Forbes magazine put out its much-watched Midas List today, which is kind of the Oscars for venture capitalists in tech. (Caveat: Think more khakis and dudes than glitz and glamour.)

On the Top 10 list of 100 of the best-performing and most influential tech investors, Jim Breyer of Accel Partners and Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz led the list at No. 1 and No. 2, as they did last year. And several others in last year’s list remained on it: Peter Fenton of Benchmark Capital, Greylock Partners’ Reid Hoffman, and also David Sze, Peter Thiel and Bessemer Venture Partners’ Jeremy Levine.

Accel scored well on the rest of the list with nine partners named; Sequoia Capital had six VCs on the list; Benchmark, Greylock and New Enterprise Associates got five slots; Bain Capital Ventures, Bessemer, Kleiner Perkins and Meritech Capital Partners had four; and Andreessen Horowitz, Institutional Venture Partners and Venrock each had three.

As usual, there were few women on the list — only three — reflecting the lack of gender equality in the top tier of the VC business, which solidly remains a boy’s club, despite a lot of noise about changing it (see the pictures here and become depressed once again). Those women who did manage to get on the Midas List were Jenny Lee at GGV Capital, who jumped from No. 94 to No. 36; Kleiner Perkins’s Mary Meeker, who dropped from No. 42 to No. 47; and Theresia Gouw of Accel at No. 82, up from No. 92.

One notable part of the massive Forbes package of VCs on parade was the intense and multipart focus on the travails of Kleiner Perkins and its longtime leader and legendary VC John Doerr. Doerr clocks in at No. 26 on the list, dropping from No. 12 last year, a significant fall.

He does address the nagging issues at the storied firm, including ill-conceived investments in clean tech, a late-to-the-game move into social media, and even its big stake in stock-declining online gaming giant Zynga, in a video (below) and in several pieces, one of which is titled ““John Doerr’s Plan To Reclaim the Venture Capital Throne.”

More like “Game of Thrones” from reading it; there is another, more critical article in the New York Times that appeared yesterday. That piece focused on Kleiner’s investment in the troubled green-car startup, Fisker Automotive, and also the firm’s ongoing sex-discrimination lawsuit with former partner Ellen Pao.

“It was a challenging year, one of my more challenging years in the venture business,” said Doerr to Forbes.

Indeed, although Forbes does hand Kleiner a hey-we-have-some-sharpie-young-folks-here-too! gimme with its focus on “new generation” partners Megan Quinn and Mike Abbott in an interesting Q&A, as well as yet another piece on Kleiner supporters — such as Google’s Eric Schmidt — touting the firm as perhaps down but definitely not out in the “mojo” department.

“John always wins eventually, and the reason he always wins eventually is because he has the processing power and human energy,” Schmidt told Forbes. “Whatever the set of challenges, he will drive the change in the firm. They’ll have a crisis meeting and another crisis meeting, but he will do it. It may be messy but he will get them there.”

Presumably, if Doerr and team can get some mileage out of its Twitter investment next year and somehow turn around Zynga’s moribund stock. (Kleiner has held on to a pile of it, which is why Doerr recently joined the board that already had Kleiner’s Bing Gordon on it.)

On problem for Kleiner, and boon to others like Accel and Greylock, was that the firm was not early in Facebook, whose IPO — as rocky as it was — gave many VCs making the top of the Midas List the needed turbocharge in terms of performance. Other key companies to help VCs look good this year, according to the Forbes report: Workday, LinkedIn and Skype.

Here’s Doerr, who is indeed a legend, even if more bruised and battered this year, talking about it all to Forbes’s Connie Guglielmo, in the video interview:

Speaking of media attention, here’s a more provocative video interview by Forbes with Sequoia’s Doug Leone (No. 4, up from No. 18 last year), in which he takes aim at VC firms that do too much self-promotion — three guesses which pioneering browser inventor he is referring to here, and the first two don’t count. He called it an “embarrassment,” although Sequoia did hire an excellent PR person from Google this year — nonetheless making the point that the focus should be on entrepreneurs and not investors.

Except, of course, when it comes to scoring high on the Midas List.

