.

Hoaxes 21 Through 25

Our final five takes you from the ultimate instance of Microsoft hubris to an ill-conceived experiment in Internet democracy (or is that Internet anarchy?).

21. Microsoft Buys Catholic Church (1994)
More than a decade ago, an e-mail press release--from Vatican City, no less--landed in my inbox. Microsoft was announcing that it was in the process of acquiring the Roman Catholic Church in exchange for an unspecified number of shares of Microsoft common stock. The story was a prank, but it sure looked real, circulating for months and perhaps worrying residents of the Holy See.

Just think: If the press release had been true, it might have stopped the Vatican from using Linux. And no, I'm not kidding about the Linux part. Watch this video interview with the woman who helped build the Vatican's Web site.

22. Hercules, the Enormous Dog (2007)
Wow, that dog's almost as big as the horse. That's what I thought when I first looked at this e-mail. The picture depicts a couple, one walking a horse, the other holding the leash of Hercules, a 282-pound English Mastiff and "The World's Biggest Dog Ever According to Guinness World Records."

Horsepucky. Here's my analysis of the Photoshop modifications. First, take a close look at the grass under the people and the animals. The area has been subtly lightened in order to make all of the shadows match and look authentic. Next, examine the shadows and you'll notice two anomalies: First, the shadows of the dog and the man start at their feet, but the same doesn't hold true for the horse. Second, the woman's shadow is missing altogether; instead, the man's shadow extends in front of her. Oh and by the way, the Guinness World Records site doesn't have a listing for Hercules or for the world's biggest dog. Okay, okay, so the pictures of the big kitty and the big dog are both fakes--but have you seen the shot of Craig Sherwood riding the world's largest jackelope?

23. Lights-Out Gang Member Initiation (1998)
People have a tendency to believe e-mail messages that come from authority figures. In 1998, a message purportedly from a police officer working with the DARE program circulated around the Internet. It warned recipients not to flash their lights to inform oncoming cars that their headlamps were off. According to the message, a recently devised gang initiation ritual involved having new gang members drive at night with their headlights turned off until an oncoming car flashed its lights at them; then, in order to become initiated, they were to shoot everyone in that car. It's just another urban myth--and about as silly as the one claiming that gangs mark off their territory by hanging sneakers from power lines.

24. Hurricane Lili Waterspouts (2002)
It's weird, it's disturbing, and it's seemingly plausible--all of the elements necessary for a successful e-mail forward. The image shows three dark waterspouts in the distance. The subject is "here comes lili," and the e-mail began appearing in inboxes at about the same time that Hurricane Lili started battering the Louisiana coastline. But three waterspouts, all neatly lined up? According to About.com, the National Weather Service labeled the picture a hoax and said that it was a modification of a genuine photo taken in 2001 by a crew member of the Edison Chouest Offshore supply boat.

25. Pranks Shut Down Los Angeles Times Wiki (2005)
It seemed like a bright idea. The LA Times' "A Wiki for Your Thoughts" fandango asked readers to chime in on the newspaper's editorials via a Wiki. In their explanation of how it would work, the editors even acknowledged that "It sounds nutty." Yet they went ahead with it--and achieved disastrous results. The Wikitorial (the name was nearly as dumb as the scheme) brought out the best and then the worst in readers. On the first day, an editorial about the war in Iraq prompted civil and thoughtful contributions. On day two, pranksters littered the unmoderated Wiki with rude comments, pornography, and profanity. The Webmaster removed the offending entries, but only after they were available for public viewing. By the next morning, the publisher had dismantled the Wiki.

Hoaxes by Decade
E-mail, Web sites, Photoshop. The digital era has made it easier than ever to pull a fast one on a large audience.

Pre-1990 Apollo Moon Landing Hoax (1969) Sick Kid Needs Your Help (1989)1990-1999 Microsoft Buys Catholic Church (1994) Alien Autopsy at Roswell (1995) eBay Sales (1995 and on) $250 Cookie Recipe (1996) Kidney Harvesting (1996) Bill Gates Money Giveaway (1997) Disney Jr. Free Vacation (1998) Lights-Out Gang Member Initiation (1998) Five-Cent E-Mail Tax (1999) Virus Hoaxes (1999 and on)2000 and on Nigerian 419 E-Mail Scam (2000) Giant Cat Photo (2001) World Trade Center Photo (2001) Bert and Osama bin Laden (2001) Hurricane Lili Waterspouts (2002) Onion Dupes Chinese Newspaper (2002) Sunset Over Africa (2003) Rand's 1954 Home Computer (2004) Los Angeles Times Wiki (2005) User-Created Commercials for Chevy Tahoe (2006) Microsoft Buys Firefox (2006) GPS Cell Phone Tracking (2007) Hercules, the Enormous Dog (2007)