The latest entry into the list of companies with a “spine” is tiny Sonic.net Inc., a Santa Rosa, Calif.-based Internet provider with about 36,000 customers. Sonic not only fought a secret court order for information from WikiLeaks supporter Jacob Appelbaum, but also spoke out about it.

So, who are these Sonic guys?

Sonic was founded in 1994 by Dane Jasper and Scott Doty when they were computer science students at Santa Rosa Junior College. They had been running the campus student e-mail service, and eventually decided to drop out of college to try to build a business offering Internet access accounts for $2 a month, according to the company’s corporate history.

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The following is the statement in full by Mr. Hogan’s attorney, Jeffrey Bornstein of K&L Gates LLP in San Francisco. Mr. Hogan’s identity was earlier reported by Wired.com.

We represent a 21 year-old young man, Brian Hogan, who has never been in trouble with the law. Brian was in a bar with friends when another bar patron handed him the phone after finding it on a bar stool near the area where Brian was sitting. Brian said the phone was not his but the bar patron walked away from the conversation and left the bar. Brian asked others near him if the phone belonged to them. When
they disclaimed ownership, Brian and his friends left the bar with the phone.

Brian opened the phone onto a Facebook page but then the phone shut down. From that time on, the phone was inoperable the entire time Brian had it. He regrets his mistake in not doing more to return the phone.

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Plans for the move were first reported yesterday by the New York Observer.

The swap is really a testament to the power of Google (GOOG) and the long-tail theory: Even though Condé had been running Portfolio.com with a skeleton crew since the beginning of the year, the site was still generating four to five million page views a month, primarily because of search queries, says Condé Nast Group President David Carey. So that alone made Portfolio.com worth saving.

It will now serve as the central hub for ACBJ, a collection of 40 local business publications (including one I used to work for many moons ago). But it won’t just be an aggregator, insists ACBJ President Tim Bradbury. He intends to rebuild the site’s staff–he’s keeping two of the last Portfolio.com employees and intends to launch with a full-time editorial staff of five, plus freelancers–and pump out new content.

Bradbury says he’d “like to get the old band back together,” but I’m not sure exactly what that means. In the last few months of Portfolio.com’s life, the site was essentially a blogging platform for the excellent duo of Felix Salmon, who covered finance, and Jeff Bercovici, who covered media. But Salmon jumped ship for Reuters prior to the shutdown, so he’s presumably locked up. No word on Bercovici’s plans. But even if Bradbury can’t get those two back on board, I’m guessing there’s no shortage of applicants for full-time and contract slots.

Here’s the release:

New York, NY, May 20, 2009 – Portfolio.com will become part of the American City Business Journal’s bizjournals.com effective in July, it was announced today by Tim Bradbury, President, American City Business Journals, New Media, (ACBJ) and David Carey, Group President, Condé Nast. ACBJ and Condé Nast are units of Advance Publications.

Bizjournals.com will oversee both the editorial and business sides of the site. The Portfolio.com editorial team and sales staff will be based in New York. In addition to newly created content, the site will share content with other Condé Nast sites including Wired.com, GolfDigest.com, and WWD.com, as it did previously. The site will also be the home of the archives of all the popular content published by Portfolio’s print and digital properties over the last two years.

“We are excited about continuing Portfolio.com and including the site in the bizjournals network because we were impressed by Portfolio’s strong web presence, its clean and crisp design, and its voice in the business journalism marketplace,” Tim Bradbury, President, American City Business Journals, New Media said. “We believe our readers will benefit as the re-launched Portfolio.com will have a stronger focus on industry news and a greater mission to offer information relevant to today’s business professionals.”

On top of its existing strengths, Portfolio.com will be able to leverage the collaborative skills and insights of the more than 600 ACBJ business journalists around the country. The site now will have access to local market intelligence and work collaboratively with ACBJ newsrooms across the country, presenting the most important local insights through a national lens and making it unique among national business media.

“We knew that Portfolio.com was a highly valuable asset, with an established digital brand, strong direct navigation by users, and a solid long tail of traffic from content published over the past two years,” David Carey, Group President, Condé Nast said. “We saw ACBJ as a perfect match due to its great editorial resources in the business arena, and view this as a win for both Portfolio.com’s readers and the company.”

Condé Nast Portfolio magazine and its website Portfolio.com, launched in April 2007 and the magazine closed in April 2009. The site provided insight into the day’s top business stories, with analysis from bloggers and columnists. During those two years Portfolio.com grew to 2.8 million monthly uniques and won industry praise with awards such as the MIN:  Best of Web 2008, MIN: Hottest Launch of the Year 2007, WebAward: Outstanding Achievement in Website Development 2007, and Webby nominees in Best Business blog and Financial Services categories.

