The top four most powerful people are politicians, including Barack Obama in the top spot. At No. 5 is Bill Gates, who ranks high for his philanthropic role as co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Some of the other tech leaders and their rankings:

5. Bill Gates, co-chair, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

9. Mark Zuckerberg, founder, Facebook.

30. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, co-founders, Google.

40. Jeff Bezos, CEO, Amazon.

42. Robin Li, CEO, Baidu.

44. Li Ka-shing, chairman, Hutchinson Wampoa.

58. Tim Cook, CEO, Apple.

60. Masayoshi Son, CEO, Softbank.

The problem with true hyper-growth … It’s the problem like baking a cake in three minutes.

— Marc Andreessen, talking about growth at Y Combinator’s Startup School this weekend

Don’t worry about it, Forbes chairman Steve Forbes tells his staff, via an internal memo which you can read below.

Before we go further: I worked at Forbes for 10 years; I still know lots of folks who work there. Now: The Fortune piece is useful because it details, via internal documents from banker J.P. Morgan, just how badly the bet that Elevation Partners placed on the magazine in 2006 has worked out.

The fact that Elevation (better known as either Roger McNamee’s private equity fund, or Bono’s private equity fund) bought a minority stake in the publisher at close to the market peak has been well known.

But the Fortune piece spells out just how badly timed it was: Elevation’s projections had Forbes generating close to $90 million in EBITDA in 2009; instead, the company had operating losses of $19.7 million. Last year the company went into default on a $90 million credit line.

Fortune also argues that the deal has been a disaster for the Forbes family, but I’m not sure that this is the case. After all, it allowed them to take more than $100 million out of the company while holding on to a majority stake. If they hadn’t done that five years ago, they certainly couldn’t do so today.

Regardless, Fortune does a good job of showing just how precarious life has been at Forbes for the past couple years — as it has been at every business magazine (just ask Portfolio and BusinessWeek) — and the publisher’s uncertain future. Elevation and Forbes have interlocking put and call options that kick in next month, and it will be interesting to see how long Elevation remains a minority owner.

—

Fortune Story on Forbes
Steve Forbes [XXX@forbes.com]
Sent: Thursday, July 28, 2011 9:43 AM
Today Fortune magazine published a story on Forbes with the clear intention of disrupting the business of its most formidable competitor.

Fortune was aware that this was highly confidential, private information and of no value to release to the public. Though the intention is to harm our business, it will not adversely impact Forbes because it highlights a very difficult time in the past when all the media industry was going through unprecedented upheaval.

Forbes has the finest team – you – in the media world today. Forbes is profitable and is successfully navigating these extraordinarily turbulent seas. The company continues to grow and thrive with powerful new strategies and talent.

We are attaching (below) a statement that will be sent later today to the media responding to this article.

Media Statement
Contact: Monie Begley Feurey
SVP Corporate Communications, Forbes Media
XXX@forbes.com

Forbes Media is profitable and in full compliance with all bank loan covenants.

In 2010, as part of a newly formulated strategy, Forbes sold Investopedia for cash realizing a profit on the sale of this investment. The decision to sell this non-core investment was taken
by the board of Forbes Media upon the recommendation of management.

In 2008, Steve Forbes and Tim Forbes, CEO and COO repectively, initiated a reorganization of the company, including the integration of its independent operating units, Forbes magazine and Forbes.com.

They also decided to expand the company management team, which led to the successful recruitment first of Lewis D’Vorkin as Chief Product Officer and then Mike Perlis as CEO of the integrated business.

The last decade has seen unprecedented upheaval across the media industry.Within that decade Forbes magazine, uniquely among its largest competitors, Fortune and Business Week, grew its total readership to record levels – 5.4 million in 2010 – and grew its share of advertising from 33% to 40%. The company also launched 16 local language editions, giving it the largest worldwide brand footprint among business publishers. At the same time, Forbes.com grew to one of the largest and most profitable business websites in the world, with, on average, 20 million monthly unique visitors.

Since 2010, the company has pursued its strategy of putting journalism at the center of social media. This strategy is at the cutting edge of media today, which is why it is garnering support from audiences and advertisers alike.

Elevation Partners are enthusiastic supporters of the direction of the company and have been full participants as these strategies have been developed.

Steve Forbes remains Editor in Chief and Chairman of Forbes Media. Tim Forbes is Chairman of Forbes Digital. The Forbes family remains the controlling shareholder of Forbes Media.

Yahoo — which turned in yet another disappointing second quarter on Tuesday, but with all new excuses for the continuing decline in revenue — is now getting toasted by Wall Street.

That would be the marshmallow — and not the champagne — kind.

