On tonight's Countdown, Keith Olbermann welcomed CNET's Caroline McCarthy to talk about the new Google-Verizon "deal with the devil" that may end net neutrality as we know it. As you might have guessed, Keith isn't a fan of the possibility.

Once worth $354 million, Halsey Minor now owes California $13 million in back taxes. The high-living CNET founder says his money was improperly frozen by creditors, which we could believe, if it wasn't such an old excuse. [Pic]

Halsey Minor's failed recent investments include the Landmark Hotel in Charlottesville, Virginia, whose construction stalled. "I'll get it up," the CNET founder promised in the fall, but it seems locals got tired of waiting: The construction site was just plastered with copies of the phallic sign above, reports cVillain.com.

These tweets are made for venting. Joanna Pearlstein, Susan Orlean, Jim Louderback, and other media twits found plenty to complain about on Twitter:

New York has a fancy matrix graphic in which it pretends to identify which Twitterers are insipid or insightful. Oh, New York: Even Twitter's insights are insipid. Today's banalities:

The advent of Oprah has not changed the inanity of Twitter. Today, Bonnie Fuller met someone supercute, Karen Tumulty landed in the wrong spot, and Alex Blagg recommended meth!

Life in the media is rough. CNET's Natali Del Conte got stuck in the foot, while Fox's Nancy Loo suffered a wound in makeup. These and other reports of suffering from the twittering class:

Ryan Seacrest's executive producer feared seeming fey, CNET's Natali Del Conte feared losing marbles, and Bob Woodruff feared he wouldn't be popular on Twitter. And if you read Twitter all day, you'd be afraid too:

A decade ago, Fortune pegged CNET founder Halsey Minor's net worth at $354 million. Today he's fending off lawsuits seeking $60 million. Has he run out of money?

Twitter is so fresh and so now! It's where rumors get debunked and celebrities break up! And yet media people like James Poniewozik, Caroline McCarthy, and Bonnie Fuller make it just as banal as ever:

After Valleywag reported that Apple had laid off 50 salespeople last week, Apple spokesman Steve Dowling issued a blanket denial: "Not true." Turns out the layoffs happened, and Dowling lied, CNET News reports.

Today's sweetest tweets: CNET's Caroline McCarthy got ready to don a Snuggie. Valleywag alumna Megan McCarthy (no relation) dreamed of Atlantis. David Gregory of Meet the Press succumbed to Twitter peer pressure. And more!

Twitter users are a sorry bunch. Especially the media! Errata, excuses, and eye-rolling from today's tweets:

CBS is laying people off at CNET — no surprise, since the entire media business is fitfully contracting, and after a merger, cuts are a given. But it signals the end of CNET's grandiose ambitions.

Since he escaped the dotcom bust with a considerable fortune, Halsey Minor, the founder of tech-news site CNET, has been acquiring art, real estate, and a blonde trophy wife. You'd think he'd be happy. You'd be wrong.

It was kind of an awkward joke to begin with: CNET News.com writer Caroline McCarthy publicly imagining how her fameball buddies David Karp and Charles Forman would be mocked by Perez Hilton if the celebrity blogger worked for Valleywag. Hilton would, of course, call the cuddle-buddies gay, as McCarthy made clear in a mockup posted to her Tumblr Wednesday night. But throw in the fact that McCarthy and Karp very recently, we heard, broke up, and the image takes on an entirely more vicious, passive-aggressive sheen.

Is Halsey Minor the "bad boy of Silicon Valley," as Portfolio recently dubbed him? The moniker may not be geographically precise — the founder of CNET turned venture capitalist has a house in San Francisco, not Woodside or Atherton. But what the magazine really should have called him was the bad boy of the blogosphere. Minor obsessively comments on stories about him, with detailed but completely off-topic critiques of the writer's prose. Take, for example, his reaction to the post Thomson Reuters reporter Connie Loizos wrote about Minor's failed attempts to buy a racetrack in Florida:

Kara Swisher's new pet media blogger Peter Kafka praises CBS executive Quincy Smith, shown here, for picking up CNET. Revenues were up 6 percent in the most recent quarter, with a 12 percent increase in display advertising. But wait a second: Aren't display ads most of CNET's revenue? The company also makes money through e-commerce referrals and the sale of marketing data — which suggests something went wrong enough in CNET's other businesses to blunt the welcome rise in advertising.

Don't call it a "social network" — the product that will save Yahoo is an "enhanced profile." Which just happens to look exactly like someone's profile page on Facebook or MySpace — friends, updates, and all of that. CNET News editor-in-chief Dan Farber got the PowerPoint deck, as did AllThingsD's Kara Swisher. Is it something they teach you in journalism school — that writing about tech involves fawning over something simply because it is new and you got to see it first? I never got to take that class. (Screenshot via Webware)

At CNET, the heads keep rolling, nearly a year after Gamespot editorial director Jeff Gerstmann was sacked. Stephen Colvin, an executive who oversaw Gamespot, is out of the company, a tipster tells us. Gerstmann's firing came after a negative review of an advertiser's game, which made him a cause célèbre among gamers. What Gerstmann's fans will say: That Colvin and other suits are getting what they deserved for ruining the CNET-owned gaming site's editorial credibility. Josh Larson left CNET, now owned by CBS, in April. Colvin, a former magazine executive who was Larson's boss, joined CNET a year ago, shortly before the Gerstmann incident. His exit comes as CBS rejiggers CNET's generous benefits, our tipster says: