Twitter is like a real-time conversation! And just like many conversations, sometimes you want to cover your ears, Eric Eldon, Micki Maynard, Ellen McGirt and others teach us:

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:

Can you destroy — or cement — your professional reputation in 140 characters or less? On Twitter, it's easy! Watch and learn from ABC's Jake Tapper, ex-Wonkette Ana Marie Cox, VentureBeat's Eric Eldon and others:

Dear Facebook employee: If you're going to do something obvious and cliché like wearing cowboy boots to SXSW's geek spring break, please have the decency not to tell Twitter about it. Other Twitter idiocies today:

Credulous bloggers think Twitter will make more money than newspapers! That's a low bar. In the meantime, the media's Twitter addicts from the New York Times to ReadWriteWeb prove how value-free the status-updating service is:

What was comely Web-video starlet Veronica Belmont thinking about today? How about Chris Nuttall of the Financial Times? VentureBeat blogger Eric Eldon? Cats, fags, gadgets, and Facebook preoccupied the Twitterati.

Did you know Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen has joined eBay's board? Why yes, it's true — and it happened last month. VentureBeat editor Eric Eldon had gotten a belated tip about the hire, and published the story without checking the date. "I made a stupid mistake," he tells me. (He was more oblique in Twitter.) Eldon rapidly took the story down, but not before it was syndicated to The Industry Standard, where it caught the eye of Nicholas Carlson, my former charge at Valleywag who has landed at Silicon Alley Insider.See the hypercompetitive pattern? Hacks have always hustled to scoop rival papers. But tech blogs are being driven to distraction by the notion that they've been beaten by a story. In the rush to publish, they're not even stopping to check their own archives. Checking actual facts is far more cumbersome. Jordan Golson, another former Valleywagger who now blogs at the Industry Standard, made a stink about a report on TheHill.com about iPhones coming to Congress. TheHill.com's overly sensational headline topped a report that merely stated that Congress's administrative arm was testing some iPhones. Golson called the flack quoted in TheHill.com's story, who backpedaled from his earlier statement that "lots" of Congressmen had requested iPhones. Tom Krazit of CNET News, one of the guilty parties cited by Golson for reblogging TheHill.com, got to the bottom of things: Congressional IT administrators were testing a total of 10 iPhones, and all of two Congressmen had asked about getting iPhones instead of the standard-issue BlackBerry. This messy process shows the blogosphere at its best and its worst. Through a series of iterations, the horde of bloggers arrived at the right result. In the meantime, however, a lot of people got the wrongheaded notion that Congress is switching to the iPhone any day now. (I'd note that TheHill.com has yet to retract its initial report; it would not be the first time a flack has said something, regretted it, and then claimed he was misquoted.) There will always be a factchecking squad on the Internet. But I think the reblogging craze will fade over time, as the Web's writers learn the deep satisfaction of telling one's own story for the first time — not repeating someone else's for the nth.

Team VentureBeat assembles for the obligatory group photo. The setting: a launch party for VentureBeat's DigitalMedia blog. Left to right: Well-paid tech-CEO transcriptionist Dean Takahashi; mopheaded cleantech writer Chris Morrison; skinflint business manager Jacob Mullins; Jimmy Olsen-lookalike and VentureBeat founder Matt Marshall; stylishly underdressed Anthony Ha; expert Techmeme gamer MG Siegler; and Eric Eldon, who's wearing his great-grandfather's three-piece suit. Yesterday's winner: Once again, WagCurious, for labeling Pete Cashmore "The face that launched a thousand ship-dates." (Photo by Brian Solis/Bub.blicio.us)

"Quick, post the pictures before you sober up!" the ever-helpful Paul Boutin emails me. I'd love to, Paul, but it seems that Brian Lam, gadget expert, forgot to put charged-up batteries in this superhigh-tech, amazingly unusable Sony camera he lent me. Thanks, Brian. This is why he's running a gadget blog and I make fun of venture capitalists for a living, people.

ATHERTON — I'm told I left the party too early, but once Third Eye Blind started playing, Thursday night's iLike bash was pretty much over for me. Don't get me wrong — I like Third Eye Blind. It's right in tune with my utterly bland and more than slightly gay musical tendencies. But this is exactly why I will never, ever use a service like iLike, which makes a Facebook app that allows you to reveal your musical taste, or lack thereof, to your friends by posting songs, and find people with similar tastes by seeing who's going to concerts. Here's the thing: I know my taste in music is egregiously bad. I don't want to advertise the fact to the world, and if anything, I want to meet people who specifically dislike the music I listen to. That's all right, though — what I really wanted to listen to was the buzz in the room.

Eric Eldon at VentureBeat reports that Forbes is buying social bookmarking site Clipmarks. Once again esteemed Forbes reporters get scooped on a story in their own backyard. [VentureBeat]