The stock of the Internet giant dropped below $14 a share, to close at $13.48 yesterday, after the company said its display advertising business in the U.S. was hard hit.

Today, it’s already down even further.

That’s close to an eight percent haircut for the past two days and a decline of 20 percent for the past three months.

In that same three months, Google is up over 13 percent, Microsoft is up over five percent, Amazon is up over 17 percent and Apple is up 13 percent.

You get the general idea here.

The decline means Yahoo’s market value is now only $17.5 billion, and more than two-thirds of that value is accounted for by its Asian assets (more than $9 billion) and cash ($3.3 billion).

That means its other properties are worth just above $5 billion now.

And while CEO Carol Bartz tried again — in a conference call with analysts after the earnings were released — to portray the situation as another part of her never-ending turnaround of the company, the issues at Yahoo are not new.

They range from display weakness to search declines to a talent drain to ineffective marketing to the lack of a consistent and fast-developing pipeline of innovative products to its flaccid board.

The earnings mess — no surprise, given estimates going forward were also missed — was seized on by investors and the press. (See, it’s not only me!)

In a column earlier this week in Forbes, titled “Carol Bartz’s 8 Blind Spots That Sunk Yahoo,” longtime and noisy Yahoo critic Eric Jackson noted:

“[T]he Bartz hiring is a cautionary tale to all boards and investors: An over-confident ex-CEO with no industry experience can make a bad company worse before things get better.”

But perhaps more damaging was a post today in The Wall Street Journal’s Heard It on the Street column by Martin Peers, titled: “Yahoo’s Unsurprising Surprise.”

It began with the cutting line: “Talk about having a credibility gap on display.”

Then it got worse:

“Admittedly, it may be that Yahoo has dropped off the radar screens of so many investors that this latest episode can’t do further damage. Certainly, aside from cutting costs, Ms. Bartz’s turnaround plan for Yahoo remains stillborn.”

That might be too kind if the stock continues to decline, a development that — in turn — might once again begin the speculation of Yahoo as a takeover target.

Which, if that could manage to get Yahoo shares back up, might be a reason to break out the bubbly.

A Yahoo spokeswoman declined to comment, which — given stock prices are what they are — is probably a good idea.

Hill — who has perhaps one of the best bylines evuh — clearly has come down on the former, writing earlier this week about the social networking company:

“As I’ve made clear here before, I think that the privacy concerns about the new tool are overblown. The tool is limited to identifying you to your friends — people who already know what you look like.”

(Hey, Kashmir: Let me know when the aliens who really created Facebook and Google come for you, after they decide to start harvesting the Earth as planned using their nefarious photo-tagging tools!)

All kidding aside, enjoy the video:

Now it looks as if News.me is just about ready for public consumption. I’m basing that observation on a new Web site that spells out, in great detail, how the app is supposed to work, and which instructs users to head to iTunes to download the app.

As I’m typing this, News.me still isn’t available in the app store. So it’s possible that the new web page is simply a new web page. Perhaps it’s just an exercise in positive thinking–maybe this will force Apple into approving our app!

[UPDATE: "Our understanding is that News.me is launching tomorrow", says New York Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy; the Times is aware of News.me's plans because it helped develop the project in its early stages (see below). I've asked Bit.ly for comment but haven't heard back yet.]

At a minimum, though, we can learn a lot about what Bit.ly has planned when News.me does launch.

The basics:

• News.me will cost $0.99 a week, or $34.99 a year. It will be available as an iPad app, using Apple’s subscription service, or as an e-mail newsletter.
• News.me will provide users with curated Twitter streams that highlight “the most popular or interesting news stories” that appear in their own Twitter feeds, and from the feeds of other Twitter users they select. The notion is that users can “read over the shoulder” of people they find interesting.
• Bit.ly does the curating, using the data it culls as it shortens billions of shared links on the Web. Since News.me relies on Bit.ly data, it has a natural bias toward publishers that use the service.
• News.me lets users read those stories in a “streamlined reading view,” which will be familiar to anyone who has used apps like Instapaper: easy-to-read black text on a white background–without the ads users see when they read the same stuff on a publisher’s Web page.
• News.me will share some of its revenue with publishers who license their content to the service. But publishers who don’t have News.me deals but do appear on the Web will still see their stuff show up on the service. It just won’t look as nice, and they won’t get paid. And they won’t get the chance to run “additional promotion for publisher products that might be of special interest to News.me users (such as iPad applications).”

You can get a pretty good sense of how the app works by reading TechCrunch’s “exclusive” from February. Or you could just ask many of the people whose work often appears on Techmeme. A whole lot of writers and bloggers–including me–have had a chance to play with News.me for a while.

