Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:
New York Times: November Was So Terrible, Even Our Internet Ads Were Down  —  Earlier this month, executives at the New York Times (NYT) warned investors that they had a miserable November.  They weren’t kidding.  —  The grim details are here, but I’ll save you some time:

Ezra Klein / American Prospect:
THERE IS NOTHING ANYONE CAN DO ABOUT IT.  —  Over at BoingBoing, Clay Shirky engages in a bit of self-congratulatory schadenfreude for predicting the collapse of the newspaper business model back in 1993.  And no doubt: He was prescient.  But like a lot of folks (many of them named Jeff […]

Monica Chen / DigiTimes:
Intel insists Atom only for Intel chipsets, does not want to share Nvidia’s Ion  —  Nvidia’s recent move to try to extend Intel’s Atom ecosystem to its recently announced Ion platform appears to have been knocked back by Intel, according to a response primarily directed at PC manufacturers as seen by […]

Sean Fallon / Gizmodo:
9 Year Old Girl Becomes the Youngest Microsoft Certified Professional  —  Today’s crushing blow to our self confidence comes to us from India, where a 9 year old girl has become the youngest person to ever pass a Microsoft Certified Professional examination.

Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Adult FriendFinder Files To Go Public  —  Florida-based FriendFinder Networks (formerly Penthouse Media Group), a group of sites that includes Penthouse and Adult FriendFinder, has filed a registration statement with the SEC to go public.  —  Little known Russian investment bank Renaissance Capital is representing them in the deal.

Ashlee Vance / Bits:
Dell’s MacBook Air Rival Confirmed by . . . Dell  —  CLARIFICATION 5:55 p.m. - The story below references a Dell ad placed in UptownLife magazine.  The online version of that ad, which has since been removed, appeared to include both an image from Dell and text.

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:
Facebook Bails on Project Playlist, Too  —  Four days after MySpace cut the legs out from under Project Playlist by disabling the music streaming service’s app, Facebook is following suit.  Here’s the official statement from Facebook PR: … The only surprise here is that it took Facebook …

MG Siegler / VentureBeat:
iPhone fart app pulls in nearly $10,000 a day  —  Apple’s App Store is currently experiencing a plague of fart applications.  Last week, I detailed one day in which at least 14 new fart apps were accepted into the store.  And now, just in a quick search, it looks like there […]

David / weblog.rubyonrails.org:
Merb gets merged into Rails 3!  —  It’s christmas, baby, and do we have a present for you.  We’re ending the bickering between Merb and Rails with a this bombshell: Merb is being merged into Rails 3!  —  We all realized that working together for a common good would be much more […]