There was a lot of big tech news breaking this week, which meant a lot of questions to answer about what happened. That was dominated at the beginning of the week by the story we broke on Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s hot-button ban on working from home for employees, a bid to turn the Silicon Valley Internet giant around quickly.

Also of interest, the launch of the new Pebble Smart Watch and Leap Motion, as well as the ouster of Groupon CEO and co-founder Andrew Mason.

Thus, here’s a rundown of some video appearances that staffers at AllThingsD.com made on a number of topics:

I appeared on “CBS This Morning” for a piece on the funny farewell of fired Groupon leader Mason.

And here’s Walt Mossberg on WSJ’s online video show on the new Pebble Smart Watch, which allows users to check phone notifications and control music without having to pull out an Apple iPhone or Google Android smartphone:

Meanwhile, ATD reviewer Lauren Goode appeared on “Tech News Today” to talk about the launch of the Leap Motion motion-control sensor and more:

Of course, it was the Yahoo work-from-home controversy that was of particular interest to the national media, where the topic blew up like a Roman candle.

Here I am on “CBS This Morning”:

And then on Piers Morgan’s show on CNN:

Finally, there was a very good roundtable on PBS MediaShift’s weekly podcast called “Mediatwits,” which covered the WFH kerfuffle and also the Twitter attack on the unfunny Oscars:

The milestone comes just over a month after Instagram began releasing its active user numbers for the first time, in the wake of widespread rumors that the service was bleeding users. (Those reports stemmed from Instagram’s short kerfuffle over its Terms of Service changes.)

It’s also an impressive growth rate when compared to Instagram’s closest competitor, Twitter. The microblogging service hit the 200 million user mark at the end of last year, though that’s over a six-year time span. Instagram has managed to gain ground at a much faster rate.

“It’s easy to see this as an accomplishment for a company, but I think the truth is that it’s an accomplishment for our community,” said CEO Kevin Systrom in the company’s blog post. “Now, more than ever, people are capturing the world in real-time using Instagram—sharing images from the farthest corners of the globe. What we see as a result is a world more connected and understood through photographs.”

That’s important, considering both platforms seem to be competing for the same space: Consumer interests. Twitter has long dominated the “interest graph,” or the measure of all things people are interested in at individual and interpersonal levels.

But as seen during the past few major events like the Grammys, the Oscars and the like, Instagram is making a serious bid to represent the pulse of a given moment in time, as documented through photos.

Twitter isn’t taking it sitting down. The company has revamped its discover tab and main stream to more heavily emphasize photography and videos. And Twitter’s cards initiative still remains a top priority for sharing previewed content within tweets themselves.

Still, Instagram’s rapid growth curve must give Twitter concern, and perhaps a hint of regret, ever since losing out to Facebook on buying the photo sharing service.

Now, after Facebook spent three quarters of a billion dollars on the app, all Instagram needs to do is monetize. We’re waiting, Mr. Systrom.

Weirdly, though, all of you seemed to keep watching, or at least typing about it. Presumably so you could warn everyone else about how bad it was?

In any case, this is normally the point where I tell everyone who didn’t watch it that they’re both lucky and unlucky. Because Disney, which broadcast the show on ABC, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which produces the show, aren’t making it available online. Which makes no sense, because all anyone wants to do the day after the Oscars is watch clips.

But not this year! For the first time ever, you can watch the entire show via Web replay. It’s on Hulu right now, up through Wednesday. And supposedly it’s going to be available through ABC and or/the official Oscars site, though I can’t find a link on either.

Also as important, ABC and the Academy have clips of the show’s highlights/lowlights, which you can either watch on the Oscars site itself (weirdly, the video clips are labeled “blogs” there), or share with your pals. Even more progressive (or long overdue) was the fact that some of the clips went up when the show was still airing.

Here, for instance, is the “We Saw Your Boobs” number that host Seth MacFarlane opened with, which seemed to upset all of you so much that you had to keep watching for another 3.5 hours.