When News.me finally does go live, potential users will have to debate whether they want to pay a fee to read stuff they can get for free on the Web.

But to me, the most interesting thing about News.me is that it’s an aggregator blessed by some publishers that haven’t always been hospitable to aggregators.

There’s the New York Times, for starters, which handed over the beginnings of the service to Bit.ly in exchange for cash and equity. And the Associated Press, which often butts heads with the Web, has signed on, too.

So have Forbes, and AOL and many of its sub-brands, and a good chunk of the blogosphere–Gawker Media, Business Insider, Gigaom, Mashable, VentureBeat, etc. (I believe–but haven’t confirmed–that neither All Things Digital nor News Corp., which owns the site, have a deal with News.me.)

The Times and the Associated Press also work with Ongo, another aggregation subscription service. But Ongo only uses content from publishers it has deals with.

News.me, though, charges money for a service built using other people’s work–even if those people haven’t signed on.

Which is what the Times has complained about in the past–like last summer, when it forced Apple to pull the Pulse newsreader out of its app store. The AP has engaged in similar fist-shaking aimed at Google and the Internet at large.

Here’s News.me’s defense of its model:

Because News.me generally provides a small subset of a publisher’s content, filtered by user actions and News.me algorithms, it is not a substitute for publishers’ own web sites or iPad applications. And, since it exposes users to content they likely wouldn’t otherwise see, it can broaden the audience and, through related-content links, drive new unique users to publisher web sites.

Which is reasonable enough. Everything on the Web gets shared and sampled; if you’re a publisher trying to build or keep an audience, trying to prevent that is counterproductive.

And News.me’s curated browsing conceit–there’s no search function, and you can’t subscribe to a publication-specific feed–makes it worthless for anyone trying to use it to game publishers. This won’t work as a permanent ad-blocker, or a paywall-jumping aid.

I still won’t be surprised to see some publishers who haven’t signed on rattling their sabers when News.me launches–just like the Times and the AP have in the past. Glad to see they’ve come around.

The investment is a relatively small one for Elevation, which is best known for big deals that have had a mixed track record, like: Forbes, Palm, Yelp, and, through secondary sales, Facebook. But it’s worth noting that Elevation had already invested an undisclosed amount in MarketShare back in December 2008.

Los Angeles-based MarketShare bills itself as “the industry-leading cross-media analytics solution for global marketers.” Which means it sells software that helps big brands figure out how and where to place their ad and marketing dollars, both on and offline.

Co-founder Wes Nichols plays up his software’s ability to model different scenarios for brands based on a wide range of variables, and says his company has helped steer $100 billion in marketing spend since 2005.

Elevation principal Adam Hopkins will join MarketShare’s board of directors, where Elevation adviser Ted Meisel already has a seat.

Today and tomorrow, Yahoo’s directors are gathering here in Silicon Valley for one of their regular meetings that take place over the course of the year.

While board meetings in general are usually pretty dull affairs–and Yahoo’s, in particular, are typically glacial ones–there is a lot on the plates of those with purview over the machinations of the long-struggling Silicon Valley Internet giant.

Here’s a primer of what might (and might not) be happening, according to sources, of course, as Yahoo continues on its quest to reinvigorate itself–a journey that is beginning to make Siddhartha’s transformation into Buddha enlightenment look speedy.

A Yahoo spokeswoman declined to comment on anything below, although I did run it all by them.

The U-Shaped Turnaround

At Yahoo’s recent sales meeting in San Antonio, CEO Carol Bartz went all Sesame Street on the troops, using the letter “U” as an illustration to indicate where in the cycle the company was in its turnaround.

Apparently, just on the other side of the very bottom of the letter, heading inevitably upward.

Her argument was that the company has finally cleaned up its platform mess and its confusing corporate structure, and that its display and search advertising business is now recovering nicely.

All true, except there are some other key issues, such as the slowness of the search and online advertising partnership with Microsoft to make some serious hay.

In fact, although its display business will show a definite strong recovery in Yahoo’s quarterly results next week, its search business–both in market share and revenue per search (RPS)–has, as one person close to the situation put it succintly, “fallen off the cliff.”

That’s due, in part, to getting the new system with Microsoft delivering better results, which is not happening yet (if ever!).

In this quarter, Microsoft has honored its contractual guarantees and will make up the difference–which will result in masking the magnitude of the RPS loss. It’s a worrisome trend to watch.

The Asia Situation

Yahoo and its Asian partners are still mulling over various options regarding the company’s large ownership stakes there.

What is happening with its share in China’s Alibaba Group, according to sources, is precisely nothing right now, as has been made clear in recent comments by its CEO and co-founder Jack Ma.