Massa says he will introduce a bill that will prevent Time Warner, along with other pipe providers like Comcast (CMCSA) and AT&T (T), from introducing usage “caps” on their Internet services. Wired.com:

“In a conference call with reporters Tuesday, Massa [described] TWC as a greedy, unregulated monopoly providing a utility service. His yet-to-be released bill would seek to increase competition among broadband providers and regulate monopolies, he said, though he declined to give specifics.

‘They are providing a utility and frankly you should not be able to impose cascading rate increases without justifying them,’ Massa said. ‘What Time Warner is saying is not true and their own SEC filings show that. This is AIG-style greed.’”

There’s no reason to think Massa’s bill will get any traction, at least until we hear from more established players in Congress who have more traction. But it continues to underscore the tricky task in front of the pipe guys: Now that they’ve trained customers to eat as much bandwidth as they want, it’s going to be hard to start charging by the byte.

Give Time Warner Cable credit for trying to tackle this by pitching the tiered offerings as a way for some customers to save money. In theory, some of its subscribers could see their bandwidth bills drop to $15 a month, the company says. But this is a PR battle that’s just starting up.

Sell ads that look exactly like the content itself.

That’s the strategy that Condé Nast is taking–cautiously–with Reddit, the Digg-like news aggregator it bought a couple of years ago. And it might be working.

So says Josh Stinchcomb, who runs sales and marketing for the “business” group of Condé’s digital properties, which also includes Wired.com, Ars Technica, and Web sites for the likes of The New Yorker and Portfolio. About three months ago, Stinchcomb began running ads that look exactly like the story headlines Reddit users submit and vote on.

The only difference: They sit at the top of the site’s homepage and carry a “sponsored link” tag. Like this (click to enlarge):

The results have made Condé “cautiously optimistic,” says Stinchcomb. You can measure that two ways: Click-through rates for the ads are running at about five percent, which is several times more than the industry average. And readers haven’t revolted.

The latter is a real possibility at a site like Reddit, whose users are fiercely protective of the community they’ve built, and antagonistic toward advertising in general. Stinchcomb says about 20 percent of Reddit’s users have installed ad-blocking software on their Web browsers.

If Condé keeps using the ads–they’ve run them from three sponsors so far and are tinkering with a self-service version that would allow marketers to submit ads on their own–it won’t create a torrent of cash. Right now the ads are priced at a $7 CPM (that’s $7 for every 1,000 eyeballs Condé gets in front of the ads), and Stinchcomb says he’ll probably have to knock that rate down. (He says he may also consider changing ad pricing to a cost-per-click/performance model, which would be a first for Condé).

But even a little bit of money would be a plus for Reddit, which has remained more or less a revenue-free property for Condé, even though traffic has shot up since the acquisition. Stinchcomb says Reddit now attracts five million uniques visitors a month, up from 1.5 million when the publisher bought the site (per usual, third-party traffic meausurements are much smaller).

Just as important, if it works for Reddit, it could have big implications for Digg, which has a significantly bigger audience, but faces the same problems selling ads.

Digg has raised $40 million so far, at a very high valuation, but revenues have been paltry. The site is reportedly planning to start selling ads that will look and feel a lot like the ones Reddit is already trying. High time to start experimenting.

[Note to Techmeme's Gabe Rivera: Yup, you have sponsored content, too. In fact, we've seen versions of this model for as long as we've had mass media. I think this iteration is particularly interesting, though.]

Since everyone wants to weigh in on the state of online music service, imeem, let me add in my two cents: The once-buzzy start-up isn’t on life support yet. But it sure could use some help–just like every other Web music player.

I can confirm that the company has sought, and received, new terms from some of the big music labels, most notably Universal Music Group. One big label that hasn’t given imeem any concessions yet: Warner Music Group (WMG), which owns an equity stake in the company.

Wired.com has a nice summary of the reason imeem needs new terms from the labels. But the short version is that the original deals it had in place meant it lost money every time someone played a song. And that the more popular it got, the more it lost.

That kind of business plan isn’t out of the ordinary for Web companies that struck deals with the big music labels–even Google’s (GOOG) YouTube has a similar kind of arrangement. But those deals, which were supposed to make sense once the online advertising business kicked into gear, are also obviously no longer sustainable.