Content aside (was all of it like that? I really didn’t see.), this is all good, even if it should have happened years ago. Next step will be getting the clips and streams where people will actually see them: Once again, the Oscar’s day-after presence on the world’s biggest video site is a joke. The show’s official YouTube page is a graveyard of old clips you don’t care about, and searching for clips on YouTube gets you none of what you want.*

One day this will get simpler, because it ought to be a no-brainer. Still: It’s 2013, and you don’t have to break the law to watch a day-old TV show. Progress!

And in that spirit, here’s the first 17 minutes of the show — the part where everyone insisted they would stop watching but didn’t.

*The good news for YouTube is that its ContentID program, designed to automate takedowns of stuff copyright owners don’t want up there, has gotten ultra-efficient.

The Cupertino company ran its latest iPad advertisement during Hollywood’s biggest awards show on Sunday evening, a cutesy, film-themed homage to its latest generations of the iPad.

Worth noting: This isn’t Apple’s first red-carpet appearance. The company has been running iPad ads since Oscar night 2010, where Steve Jobs himself showed up at the awards ceremony.

Enjoy:

But there may not be much celebrating at the El Segundo, Calif., offices of Rhythm & Hues Studios Inc., the 26-year-old company that served as lead effects producer for the film. On Feb. 13, just eight days after “Pi” won four prizes at the annual Visual Effects Society Awards, Rhythm & Hues filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The same week it laid off 254 of its 718 employees in the Los Angeles area, according to court documents.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The post was both effective — it showed up high on Google searches, which is the reason Huffpo created it — and symbolic of Huffpo’s traffic strategy — which was either craven or clear-minded, depending on your perspective.

Now that kind of Google-baiting is old hat. Even for august newspapers with 41 Pulitzers. Here’s what the same query for today’s Oscars looks like today:

Say this for the Los Angeles Times piece — it delivers the goods, for both humans and Google’s robots. Here’s the keyword-filled top:

The 85th Academy Award nominees and winners have been chosen, the red carpet has been rolled out and the gilded Oscar statues have been polished. But what time is the show again?

The 2013 Oscars ceremony honoring the films of 2012 is set to take place Sunday at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood. The pre-show broadcast will begin on ABC with red carpet arrivals at 4 p.m. PST (7 p.m. EST) and will be hosted by Lara Spencer, Jess Cagle, Kristin Chenoweth and Kelly Rowland.

The awards show will start at 5:30 p.m. PST (8:30 p.m. EST) and is scheduled to last three hours. It will be hosted by “Family Guy” and “Ted” star Seth MacFarlane and televised live in more than 225 countries.

And Google is presumably extra pleased that the story’s author, reporter/Web producer Nardine Saad, is a diligent Google+ contributor who has posted more than 30 LAT links so far this month.*

What’s that? You still find this sort of thing disheartening, even if it gives readers what they want and delivers some clicks to a newspaper that can use them? Well, you’re not alone. Here’s a gut reaction from New York Times editor Patrick LaForge:

Sad. RT @harrisj: LA Times starts the SEO battle for tomorrow bit.ly/15Fnmh4

— Patrick LaForge, NYT (@palafo) February 24, 2013

But you’re probably going to be in an ever-shrinking minority, says Raju Narisetti, who heads up The Wall Street Journal digital network (the Dow Jones digital umbrella which includes this Web site).

A (good) lasting lesson @huffingtonpost taught big newsrooms MT @harrisj: @latimes starts SEO battle for tomorrow twitter.com/harrisj/status…”

— Raju Narisetti (@rajunarisetti) February 24, 2013

And yes, even people like yours truly try to engage Google (and Facebook, and Twitter, and anyone that will increase the number of eyeballs on my stuff). AllThingsD’s publishing system, for instance, allows us to create “SEO heds” — headlines created with Google’s automatons in mind.

And if you know how to find the one I’ve created for this post, you’ll be able to figure out what time to watch the Oscars tonight. Enjoy!

* Conventional wisdom among Google-watchers is that even if no one reads anything you post on Google+, the search engine will reward active users with Google juice in search results. So get posting!

As the president of Walt Disney Animation Studios and Pixar Animation Studios, the five-time Oscar-winner has overseen such hits as “Toy Story,” “Cars” and “Up.” Disney/Pixar’s next film, “Brave,” which is coming out soon, is also highly anticipated.