“If you cannot make the business cool, you have no right to be angry with me,” said Ma in an article in Forbes published this week, referring to Yahoo. “I just don’t trust them…I’ve been working with them for years, and I’m disappointed.”

Relations between Ma and Bartz, sources said, remain as bad as ever, and even the normally close one between Ma and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang is strained.

Plus, Ma told Forbes, as he has said before, Alibaba is not taking its auction site, Taobao, public–leaving Yahoo in possession of an appreciating but decidedly private asset.

Japan is a different story, with the disposition of Yahoo’s stake in Yahoo! Japan the subject of long and continuing negotiations for a while now.

While the earthquake and tsunami crisis there did slow discussions down, there is still active recent movement about a variety of cashing-out scenarios, all of which have massive tax and regulatory issues.

Without boring you with the specifics, one option is to create a tracking stock, another a spin-off of the asset and still another some sort of stock trade.

But no matter what happens, Yahoo will have to pay some sort of taxes on its 35 percent stake in Yahoo! Japan, now worth $8 billion.

But if its CFO Tim Morse–the key figure working on the deal–can pull it off, what will Yahoo do with all that money?

Acquisition Guns Blazing? Or Sputtering?

In a recent forum in Silicon Valley, one of its M&A minions said Yahoo had its “guns blazing” with regard to acquisition activity in 2011, as deliciously reported in The Wall Street Journal, despite the company’s lackluster acquisition record.

Sources said the exec had his ears soundly boxed by his managers for the dopey remarks, since Yahoo has had such a lackluster record in the arena–especially compared to others.

And, oh yes, Yahoo’s M&A head just decamped to gaming phenom Zynga.

That aside, Yahoo should be deep in the market for hot start-ups to help revive its innovative spirit, but it remains hindered by a continued reluctance by new start-ups to join it and by its reputation for being a place where entrepreneurs go to die.

That certainly could change at any time with the right execs in place, but Yahoo is competing with a plethora of more exciting companies and also a seemingly endless venture capital gusher of cash of late.

While it is the board’s job to approve acquisitions and not source them, perhaps it is its job to pressure Bartz and other execs to get off the stick and hit at least one of the targets Yahoo aims at.

Targets are plentiful in advertising, content and even social, with many start-ups playing right into a lot of arenas Yahoo needs some help.

And help it does need as talent keeps walking out the door daily, mostly to hotter prospects such as Zynga and social buying sites Groupon and LivingSocial.

There is no question it is hard for any large company to hold onto top staff when there are so many enticing bonbons out there as options, but it can be done.

One good thing: Its newish head of product Blake Irving and head of U.S. media and advertising Ross Levinsohn seem to be playing well together and are setting a tone of stability that is much needed.

Enter the Kenny

That said, there remains endless swirl, especially with key investors, about the performance of its CEO.

While she started off as a publicly in-your-face exec, Bartz has definitely stepped out of the limelight of late, as her pugnacious manner started to irritate Wall Street and others.

It was a good idea, since it has taken the focus off the lack of stock and revenue progress she had loudly promised.

Still, Yahoo shares have continued to stay locked in the mid-teens, as investors wait for some sign that Bartz’s turnaround has worked.

The entrance of its spanking new director, Akamai President David Kenny, has further increased speculation about management and board changes at Yahoo.

This is Kenny’s first board meeting, but this well-connected newbie is someone who is clearly going to rise quickly to the top of decision-making at Yahoo.

That’s because the smooth and well-liked Kenny, who also has deep advertising experience as founder of the Digitas agency, has a long relationship with Yahoo and also with Yang.

He also now has much more tech cred as a leader of one of the Internet’s most important infrastructure companies, with a ton of regular contacts with media giants, ad networks and video providers that are Akamai’s clients.

In other words, Kenny (pictured here) is the full package of ad and tech experience that would make him an obvious Yahoo CEO candidate when Bartz’s contract is up in early 2013, if not before.

He’s also the person most likely to take over for longtime BoomTown punching bag Roy Bostock as chairman of the board at some point.

None of this is happening soon, but it is clearly an interesting development.

There are other machinations, of course, from continued interest from private equity players in Yahoo, as well as a variety of takeover scenarios, each more complex than the next.

While often derided as yesterday’s news by the elite of Silicon Valley as on an inevitable downward path, those plots are there because Yahoo remains a stellar brand with consumers worldwide and an Internet property with huge traffic and a big ad business.

In other words, it’s a U that someday maybe could be a V.

