That Internet sprite, Groupon Co-founder and CEO Andrew Mason, continued in his quest to be the cleverest little entrepreneur on the Web with a very funny post on the Chicago-based start-up’s blog yesterday titled: “No Comment!”

Mason is well known for his hipster-ironic-cute no-comment responses to the media, such as one he gave the New York Times recently:

“Andrew Mason, Groupon’s chief executive, declined an earlier interview request, adding that he would talk ‘only if you want to talk about my other passion, building miniature dollhouses.’”

Buuuuuurn, NYT!

In his latest rumination on life as a digital celebrity, Mason more fully outlined what he would not comment on, including everything even remotely interesting you might want to know about the social buying company, including:

* Plans relating to capital-raising, including a possible public offering

* Pre-announcements of new products

* Our competitors or the competitive landscape

* Statements on core business metrics, including margins or profitability

* Any projections regarding revenue, growth rates or other financial metrics

*Strategic transactions or partnerships with other companies

Thank goodness any metrics we want about how many discounted stripper pole lessons Groupon has sold in Omaha is on-limits!

Mason–who appears to want to become the Midwestern version of comic Jackie Mason, except Jackie would have taken the $6 billion from Google–is now styling a very scruffy Jeremiah-Johnson beard on this blog post, which you can see above.

BoomTown’s query on that: Why, dear God, why?

Here is Mason’s full “No Comment!” post:

No Comment!

As press interest in Groupon has grown, I’ve found myself increasingly uttering two words that have always annoyed me: “no comment.” We like to be as transparent with our customers as possible, but, just as people don’t walk around naked, there are some things that we as a company don’t talk about (for obvious reasons).

The least we can do is be transparent about the things we won’t be transparent about, which are listed below:

* Plans relating to capital-raising, including a possible public offering

* Pre-announcements of new products

* Our competitors or the competitive landscape

* Statements on core business metrics, including margins or profitability

* Any projections regarding revenue, growth rates or other financial metrics

* Strategic transactions or partnerships with other companies

While we’ll clam up when asked about the above business-y stuff, we’ll always be straight forward about things that affect the experience we’re creating for customers and merchants.

Awesome! So says Tina Brown, in an “interview” her site is running with her today, to mark the Beast’s two-year anniversary: five million uniques, “ahead of projections” on advertising, etc. “A romping, vibrant, 2-year-old animal bursting with rude health.” (No mention of Howard Kurtz, though.)

In fact, it’s doing so great, Brown says, that Diller may end up pawning the thing off to Newsweek and new owner Sidney Harman.

Well, she doesn’t say that exactly. But she does acknowledge, out loud, for the first time, that the two sides are chatting:

We hear something is going on with Newsweek.

How clever of you to notice! Yes, there have been some interesting discussions going on, as we have with potential partners large and small all the time.

Cheeky!

Here’s a more fleshed-out version of that discussion, via the NYT:

Mr. Harman and Ms. Brown met as recently as last week and are keen on working together. But whether The Daily Beast, which is financed by the billionaire investor Barry Diller, and Mr. Harman can reach a deal that is agreeable to all parties is still unknown, this person said, speaking anonymously to reveal privileged information.

Ms. Brown has gone as far as submitting a memorandum to Mr. Harman outlining how she would run Newsweek, but Mr. Harman was also interviewing other people for the job, this person added.

A few things:

• It’s astonishing, and also true, that Harman bought Newsweek from the Washington Post (WPO) without knowing who he would hire to run the operation.
• This also means that no one is really running things there now.
• Brown would be a pretty good choice, all things considered.
• And picking up the Beast wouldn’t be a terrible idea for Harman, assuming Diller can do it at the right price: Newsweek’s Web operations are okay, but not nearly as good as they look on paper. That’s because the site is largely dependent on MSNBC.com for its traffic, and that’s not a healthy affair. Say what you will about Brown’s start-up, but it hasn’t had the crutch of a big distribution partner.

BoomTown truly believes the editors over at Next Media Animation are speaking a news language of the future.

Here is the Taiwanese CGI news unit’s genius take on the ongoing media battle between the New York Times (NYT) and The Wall Street Journal, which is owned by News Corp. (NWS), in the New York market.