So how does he do it?

“I read a lot of business books,” Catmull said. “Most of them were true, but content-free.”

What he means by that is that executives are some of the last people to know exactly what is going on inside of an organization and, by default, organizations have a hard time being honest with themselves.

“The things going on are not visible to the people doing them,” Catmull said. “They are happening here and now at Pixar, and I can’t see them.”

Because of the difficulty in seeing one’s own flaws, he says they have to push to create an open and honest working environment. “We wrestle with hard problems, and shut things down when they don’t work.”

As an example, he said they’ve canned at least one major project, which he declined to disclose, and said that certain movies, such as “Toy Story 2,” required a serious rewrite in order for audiences to love it.

His other piece of advice to the D10 audience had to do with recognizing when you have an overreliance on technology.

“Our goal is to make a good movie; for a lot of people the goal is on the technology. The technology is not the goal. It is to create a good movie, and there’s something about the infusion of technology into the artistic process that enhances both.”

Full D10 Conference Coverage

The Artist people were in line in front of me and now I smell like cigarettes and entitlement.

– Kaui Hart Hemmings, author of “The Descendants,” tweeting about her Academy Awards experience. The film adaptation of her book was shut out of the Oscar race, while “The Artist” was the big winner of the night.

Yes. But not that many people.

Social TV tracker Bluefin Labs counted 3.44 million “social comments” about last night’s Oscar awards. That metric, which primarily tracks Twitter usage but also includes some data from Facebook and other services, is certainly big. But it’s much smaller than two other big live-TV events this month. Bluefin counted some 12 million comments for the Super Bowl, and 13 million for the Grammys.

And the comment volume for those two events showed much more year-over-year growth than the Oscars, too. Bluefin says Oscar Tweets were up more than 250 percent this year, compared to a crazy 2,300 percent bump for the Grammys and 580 percent for the Super Bowl.

That might seem a little odd to someone like, um, me, whose Sunday evening Twitter feed seemed to be clogged exclusively with people live-tweeting the same broadcast. (Which, really — love you guys, but I could do without.)

So this ends up being a very healthy reminder that different people use Twitter for different things. Hard to remember that sometimes, because the medium so closely mimics a traditional broadcast system, with its one-to-many structure (even if CEO Dick Costolo insists it’s not a media company). But on Twitter, there are a whole lot more broadcasters out there, and not all of them go freaking nuts about the Oscars, and that’s not a bad thing at all.

(Photo courtesy of Academy Award official site)

Many of those folks work at Trendrr, one of several start-ups trying to make a go of the “social TV” boom. A dozen of the company’s 20 employees will spend the day monitoring the broadcast, as well as the red carpet run-up to the show and the post-event recaps.

But Trendrr did its heaviest lifting last week, when it had to figure out exactly how it was going to track Twitter’s Oscar conversation. (Like its peers, Trendrr also keeps tabs on Facebook and other social outfits, but Twitter provides it with the most complete data stream.)

Some of you will go out of your way to help Trendrr and its competitors, like Bluefin and Socialguide, by explicitly labeling your Oscar tweets via hashtags like “#oscars.”

But many of you may simply type something about “The Descendants” at some point during ABC’s broadcast. And some of you may leave out the space between the two words, or the “The” altogether. How to account for all of that?

A combination of art and science, says Trendrr CEO Mark Ghuneim. His team spent the week going through the list of award categories and nominees that will be televised, as well as any presenters expected to be on stage, etc.

That yielded around 200 search terms that his computers will use to search the Twitter stream. And each search term will contain multiple queries — not just “The Artist,” for instance, but “TheArtist.” (You can see some of the list, pictured left.)

Some of the other stuff is trickier to account for, and Trendrr will need to make some decisions about some of the tweets on the fly. If it sees a spike in tweets about “Drive,” for instance, it will need to figure out if people are talking about tooling around in a Toyota, or a sound-editing award.

All of which make for interesting data points after the event, some of which I’ll happy to write up here. (Spoiler alert: Just like the Super Bowl and the Grammys, the Oscars will generate a big year-over-year increase in Twitter activity.)