Such lists are always heavily subjective, since picking the methodology determines how the list will turn out (full disclosure: our friends at Dow Jones VentureSource provided the raw data for the Forbes report, though neither VC Dispatch nor VentureWire was involved in the project). And indeed, some VCs get irritated by the list, believing it doesn’t accurately reflect true returns.

But it certainly gets attention. The project examines returns gained from IPOs and M&As over $200 million in the last five years, and used a series of additional metrics as well as an expert panel to come up with the final list.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

KickApps CEO Alex Blum will become KIT’s COO, and Blum and KIT CEO Kaleil Isaza Tuzman say almost all of the three acquired companies’ employees will hang on to their jobs.

Tuzman said his company paid about $62 million in KIT’s Nasdaq-traded stock for the three companies, and the balance in cash.

KickApps and Kyte had collectively raised some $55 million, so the companies’ backers aren’t going to do much more than break even in these deals. And the deal may be a coulda-shoulda for KickApps, which had talked to AOL about a $90 million deal three years ago, but never got it done.

Blum wouldn’t comment directly about the AOL non-deal, except to note that the spring of 2008 “was a different era.” And he says that all of his investors, which include North Atlantic Capital, Spark Capital and Softbank, have gotten “more than their money back,” and that all of them have taken KIT stock instead of cash. Spark general partner Santo Politi will join KIT’s board.

Tuzman, meanwhile, has an interesting story. During the first bubble he ran GovWorks, a failed start-up that happened to have a movie crew documenting its rise and fall. (Sadly, you can’t get “Startup.com” from Netflix or any other obvious place–can anyone point us to a copy?)

But this Forbes profile documents his efforts to build a second career. And at the very least, his newest company appears to be growing. In its last public filing, KIT reported quarterly losses of $8 million on sales of $28 million, which was up 151 percent from the previous year.

And late last year, KIT raised more than $100 million earmarked for acquisitions. None of that money, Tuzman says, was spent on these three deals.

[Image credit: Tyw7 via Wikipedia]

Sorry, couldn’t shave down the eight-minute running time, but it’s worth it (boy do I miss the Hulu clip-editing feature). Also, this is NSFW if your workplace isn’t cool with the word “penis.”

If you’re looking for a more sober take on WikiLeaks, check out Andy Greenberg’s excellent Forbes cover story and interview with Julian Assange.

Welcome to NewEnterprise, the latest in the ever-growing stable of offerings at All Things Digital.

I am Arik Hesseldahl and I’ll be following the world of information technology with an emphasis on the enterprise. This is a deliberately loose definition that encompasses a lot, so I expect I’ll have a lot of room to roam.

Consider for a minute all the different threads that can reasonably fall under the umbrella term “Enterprise IT”: Everyone loves Twitter and Facebook and Google, but when some part of them fails to work right, phrases like “Fail Whale” enter the popular lexicon, and careers, reputations and investments are all at risk.

When they do work, the people who assembled all the hardware and software become the unsung heroes. I’m fascinated by both scenarios, because in their own way they’re both great stories that others can learn from.

You can expect me to pay a great deal of attention to developments in the burgeoning cloud computing industry, and in the traditional enterprise IT business of selling computers and other products and services to large companies.

Beyond that I’ll be looking deeper at the chips and other components inside them, and the companies and people who make them.

And I’ll also be keeping an eye on issues relating to computer and network security, an issue that has suddenly taken on significant heft, as computer worms have evolved from stealing credit card numbers to attacking nuclear plants.

Plus, I’ll be on the lookout for new start-ups aiming to change the way things are done in the workplace.

I’ve covered technology for more than a decade, most recently for Bloomberg Businessweek, and for Forbes.com before that. In those years I’ve learned to treat buzzwords and hype cycles with suspicion and to question the so-called conventional wisdom wherever possible.

So, I promise to tell you what I think is going on in straight and simple terms, and in a jargon-free manner.

In short, I think we’ll have a great deal to talk about. And that’s where you come in. I’d like to hear from you. Give me feedback. Tell me what I’ve missed and where I could do better and also whether or not you agree with what I’m saying, or where you think the next important story is.

Leave a comment here or send an email (Arik@AllThingsD.com).

What I need most are thoughtful ideas and feedback from the people on the front lines at tech companies, and those making tech-related decisions at non-tech companies.

Remember those unsung heroes I mentioned before? They’re you. And NewEnterprise is nothing without you.

The two big takeaways here are that Forbes’s famously cluttered pages have been cleaned up (the print magazine has a new look, too) and that the whole thing looks, and acts, a whole lot like Facebook. That’s very much intentional, says D’Vorkin: “We are putting news, and the journalists, at the center of social media.”

And it’s the restructuring behind the scenes that’s much more important to Forbes than the new look. The business-news publisher (where I worked for a decade) has been faltering online and off, and it has brought in D’Vorkin to fundamentally overhaul the place.