It features News Corp. kingpin Rupert Murdoch with a shark fin and helicopters, NYT CEO Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger Jr. with a big red “cut jobs” button and even a “West Side Story”-inspired Jets vs. Sharks face-off.

Like I said–genius from NMA:

(Full disclosure: The shark-finned News Corp. also owns this site.)

BoomTown has finally dragged all my various and sundry bags of gadgetry back to San Francisco after a week of it sitting mostly useless on a ranch in Wyoming.

However did I manage that?–at least according to a recent slightly alarmed series of articles in the New York Times (NYT) about how technology is messing with our inner chi.

Noted the Times, which has also been urging readers to unplug and then tell the tale:

“These technologies have become so constant in many of our lives we can’t see ourselves without them even as the impact of them on our personal and professional lives–and even our brains–is being discovered.”

Memo to the NYT editors: I survived the whole analog encounter just fine.

I was able to read a real book easily, sit quietly contemplating the cosmos and maintain regular eye contact with my children, even though I really also like being jacked into the matrix 24/7/365.

A brief rundown of how I did it:

Mobile Phone: My Apple (AAPL) iPhone has exactly zero bars at the Spotted Horse Ranch, which is located south of Jackson, Wyoming.

So the coverage was pretty much about what I get in San Francisco–except it was crystal clear when I was riding Lefty the horse on a mesa. I called my mom to say so.

But, in all, fewer than five calls all week.

I did post my location to Foursquare once from the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar, because you kind of have to do that when you are sitting on a saddle at a bar drinking a beer.

Mostly, my smartphone went dumb.

Internet: The Wi-Fi went in and out unless I was in direct line of the office where the hub was located. So, I did not do much of that either, although I tweeted now and then and made sure I was up on whatever Lindsay Lohan was doing (making trouble as usual!).

But, since it was so slow, there was little Web surfing–which is pretty much how I get most of my news these days. Thus, I was forced to crack open the newspaper, and it worked well, although it still leaves my hands grimy.

Email was a lot easier, of course, and I did some, although only a tiny fraction of my usual, which is hundreds of emails a day.

Other devices: I retired the Flip camera, even to shoot videos, as I was taking to the trails daily. Let’s just say that horses irk a lot easier than Internet moguls, and I did not want to get bucked.

On the other hand, the iPad was a delight to have, whether doing crosswords at the creek, playing air hockey with Louie, piano with Alex or just doodling. Video and music playing was also a welcome feature.

I thought I would miss the online element of the tablet, since 3G did not work where I was and it was not easily able to find the faint wireless signal.

Not so. Apps are really versatile, and it is easy to imagine everyone having some kind of loaded tablet device from a variety of manufacturers on vacation.

Thus, I guess I was not truly unplugged, even though I was insulated from the constant pinging of my usual life. Does this mean my brain has warped to crave tech and think small thoughts?

Then again, I also did not churn my own butter or rope my own cattle for hamburgers, and somehow those are not an issue anyone has with modern life.

In other words, I really wish it were not an either/or debate over technology, as it always seems to degenerate into. We can all live both offline and online without having to denigrate one or the other, as if it were some noisy Western shootout.

Oh, they re-created one of those every night in Jackson, which you can watch here on a Webcam aimed at Town Square and its antler arches.

That said, Mahaney points out that Amazon, with its long-established relationships with publishers, still offers book buyers a wider selection of e-books than Apple does. And it sells its books for less. From his note published Friday:

• 88 percent of New York Times (NYT) fiction and nonfiction best sellers are available on Amazon’s Kindle vs. 63 percent available for Apple iBooks
• The average price of the best-selling ebooks available on both platforms is $11.23 on the Kindle and $12.31 on the iBook platform–a 10 percent difference
• All in all, about 50 percent of NYT fiction and nonfiction best sellers are available on both the Kindle and the iBook platform
• For eBooks available on both the Kindle and the iBook platforms, 80 percent had the same price, whereas Kindle prices were cheaper for 20 percent of the books by an average of 11 percent

These gaps will narrow over time if Apple (AAPL) pushes hard with publishers to do so. And assuming it does, the real difference for buyers ought to be: Do you want to read e-books on a multipurpose device (the iPad) or one that costs a whole lot less and does much less (the Kindle)? My guess is that even after Apple eats into Kindle’s share, Amazon (AMZN) is going to find plenty of people who just want an e-reader. We’ll see.