The long-term question is what kind of value all of this data will provide for programmers and advertisers.

Even if it turns out that Twitter (and Facebook, and every other social service) is directing more eyeballs toward TV — a narrative that pleases both the old- and new-media folks — how is it helpful to know that “George Clooney” was a popular term on Twitter last night?

“This is a swarm event,” Ghuneim says. “And when you have a swarm event, that’s when the action is most actionable.”

That sounds smart, though I’m a little skeptical that the ad world is anything close to nimble enough to do a lot with the data right now. Still, lots of marketing folks seem interested in this stuff in the present tense — if you visit Interpublic Group’s Media Lab, for instance, you’ll see Trendrr data displayed prominently. And always better to have more data than less, right?

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to finish my preshow Melissa McCarthy appreciation exercises.

*If I had to bet, I’d go along with the conventional wisdom that gives “The Artist” an armful of statues. And if you haven’t seen it, I’d say this: It’s fun! You should go! But if you don’t see it in a theater, and end up watching at home, you’re going to be underwhelmed. Can’t watch this one with a remote or an iPhone in your hand.

The winners for the 15th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards are decided on by members of the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences. (Just like the Oscars are voted on by members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.)

The ceremony covers mostly hardcore genres across console and PC, including action games, massive multiplayer games, adventure games and more. It also has categories for casual, mobile and social. (Update: See a list of some winners at the end of this post.)

The event is taking place in Las Vegas at the Red Rock Resort, a swank location way off the Strip, where industry leaders gather annually as part of the games conference called DICE.

DICE, which stands for Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain, is a three-day summit featuring a number of talks by bigwigs from game studios like Bethesda Softworks, which published The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham City, which were both wildly successful over Christmas.

Because the show is far off the Strip and only has a few hundred attendees, it allows people to speak intimately about recent trends and key issues facing the industry. They even get to pat each other on the back; this morning, one grown man got on stage and bowed in front of some of the original game developers who worked at Atari back in the 80s.

The event tonight will be hosted by actor and stand-up comedian Jay Mohr, a former cast member on “Saturday Night Live” and self-described games enthusiast, who is known for roasting some of the industry celebrities being recognized.

The ceremony kicks off at 7:30 pm PT. To follow along, GameSpot will air a live Webcast of the IAAs here.

Update: Here are the winners from some of the major categories:

• Game of the Year: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Bethesda Softworks
• Action Game: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Activision
• Online Game Play: Star Wars: The Old Republic, Electronic Arts
• Mobile Game: Infinity Blade II, Epic Games
• Sports Game: FIFA 12, Electronic Arts
• Social Networking: The Sims Social, Electronic Arts
• Casual Game: Fruit Ninja Kinect, Halfbrick Studios

Which is why this pitch-perfect impression, from “The Soup,” of Richards rating the Oscars — nominations for the annual movie awards were just announced — is even better, if possible.

On “War Horse,” for example: “There was war. And there was a horse.”

Exactly:

In fact, Bartz practically sounded like a gushy “Entertainment Tonight” flunky when talking to Wall Street analysts about Yahoo’s Oscar news, games and other offerings. She proudly noted the site’s efforts generated more than a billion pages views.

There will be more of that, it seems, with the elevation of Yahoo exec Sam Silverstein (pictured here) as head of its special events coverage. Sources said it will be a major area of emphasis, given obvious advertiser interest.

It’s all part of a lot of dramatic changes being made in the media unit at Yahoo, which is run by its newish Audience head Mickie Rosen.

Previous to his new duties, Silverstein has been mostly focused on major sports events for Yahoo, but has also been managing content on its front page and in tech and green arenas.

The move to taking over more comes after Lawrence Yee–who led Yahoo entertainment efforts and was once the managing editor of its omg! celebrity site–headed to TMZ.com, the competing and much sassier celebrity site, owned by AOL. His new job is as managing editor of its TooFab site, TMZ overlord Harvey Levin confirmed to me.

