I stuck with that for a little while. But there were two big problems.

First, I was bombarded with friend requests from people I barely knew or didn't know at all. Why? It soon became clear that large numbers of people weren't approaching Facebook with the reality principle in mind. They were playing the usual online game of racking up big numbers to feel important. "Friend count" was the new "unique visitors."

Then Facebook started to get massive. And consultants and authors started giving us advice about how to use Facebook to brand ourselves. And marketing people began advocating that we use Facebook to sell stuff and, in fact, sell ourselves.

So which was Facebook: a new space for authentic communication between real people -- or a new arena for self-promotion?

I could probably have handled this existential dilemma. And I know it's one that a lot of people simply don't care about. It bugged me, but it was the other Facebook problem that made me not want to use the service at all.

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As the tech-savviest of a not-tech-savvy-at-all gang of newspaper refugees trying to build a Web magazine, I got pulled over by our then-publisher. He'd been tearing his hair out trying to get a group of unruly Cornell students to write the software that would power Table Talk, which was going to be Salon's big bid for being not just an online magazine but an "interactive" website worthy of the Salon name. Things weren't going well. "I want you to project manage this," the publisher said. I thought, "What do I know from 'project manage'? I'm a critic!" Then I dove in, because, in a start-up with six employees, that was what you did.

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Yesterday James O'Keefe, the conservative trickster who has previously targeted ACORN and other organizations with fraudulent schemes aimed at exposing what he sees as liberal bias and malfeasance, unveiled his latest act: his confederates impersonated Muslim donors and recorded a meeting with an NPR fundraiser, Ron Schiller. Schiller said some impolitic things, some of which were true, others of which were overstatements, none of which was that different from what you can hear in any bar and on any blog. (Unless you believe nobody has ever charged that there are racists in the ranks of the Tea Party, or that anyone has ever suggested NPR might be better off without the federal funding that conservatives are constantly threatening to cut.)

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The events are similar in another way: Despite all the CEO happy-talk about synergy, we are once again watching two companies in trouble taking a big gamble that the other will solve its problems.

People think of Huffington Post as the leading popular liberal-Democratic news site. Huffington is now at least suggesting that the progressive point of view isn't a part of what she'll be pursuing at AOL. "Ms. Huffington said her politics would have no bearing on how she ran the new business," says the New York Times story. Really? This strikes me as strange, disingenuous, and about as credible as Roger Ailes claiming that Fox is not a partisan-driven institution.

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This week's launch of Rupert Murdoch's iPad "newspaper," The Daily, is a milestone: It's the first significant attempt, since the Web conquered the digital world in 1995, to create a major new media product that embraces technology yet spurns the Web -- and the public Internet, too. Chris Anderson's Wired "Web is Dead" package was the warning shot for this phenomenon, but The Daily's introduction puts it in front of us in palpable touch-screen form. It boldly declares: We're digital people but we're not Web people.

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Apparently, the answer is yes. The Guardian writes that this new publication will feature "a tabloid sensibility with a broadsheet intelligence" (funny, that's pretty much how David Talbot described Salon when we started it!) and tells us:

According to reports, there will be no "print edition" or "web edition"; the central innovation, developed with assistance from Apple engineers, will be to dispatch the publication automatically to an iPad or any of the growing number of similar devices. With no printing or distribution costs, the US-focused Daily will cost 99 cents (62p) a week.

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Friday offered a particularly striking contrast: Both papers led with stories about campaign finance.

If you read the Times, you came away with the impression that the US Chamber of Commerce, a business lobby, was blowing out the gaskets this cycle. The chart accompanying the Times' lead story identified the Chamber as "the top non-party spender" in the election, having spent $21.1 million, an amount raised largely from "a relatively small collection of big corporate donors" who have been able to remain anonymous.

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Yesterday we learned that New York Times economics correspondent Peter Goodman was decamping for HuffPo. "For me it's a chance to write with a point of view," Goodman told Howard Kurtz. He described fitting into the Times voice as "almost a process of laundering my own views, through the tried-and-true technique of dinging someone at some think tank to say what you want to tell the reader."

Jay Rosen commented on Twitter:

You get what this means, right? The View from Nowhere has become a liability in keeping newsroom talent

And again:

It's not so much that @petersgoodman wants to be a pundit. He wants to report what's really going on. In his own voice.

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This is the perennial cry of the outraged reader and the wronged article subject. The latest party to raise the fact-checking howl is the White House, which yesterday went public with its discontent over Forbes' ludicrously poisonous new cover story.

The article depicts President Obama as a deranged anti-colonialist whose ideology of business-hatred was somehow implanted, "Manchurian Candidate"-style, by the estranged father who abandoned him when he was 2. (Imagine, if you will, a leftist critique of George W. Bush that attributed his torture policies to secret indoctrination in his father's CIA dungeons. I know, I remember reading that cover story too…)

I'll let others do the actual point-by-point refutations of the Forbes article. I want to come at this story from two other angles.

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Discussion of these guidelines in the tech press initially framed the move as a "relaxation" of Apple's policies, because the company will now allow developers to use third-party frameworks and toolkits. But view the guidelines from the perspective of content publishing and "relaxation" is not the word that will spring to mind.