D’Vorkin’s big idea is to import the model he used at True/Slant, his last company. That site employed a small army of freelance bloggers/contributors, each of whom had their own pieces of turf, were encouraged to comment on/link to each other, and were paid based on performance.

If you’re a traditionalist, that approach is worrisome because it undermines the carefully cultivated voice of authority that titles like Forbes banked on. If you like the idea, you can argue that many voices are better than one–and that this is a good way to make a lot of Web traffic/inventory without spending much for it.

I couldn’t understand why that notion appealed to Forbes’s owners, since the site always had lots of page views to sell, but the penny has finally dropped for me: Forbes wants to find a way to lessen its dependence on portals, particularly Yahoo (YHOO), for traffic.

In many ways, the Web site has effectively functioned as a subcontractor for Yahoo, generating stories and slide shows it hoped would land on the site’s front page, in return for a fire hose of traffic via referrals. A cadre of contributors can’t replace that traffic flow, but it’s much better to have page views and unique visitors that Forbes owns instead of rents.

D’Vorkin won’t talk about traffic directly, or about specifics of other internal overhauls he is planning. But broadly speaking, he’s talking up the idea of journalists as “product managers”–tellingly, D’Vorkin has given himself the title of “chief product officer”–who would be responsible for generating their own traffic, recruiting contributors, keeping tabs on their own analytics via Chartbeat accounts, etc.

And if you read between the lines, it’s easy to imagine that all of the Forbes editorial staff will eventually be compensated based on Web traffic, at least in part.

“The journalists are not just creating content, but they are developing brands among themselves, and people who are good at it should be rewarded for it,” D’Vorkin says.

Clean new Web site, brave new world.

And yes, that sounds even more indulgent and navel-gazing than most media about media. There’s a logic here, though: Twitter is great because it’s immediate and unfiltered (when it’s working). But there’s a value in a service that pauses and sifts, too.

In this case, that work is done by Steve McGookin, a veteran of the Financial Times (and Forbes, for a minute or two, where I worked with him), who sorts through journalists’ tweets and lets you know what they’re talking about and what they’re saying.

Straightforward stuff, but it’s something that isn’t being done yet. Most aggregators either rely on crowdsourcing/algorithms to cull stories, which is interesting but crude, or they don’t do any sorting at all. And because McGookin is doing actual editorial work, via super-concise summaries, it’s much more useful than the “bunch of tweets = a newspaper” model that paper.li is pushing. (No annoying spam, either.)

Muck Rack Daily is a spinoff of Muckrack, one of the umpteenth Twitter-related sites generated by the guys at Sawhorse Media. Sawhorse co-founder Gregory Galant says the main Muckrack site, which simply tracks individual journalists’ Twitter acccounts, is generating 100,000 uniques a month. But this new site may ultimately be much more useful, and popular.

As Kara Swisher pointed out in July, Facebook isn’t accepting ads from Sony (SNE), the movie’s distributor. The reason, in so many words: Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg don’t like the movie.

Fair enough: Sony has figured out plenty of ways to get buzz for the movie online, via both paid routes (“Promoted Twitter” ads) and unpaid gambits (viral videos, of course).

And now, in a lovely bit of irony, the “The Social Network” is being advertised on Facebook, after all. For free. By Facebook’s users.

As Forbes’s Dorothy Pomerantz explains, Sony is asking Facebook users to “like” the movie, and they’re complying: So far, some 29,000 Facebookers have endorsed the movie via a button click, which translates into some 29,000 individual “thumbs up” ads appearing in Facebook users’ streams.

Pretty clever, no?

I’m giving the movie a previewing thumbs-up, too, for what it’s worth–I’m really excited to see it. And not because I think it’s going define Generation Y or anything like that (beware of explicitly “generation-defining” movies, by the way–you’ll end up with “Reality Bites”). It’s because I think it’s going to be awesome: Aaron Sorkin is great with the words, and David Fincher makes great images.

And if that doesn’t sell you, maybe another view of the trailer, scored by a cover of Radiohead’s “Creep,” will help.

(Happy Birthday, Ben!)

Spanfeller Media Group, which plans to launch a series of new sites, is close to finishing a funding round that I’m told will total around $2 million. Backers include RRE Ventures, Greenhill SAVP, SoftBank and Lerer Media Ventures.

Once the deal is done, sources say, Spanfeller’s plan is to roll out a series of industry-specific “verticals.” First up: Food.