Also gone recently is Annette Cardwell, who was managing editor of Yahoo’s Shine women’s site, who is now working as director of digital content and games at Future US, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Now it will be up to Silverstein, who is well-regarded at Yahoo, to run the upcoming Royal Wedding coverage by himself.

William and Kate, as well as Bartz, will be watching.

MicroHoo is funky!

At least according to Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz on the Silicon Valley search giant’s first-quarter earnings conference call about its recent financial performance.

Yahoo’s results showed a continued worrisome revenue growth stall, due in large part to a search advertising fall-off, and a still-turning turnaround.

Yahoo reported revenues of $1.06 billion, down six percent from a year ago, on net earnings of 17 cents a share, down 28 percent.

The results were essentially in line with Wall Street expectations.

2:03 pm PT: The call started right on time, as per usual. Maybe they can’t get search right anymore, but Yahoo execs sure know how to start an analysts’ confab.

Bartz started off the call, noting “overall, our turnaround is proceeding on schedule.”

Well, the schedule of a three-toed sloth, I suppose, but it’s on schedule!

Bartz is too smart, though, and quickly noted the problems with search revenue declines, related to its search and online advertising partnership with Microsoft.

Still, she then used the unusual term “funky comparisons” to dismiss the key issue.

But isn’t she the one who struck the funky deal with Microsoft that has resulted in these funky comparisons and these even funkier search advertising revenues?

Just askin’!

Bartz proceeded quickly to noting Yahoo’s advances due to technology improvements, which showed a doubling of impressions to big events such as the Super Bowl and the Oscars.

It’s a good point, since Yahoo–for all its troubles–is still a huge traffic driver, including serving up 1.3 billion page views for the Oscars.

Bartz talked about monetization and said a lot of other stuff, but got to the finances quickly.

“Search was a mixed bag,” she said flatly. You can say that again–but not in a good way.

Bartz tried to put a good-news spin on it, but had to admit that “on the downside [Microsoft's] adCenter is not seeing strong RPS,” she said.

That’s revenue per search and a key number that Yahoo had thought would be better by now.

Bartz noted that the paid search markets internationally will be delayed until MicroHoo gets its act together.

Good idea!

2:16 pm: CFO Tim Morse took over to go through the numbers.

“We had good display momentum around the globe,” he said.

But search was, um, bad. It underperformed, but Yahoo had that guarantee from Microsoft to pay out, which Morse called a “financial floor.”

Morse pretty much read the press release from here on out.

2:24 pm: Bartz was back talking up the huge audience Yahoo has abroad. And it is true–the Yahoo brand is a golden one globally.

Also video consumption is up too, as it is across the Web, in terms of views and time spent. Yahoo’s “Primetime in No Time” got 500 million streams in the quarter.

Bartz turned to mobile, which is weak no matter what she said about the laudable Livestand. It’s one of many in a very competitive market.

Same for social, which Yahoo has essentially abdicated to Facebook. That said, Yahoo has tried to weave social within its myriad of sites and it gets it, especially compared to the socially awkward Google.

Bartz summed up that she hoped everyone gets that profitability and revenue growth were on track to get better, promising more at the investor day in May.

2:30 pm: Q&A time!

The first question is about display growth. It’s a softball, since display was up.

The next is about other revenue growth areas to come.

Bartz–who seemed not so prepped for such an obvious question–ticked off shopping, travel and uuuuuh….

Morse jumped in and talked about making internal connections, which I also did not understand.

An analyst then wanted to “dig into” search problems. I’d say it’s time to call in Mike Mulligan and his steam shovel!

Relative to RPS, Bartz acknowledged it was low and everyone was studying the issue. There is a plan, apparently. Again, Bartz was maddeningly vague.

I missed the next question and then it was back to search.

Bartz was not getting too specific about search, but would say video advertising was going to do well.

She did note that Yahoo expected a dip in Q1 related to search revenue, “but the dip went a little lower than we expected and lasted a little longer than expected.”

Bartz said she had recently sat down with Microsoft execs to go over the problems. How much would I have liked to have been a fly on that wall!

The next question was about video and it turns out Bartz loves the babbling babies too! I knew we had something cool in common.