This item stands out:

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For 15 years, I've been doing most of my writing -- aside from my two books -- on the Web. When I do switch back to writing an article for print, I find myself feeling stymied. I can't link!

Links have become an essential part of how I write, and also part of how I read. Given a choice between reading something on paper and reading it online, I much prefer reading online: I can follow up on an article's links to explore source material, gain a deeper understanding of a complex point, or just look up some term of art with which I'm unfamiliar.

There is, I think, nothing unusual about this today. So I was flummoxed earlier this year when Nicholas Carr started a campaign against the humble link, and found at least partial support from some other estimable writers (among them Laura Miller, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Jason Fry and Ryan Chittum). Carr's "delinkification" critique is part of a larger argument contained in his book "The Shallows." I read the book this summer and plan to write about it more. But for now let's zero in on Carr's case against links, on pages 126-129 of his book as well as in his "delinkification" post.

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I shed no tears for Dr. Laura -- why do we give so much airtime to browbeaters, anyway? -- and I don't care much about this story. But after reading a post over at TPM about Sarah Palin's hilariously syntax-challenged tweets defending Schlessinger, I wanted to learn just a bit more about what had happened. So of course I turned to Google.

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I'm not in a position to offer strong views on the first criticism -- except that, as a journalist, I always lean toward disclosure unless there's clear likelihood of immediate harm to specific individuals. But the second criticism needs some review.

News organizations have always competed on the basis of scoops. The WikiLeaks documents haven't offered them anything that they can recognize as a scoop. You can picture the conversation:

Editor: What'd you find?


Reporter: Well, there's a ton of fascinating detail about a lot of incidents. A little more detail about the problems with Pakistani intelligence. And a whole lot of local color…


Editor: Just give me the top line. What's the headline?


Reporter: Uh, "Afghan war going as badly as everyone thought"?


Editor: Go find a fire somewhere, wouldja?

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And if you get away with this sort of stunt repeatedly, despite being exposed and shamed for it, then you are pulling off a grand heist -- stealing the credibility of larger media and government institutions that continue to pay attention to you.

This, in a nutshell, describes the challenge Andrew Breitbart has presented to the world of journalism, first with his ACORN deception and now with his Shirley Sherrod stunt. So far, journalism is failing to meet it.

By this point, Breitbart ought to be an object of snorting derision in the journalism profession. He ought to be shunned by respectable news organizations and mocked in public. He deserves the sort of ostracism that until recently was reserved for serial plagiarists.

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They blame anonymity. If only they could make people "sign their real names," surely the atmosphere would improve!

This wish is a pipe dream. They are misdiagnosing their problem, which has little to do with anonymity and everything to do with a failure to understand how online communities work.

It is one of the great tragedies of the past decade that so many media institutions have failed to learn from the now considerable historical record of success and failure in the creation of online conversation spaces. This stuff isn't new anymore. (Hell, this conversation itself isn't new either — see this Kevin Marks post for a previous iteration.) There are people who have been hosting and running this sort of operation for decades now. They know a thing or two about how to do it right. (To name just a few off the top of my head — there are many more: Gail Williams of the Well. Derek Powazek of Fray.com. Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon's Table Talk. Caterina Fake and her (ex-)Flickr gang.)

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"Self-publishing by someone of average talent is not very interesting," he told The Economist in 2006. "Talent is the new limited resource." At a technology conference that year, he declared, "There's just not that much talent in the world, and talent almost always outs."

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Thankfully, Google downtimes are brief, and so rare that bloggers take screen-captures of the events and post them like souvenirs. But when they do happen, they offer us brief flashbacks to something that now seems unthinkable -- a Google-less Web.

In fact, of course, we lived for years online without any Google at all. In 1998 Google was actually a latecomer, an upstart on a Web that had already grown crowded with services that promised to guide you through the online jungle. Conventional wisdom had it that Web search had fully evolved: The technology was as advanced as it could be; the market was boring and mature; opportunity lay elsewhere. Hah!

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As I hunted for help online, I stumbled on a Web site that offered a one-stop shop for people in my quandary. You paid a small fee and entered a little data and they did the rest: Payroll. Tax calculations. Government forms.

That site saved my sanity. And when my kids graduated to preschool and I gratefully retired my domestic-employer status, I wasn't left with a useless investment in an accounting software package; I just canceled.

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How would we negotiate this unfamiliar terrain? A spate of "netiquette" books arrived to help, with marching orders: Never e-mail drunk or angry. Don't type in all caps. Delete all come-ons from Nigerians with formal salutations and fortunes to bestow.

Good advice -- but most people were too busy forwarding risqué jokes and hunting down old high school friends to bother with it. Who needed etiquette tips? E-mail was everywhere; we were swimming in it.

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Just Wednesday afternoon, Jobs had knocked Windows software: He'd explained why Windows users love iTunes' jukebox software so much by declaring, "It's like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell."

But later, in the warm evening glow, Jobs dropped that familiar braggadocio and joined in the spirit that interviewers Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher set, of thoughtful reminiscence and mutual appraisal. On those terms, the event was a fascinating bout of PC-industry psychoanalysis.

Many others blogged the event live (Engadget, the D5 blog, Dan Farber, Paul Kedrosky, Eric Savitz and more), so let me instead offer some impressions based on the unusual opportunity to observe these two industry pioneers side by side.

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