Aren’t there plenty of food sites out there already? You’d think so, but Spanfeller and his backers figure there’s room for more. After that, they have a list of categories to tackle, with the exception of five they think are overpopulated: News, business/finance, entertainment, traditional sports and technology. Spanfeller declined to comment.

When Spanfeller left Forbes last summer after eight-plus years at the site, his initial plan was to create a sort of repair shop for established publishers’ Web properties. That made sense, given that that’s essentially what he did for the Forbes family when he took over their Web site in 2001. But the new plan is to create stuff from scratch.

Within the Web publishing industry, Spanfeller gets lots of credit for moving Forbes.com from also-ran status into one of the biggest finance sites on the Web. And he gets a fair amount of derision as well, for both a blustery style and a lusty embrace of page views. His most infamous gambit, used more than once: A slideshow detailing the world’s “Top Topless Beaches.”

But the collapse of the last tech bubble and the realization the Web publishing economics require lots and lots and lots of scale have brought many other Web publishers much closer to Spanfeller’s tactics than they’d like to admit. His new challenge: Re-creating that scale with brand new properties.

As promised, Kara began BoomTown this week with another Steve Jobs blast from the past, this time at D5. It has all been a big countdown to Steve’s upcoming interview live on stage at D8 this coming Tuesday. It’s not just Jobs though. Head on over to the D8 site to see the full roster of tech execs in line for Kara and Walt’s hot seat. Midweek, Kara got a little video time with Keith Lee, CEO of Booyah games, maker of MyTown, the check-in-based social game that, with two million users, dwarfs Foursquare. The start-up just completed a healthy round of funding and apparently used the money to buy a giant Princess Leia doll…watch the video. Kara ended the week on one of her favorite subjects: Who’s departing this week from Yahoo (YHOO)? Looks like Tapan Bhat, head of the Internet giant’s front page, has left the building. Kara got the exclusive skinny.

John was at the Digital Daily ticker the moment the big story hit. Let us mark this down in our calenders as the week Apple exceeded Microsoft (MSFT) in market capitalization. How do you top a story like that? Well, John does it by following the saga of the social network editor that everyone love to hate at the moment. John gave a blow-by-blow of the privacy changes that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg laid out for his staff. Verdict? Less bad, maybe. To end the week, John covered some of the expectations around the international release of the iPad. Everyone is watching to see if the tablet outsells the Mac and will then proceed to stump about what that means for Apple (AAPL).

Twitter came in for a landing all over MediaMemo on Monday. Peter opened with a post trying to make sense of its new “ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” profit model. The media shuffle is always in Peter’s crosshairs, and this week’s installment was about Forbes buying up True/Slant. Wait…was that a media company acquiring something? Not selling it off? Peter ended his week with a cautionary tale for all this season’s commencement speakers: Don’t plagiarize your speech. Or, if you do, don’t steal it from YouTube. Nothing is more humiliating than being exposed virally.

Walt stepped out of the writer’s chair for Personal Technology this week and gave Geoffrey Fowler a shot at the keyboard. He turned in an insightful piece on the complicated world of e-bookstores and some useful advice on how to navigate their ins and outs.

The whole AllThingsD crew is feverishly preparing this weekend for D8, and even the lowly Weekend Update crew will be getting on a plane bound for LA. We’re packing plenty of sunscreen and NoDoz. Those shouldn’t interact badly…right?

Dvorkin’s old company tried to build a platform for free-lance bloggers, paying each contributor a small per-piece payment based on traffic and other goals (here’s Walt Mossberg’s review of the site, from 2009). Forbes COO Tim Forbes, whose company owned a 20 percent stake in True/Slant, tells me the publisher will use True/Slant in some way. But what he’s really buying here is Dvorkin, who had previously worked for the magazine in the late 1990s before heading to AOL (AOL).

“I’m tremendously excited to have Lewis come aboard as chief product officer. That’s the core message,” Forbes says. He adds that he hadn’t thought he would buy True/Slant when he brought Dvorkin on to overhaul his Web site and magazine this spring, though it seems as if the idea didn’t come completely from out of the blue. “It wasn’t planned because we didn’t know how things will play out.”

All right. So how’s Forbes Media doing, anyway (disclosure: I worked for Forbes for 10 years)?

Okay-ish, Forbes ventures. He says his family company is still looking for a “very senior executive” to fill the place of Jim Berrien, Forbes magazine’s former publisher, and Jim Spanfeller, who ran the Forbes Web site. That job search, which has been running since last summer, is for a single position.

And the business itself? “Business improves,” Forbes says. “The world heals, and we’re seeing real improvements in order flow. Things are getting better.”