The next question is about Japan and the possible deal to sell off Yahoo’s ownership of Yahoo Japan!

Morse said diddly, except “we continue to make progress.”

A question about display and possible content verticals.

Verticals Yahoo is interested in, according to Bartz: Entertainment, lifestyle, women, gossip.

“The things people really want to do, they want to disappear,” said Bartz, which was an interesting way of putting it.

Yet another question in what was beginning to feel like an endless call.

It was about Right Media, Yahoo’s advertising exchange. Cleaning it up, etc.

The next question is about communications, as in email.

Bartz even sounded bored and messed up a few words. “I’ve had too many Diet Cokes,” she joked.

Personally, I am considering disappearing into some content, since there is yet another question.

It’s–no surprise–an RPS question!

Funky!

Search guarantee payments from Microsoft are in place for another four quarters. Thank goodness.

Bartz got more detailed about the problems. There is some kind of prediction issue, which she said Microsoft is working on.

Now a local advertising question and its relationship with Facebook.

Bartz grabbed this one by the horns, noting you don’t have to run to the social networking powerhouse to get you a social ad!

It’s about branding with a social component. Which would be, um, Facebook, which was part of Yahoo’s Chrysler campaign referenced by Bartz.

A question about daily deals.

It’s growing, but more at Groupon and LivingSocial, which Morse does not mention.

Finally, the last question.

Another gigantic softball on engagement and Yahoo’s new content platform and some mobile deets query about whether Yahoo can make it there.

Bartz said she was working on it. As to content, Bartz said stats show big lifts.

“The good news is that it’s all in the right direction,” she said.

Up would certainly be good.

On Sunday, BoomTown tossed my mohawked dog Phineas in the Mini and motored up to lovely Petaluma to appear live and in studio on Leo Laporte’s fine “This Week in Tech” online show.

It was a week full of news–from the about-to-launch Apple iPad to Google taking aim at content farms to the Oscars.

Which is why I wore my Ray-Bans, so stop asking.

The title of this week’s show was due to a story I told about an unfortunate parenting Web snafu I had just experienced when I let my almost nine-year-old son check out Katy Perry’s music video for “California Gurls.”

Let’s just say, I had no idea a whipped-cream bra could exist.

Here’s the video of me, Laporte, as well as Om Malik and Iyaz Akhtar:

The movie won prizes for best film editing, best original score and best adapted screenplay. But its honorees spent their speeches complimenting each other rather than playing homage to their inspiration in Palo Alto. And no Winklevii appeared in person, despite how good the litigious twins might have looked in tuxes.

“The Social Network” had also been nominated for best actor (Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg), best cinematography, best director (David Fincher) and best sound mixing.

“The King’s Speech” was the big winner of the night, taking four Academy Awards, including best picture.

Fans can tweet and Facebook post their way into the pre-show ABC red-carpet coverage by asking questions of @TheAcademy on Twitter or going to the TheAcademy Facebook page. A start-up called Mass Relevance is helping filter the questions for hosts Robin Roberts, Tim Gunn, Krista Smith and Maria Menounos.

(Facebook itself, which often hosts its own red carpet live chats for similar events, will not have a company presence at the Oscars.)

The official ABC Oscar Backstage Pass app for Apple devices costs $0.99 and gives viewers additional live camera angles from the red carpet, backstage and the after party. For $4.99 you can get additional content on the Web, like a “360 cam” to assess attendees’ ball gowns and tuxes from all angles.

E!’s Live From the Red Carpet for iPhone and Android carries the network’s coverage of special events like the Academy Awards.

If you want to remind yourself of all the contenders, YouTube has compiled the trailers here. The most-watched best picture nominee trailer was “Toy Story 3,” with 15 million views.

If you need some virtual validation on Sunday evening, check-in to receive stickers from GetGlue for tuning into E!, Oscars.com and Jimmy Kimmel Live.

Jimmy Kimmel is also releasing one of his celeb-studded made-to-go-viral videos on his post-Oscars episode. Here’s a preview of “Hottie Body Humpilates”:

This time, unlike the one that aired right before the Super Bowl kick-off, LivingSocial is focusing more on the deals themselves.