I haven’t had time to do a full review of App World, but I tried it out for a couple of hours on a top-of-the-line BlackBerry Bold and a fast network connection. Here are my first impressions.

RIM’s store is clumsier to use than Apple’s (AAPL), but it works. The selection at launch is decent, but with some surprising omissions. The emphasis seems, at first glance, to be toward pricier apps. And, there are some limitations and oddities. Perhaps the biggest of these is that App World is only available for relatively recent BlackBerry models–the ones with trackballs instead of side wheels, starting with the Pearl, which came out in the fall of 2006. That means that millions of people with older models can’t use the app store.

App World has apps in all the major categories–Games, Productivity, Entertainment, News, Weather, Finance, Health, Social Networking, and so forth. The selection is broad. For instance, on the first day, it offers 166 games, 99 productivity and utility apps, and 69 reference and book apps. There are even a few of those fart apps that have proved so popular on the iPhone, something that seems so… unBlackBerry-like.

But there are some surprising omissions. There’s no dedicated Twitter client, at least none that either I or a RIM (RIMM) spokeswoman could find at this writing. There’s a Facebook app, but it’s the same rudimentary one RIM has offered for a long time. There’s no Google (GOOG) app, just a shortcut to a Google page in the BlackBerry’s browser. And there’s no app for shopping at Amazon (AMZN) or viewing Kindle books. No doubt these things will show up eventually, but given the competition and the time RIM has spent getting this ready, I was surprised they weren’t there at launch.

Still, I downloaded about a dozen apps and liked most of them, including the Bloomberg, Pandora, and Shazam apps. But a $2.99 Associated Press app didn’t work properly and looked crude compared with the free AP app on the iPhone. Shazam, which identifies songs playing nearby and gives you a chance to buy them, correctly identified several songs on the BlackBerry, but unlike on the iPhone, didn’t link to videos related to the songs.

The buying process is harder than on the iPhone. You have to download the store itself, then pay for any apps you want with PayPal, which requires going through a couple of screens each time. On several occasions, despite my fast, strong, steady network connection, app downloads stopped in midstream multiple times, And the least expensive apps are $2.99, about triple the cost of the cheapest typical paid apps on the iPhone. Indeed, I spotted a surprising number of $20, $30 and $40 apps on App World.

App World has other limitations and oddities. You can only save apps to the BlackBerry’s limited internal memory, not to a roomier flash memory card. RIM has made up for this by allowing you to also store your apps online, but that’s still a pain, especially when you’re not connected. And, oddly, the apps you obtain from App World aren’t located in the BlackBerry’s Applications folder, but in the Downloads folder. You can, of course, move them around, even placing them right on the home screen.

BlackBerry fans unfamiliar with the iPhone won’t care about some of these comparisons, of course. They will, and should, just be happy that their phones are now much richer and more versatile devices. And, in the end, that’s what counts. RIM is now truly in the platform game, which will make its products more attractive and could make its shareholders richer.

The New York Times (NYT) is in lousy shape, so it needs to sell off About.com, the kind-of-portal, kind-of-blog-aggregator it bought from Primedia in 2005. So says Jason Calacanis, whose Mahalo.com is a kind-of-portal, kind-of-blog-aggregator.

Not true, say two people familiar with the Times and About; they say the paper isn’t shopping the property.

Calacanis, who made the remarks during the most recent This Week In Tech podcast, doesn’t go into much detail about his claim. Gawker has a link to the audio, but here’s the relevant transcript, in its entirety:

They’re going to have sell About. They’ve been trying to sell About.com, from what I understand.”

NYT spokeswoman Catherine Mathis offered up the standard we-don’t-comment-rumors-and-speculation line.

That said, it doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen at some point in the future. The Times really does need money, and since About.com is both growing and profitable, it may be the most valuable asset the Times now owns.

But that’s exactly why the New York Times would be reluctant to part with it. Like it or not, About.com may well represent the Times’ future.

This isn’t the first time a Web reporter has suggested that About.com is on the block, by the way. I wrote the same thing earlier this year, and I was wrong then.