Here’s the release:

Lewis Dvorkin to Lead All Forbes Editorial Areas as Chief Product Officer

The Company to Acquire True/Slant

New York, New York (May 25, 2010) – Forbes announced today that it had agreed in principle to acquire True/Slant, a unique, web-based, news platform company. Founder and Chief Executive Officer Lewis Dvorkin of True/Slant will be joining Forbes to lead all editorial areas at Forbes as Chief Product Officer effective June 1.

Mr. Dvorkin started consulting with Forbes in April of this year. He had been Executive Editor of the Forbes magazine from December 1996 to April 2000. In his new capacity Mr. Dvorkin will be creating and implementing many new initiatives in the editorial product and the engagement of Forbes’s audiences. He will be charged with re-architecting the Forbes.com website; redesigning the magazine; and will assume responsibility for all editorial product across Forbes.

In making the announcement Tim Forbes, President and COO said: “These times demand new models for delivering information and engaging audiences and for the ways we run our business.

“Lewis Dvorkin, a seasoned journalist (including a previous stint with Forbes), a business entrepreneur and founder of True/Slant, and a social media pioneer is the ideal leader for Forbes editorial vision and products at this stage.

“Forbes mission and message will not change. There will be new opportunities for people inside Forbes; new opportunities for audiences to have a deeper relationship with Forbes; and new opportunities for marketers to engage with our important audiences.”

“To participate and lead Forbes into its next stage of media life is truly exciting,” said Mr. Dvorkin. ”Forbes is a trusted brand with deep and specific meaning to those interested in information that inspires and enables them to succeed and to create wealth.”  He continued, “With all of Forbes’s great experts, the wealth of Forbes data, and its real-time web features, we have a unique ability to stimulate the social media conversation. Our journalists, producers, audiences, marketers and all variety of entrepreneurs will be engaged as they never have been before with one another. Forbes is stepping ahead of everyone on this one.”

Mr. Dvorkin brings to this new position thirty-five years experience in both old and new media platforms. Besides his years at Forbes, Mr. Dvorkin was Page One Editor of The Wall Street Journal, a Senior Editor at Newsweek, and an editor at The New York Times. After leaving Forbes, Mr. Dvorkin was Senior Vice President, Programming at AOL, where he was responsible for News, Sports and Network Programming and played a significant role in the launch of TMZ.com.

Forbes Media encompasses Forbes magazine and Forbes.com, the #1 business site on the Web that reaches on average more than 18 million people monthly. The company publishes Forbes and Forbes Asia, which together reach a worldwide audience of more than 6 million readers. It also publishes ForbesLife and ForbesWoman magazines, in addition to licensee editions in China, Croatia, India, Indonesia, Israel, Korea, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Russia and Turkey.

That’s a bit weird because DVorkin already has a day job: He’s the founder and CEO of True/Slant, a news network/aggregator/publisher he launched last year.

And it makes sense given that Forbes Media is one of True/Slant’s financial backers. Employees there say COO Tim Forbes has been particularly enamored of True/Slant’s low-cost, high-frequency approach to content generation, so you can read into this move what you will.

DVorkin started showing up at editorial meetings this week, I’m told. I’m also told that both Forbes magazine editor Bill Baldwin and Forbes.com editor Paul Maidment are reporting to him. “All I know is that it means we failed to fix our own problems,” an employee there tells me.

Disclosure: I worked for Forbes for 10 years and worked closely with DVorkin for a couple of those years. He’s smart and a bit scary. His former colleagues at AOL (AOL), where he landed after his stint at Forbes, almost always describe him as “quite a character.”

Reached for comment, DVorkin referred me to a Forbes spokeswoman. But did want me to make clear that he’s still running True/Slant. “I’m the CEO and founder of True/Slant, and we’re having out best month ever.”

Here’s Forbes’s statement:

Lewis DVorkin will be consulting on a redesign of Forbes.com and other editorial areas at Forbes Media.

Though he will be devoting time to this assignment, Mr. DVorkin remains the Chief Executive Officer of True/Slant, an original content news network, which he founded in April 2009. Forbes Media is a strategic investor in True/Slant.

Mr. DVorkin brings to this assignment vast experience in both old and new media platforms and a history with Forbes editorial. He was the Executive Editor at Forbes magazine from December 1996 to April 2000. where he spearheaded that magazine’s redesign, managed the annual Forbes 400 Richest Americans list and created the Celebrity 100 list, both internationally recognized products of Forbes magazine.

During his career Mr. DVorkin was Page One Editor of The Wall Street Journal, a Senior Editor at Newsweek and an editor at the New York Times.

After leaving Forbes, Mr. Dvorkin was Senior Vice President, Programming at AOL, where he was responsible for News, Sports and Network Programming and played a significant role in the launch of TMZ.com.