In the Super Bowl, it used the tagline “LivingSocial changed my life,” and had a strange storyline that featured a gruff-looking man who turns into a cross-dresser.

The two new spots are a little more on point.

For example, in “We’ll set the stage, you play the part,” a man and a women perform a number of quick costume changes as they transition through a number of scenes, ranging from a restaurant (55 percent off fine dining), to a hair salon (72 percent off) to a dance floor (where they save 62 percent on tango lessons). For the finale, the curtain closes and the announcer says, “Sign up for free to get daily deals at LivingSocial.com.”

The Super Bowl commercials for both LivingSocial and Groupon demonstrated how difficult it is to portray this somewhat new concept of offering a voucher for a heavily discounted service.

Even so, LivingSocial’s commercial might be a little misleading since it uses “free” in the tagline. As any regular participant of LivingSocial or Groupon would know, you have to pay for the voucher in advance if you want the deal. (But it may not be so obvious to a newbie).

While LivingSocial’s Super Bowl ad fell flat, Groupon fell on even tougher luck with its series of three advertisements, which viewers revolted against and called insensitive.

The one that got the most feedback was a 30-second clip featuring Timothy Hutton that said while Tibetan culture is in jeopardy, “they still whip up an amazing fish curry, and since 200 of us bought at Groupon.com, we’re each getting $30 worth of Tibetan food for just $15.”

Groupon initially offered to retract that one, but ended up having to apologize and yank all three. The company tried explaining that it was raising money for those causes, but the connection was lost on viewers.

LivingSocial’s new commercial can be found on the company’s Web site. It’s also embedded below. Mashable reports that the new campaign, which will kick off Sunday, was created by the Martin Agency.

Enough said.

Enjoy:

Because Stern has spent the afternoon delivering a scene-by-scene, Tweet-by-Tweet, DVD-style commentary while the movie has been playing on Time Warner’s HBO. It’s an incredibly simple idea, and a surprisingly compelling one: I gave in about 30 minutes ago and have had a hard time doing anything else since.

And while the movie will have ended by the time you read this, my hunch is you’ll be hearing about it for some time.

That’s because the idea of using Twitter to augment TV–particularly live TV–is something that Twitter’s executives have been actively promoting for some time now. Both because people are already doing it on their own, and because they think it will help them capture some of the huge TV ad marketplace, which still dwarves online.

“It’s taken the DVR out of the equation again,” Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said last month. “People feel like they have to watch the show, while it’s going on.”

And Twitter ad sales boss Adam Bain used today’s (spontaneous?) Stern seminar to expand on that message, and  hand out instructions to the TV business.

And I think he’s sort of right. I’m very happy to Twitter away, and read responses, during a certain kind of TV show. Such as a live event like the Oscars–one that I sort of care about, but not so much that I can’t look away for a few minutes.

But I’ve got no interest in twittering during “Justified,” because I really, really like that show. And there aren’t many celebrities whose tweets can get me to watch a show I don’t like.

Still, as I type this, I’m half-watching the last few minutes of a 14-year-old movie I haven’t thought about for a long time. So maybe the Twitter folks are on to something….

The movie was nominated for best picture, while Jesse Eisenberg was nominated for best actor for his portrayal of Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, David Fincher for best director and Aaron Sorkin for adapted screenplay.

We probably won’t be seeing the famously underdressed Zuckerberg in a tux anytime soon. Given the film was unauthorized and took liberties with all-too-recent history, it’s highly unlikely he would attend the awards show. But Zuckerberg has had more of a sense of humor about the movie than might be expected–he rented out a local theater so he and his staff could watch the film on opening day, and has said in interviews that the creators did get his hoodies and T-shirts right, if nothing else.

“The Social Network” was also picked as a finalist for the Academy Award in cinematography, film editing, original score and sound mixing.

But it wasn’t the most-lauded film of the morning. “The King’s Speech” had 12 Oscar nominations and “True Grit” had 10.

“The Social Network” has already won Golden Globes for best picture (drama), best director, best screenplay and best original score, as well as a pile of film critics’ awards.