The big picture: imeem went looking for buyers last fall–at the same time that its venture investor Sequoia Capital began lecturing start-ups about the need to cut costs–and hasn’t found any.

That puts Imeem in the same boat as every other notable online music service, including iLike and Pandora, all of which have been looking for money or an acquirer during the last six months.

One of them–Spiralfrog–finally shut down earlier this month. And if the other start-ups can’t get the labels to cut them some deals, Spiralfrog will have company.

Hulu has expanded its content library considerably since its launch a year ago. The Internet video site has grown from 50 content partners to more than 130 and has nearly 40,000 pieces of video.

Now, in addition to the full-length TV shows that made the site popular, it has an expansive, somewhat chaotic library. The site contains everything from two-hour feature films such as Universal’s “Liar, Liar,” starring Jim Carrey, to short instructional Web videos such as “How to Make Stuffed Crust Pizza.”

Andy Forssell, Hulu’s senior vice president of content and distribution, says the goal is to provide users and advertisers with more options. Hulu is a joint venture of General Electric’s (GE) NBC Universal and News Corp., (NWS) which owns Wall Street Journal (and AllThingsD.com) publisher Dow Jones.

Among the newest content partners is Condé Nast Publications Inc., the people behind magazines like Vogue and Wired. Videos from the company’s online destinations, such as Epicurious.com, a site for food aficionados, are now appearing on Hulu. They’ve added content from four sites: Epicurious, Wired.com, Style.com and Men.Style.com.

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The company plans on announcing the details of the reorg tomorrow, but here’s the most important one: The reshuffling won’t result in any layoffs, a person familiar with the situation tells me.

That’s nice for Condé’s employees, who already went through cuts last fall. But it’s also puzzling: If merging all of Condé’s Web operations into one group doesn’t eliminate a single redundancy, then what does it do?

Perhaps not that much. AdAge’s Nat Ives, whom Condé briefed on the move, explains the upshot:

Some things also stay the same. Condé Nast Digital will handle day-to-day contact with digital advertisers, but the Condé Nast Media Group retains the lead on most relationships. The magazines’ high-powered publishers aren’t getting any new incentives to sell digital. And everyone remembers that print still brings in almost all the revenue; digital absorbed at least its fair share of staff cuts that concluded 2008.

But Condé Nast executives point to the recession to explain why it’s finally found religion. ‘This economic experience that we are going through has sobered us up considerably,’ [Condé Nast CEO Charles] Townsend said. ‘To get back to double-digit growth, we have to put our digital assets to work hard. I am hoping that the print business will recover to double-digit growth, but I am convinced that the digital business will grow exponentially.’”

The problem here is that unlike Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc, Condé only has a few properties, liked Wired.com, that have enough scale to attract digital advertisers. Most of the ones associated with magazine titles, like Gourmet.com, VanityFair.com, etc., are simply too small to register.

And as long as Condé remains a magazine publisher that happens to have some Web properties, it’s hard to see how that will change.

Here’s the deal: If you work at a media company that hasn’t had layoffs recently, just go ahead and assume they’re coming.

This afternoon’s installment–CondéNet, which manages some, but not all, of media giant Condé Nast’s Web operations, is cutting staff “across the board.”

Which means not just cuts at Wired.com, as Alley Insider reported earlier this afternoon, but also sites like Epicurious and Style.com.

The company wouldn’t announce how many people are being let go.

But here is the official statement, from a CondéNet spokesperson:

Visibility for 2009 is very limited and we are adjusting all costs to prepare for slower revenue growth. The adjustments are across the board and include staff restructuring and some reduction. Despite the current environment, CondéNet will end the year slightly up over 2007. These moves will put the company in a stronger position to handle a challenging year ahead and for the business to benefit when the economy and the ad market start to rebound.”

This follows cuts at Condé Nast’s print titles last month, so it’s not that much of a shock.

A person familiar with the situation tells me that the CondéNet took longer to make its cuts because it hadn’t gotten a grip on 2008 sales and 2009 projections.

Now it has: The unit won’t hit its internal goal of 35 percent revenue growth for 2008, but should still “outperform the market,” I’m told. What I’m not told–whether that means the broader market for Web ads and display ads only.

Next year, the CondéNet group, run by Sarah Chubb (pictured above) expects a “modest” increase in revenue–likely something in high single or low double-digits.

As always, I’m happy to update my posts as I learn more. If you’ve got information on specific titles or people cut, please drop me a line. As always, I keep all correspondence anonymous: peter@allthingsd.com.