• Three more people have come out of the woodwork to express an interest in acquiring the Boston Globe. Let the bidding war begin? [Reuters]
• Analog television meets its maker tonight. Tell your grandma. [NYT, AP]
• Facebook introduces vanity URLs at midnight! Just in case you have absolutely nothing better to do and/or you're not too busy tweeting. [ABC]
• The New York Times is cutting, combining a few of its blogs. [E&P]
• Yahoo's new CFO is known for his ruthless cost-cutting. Good news for the beleaguered Internet company, bad news for beleaguered employees. [PC]
• Jon and Kate have been on the cover of Us for seven straight weeks now. "Unless Britney Spears gets pregnant or Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie break up, it appears the troubled couple won't be bumped anytime soon." [WWD]

Who can afford to be blasé about making money in this economy? A hot Web 2.0 startup, it turns out.

Sad Web nerds plan to stay in front of their computers late Friday night to obtain short, easy-to-remember Facebook addresses ("facebook.com/sadwebnerd"). It's the start of a geeky land grab! But true geeks know why this is stupid.

Richard Richtmyer is in trouble with his bosses at the Associated Press for something he wrote on Facebook. Did he burn a source? Trash a story subject? Worse: He mildly criticized one of AP's hundreds of members.

Even as Wall Street rallied last month, Peter Thiel's hedge fund lost close to $25 million, according to leaked documents obtained by Valleywag. Maybe this is why the PayPal founder has been grumpily calling people "frauds."

• Stephen Colbert will be Newsweek's guest editor next week. [NYO]
• Conan O'Brien's second Tonight Show dropped 30 percent from Monday's record-setting premiere, although that was probably to be expected. [THR]
• For the third straight month, MSNBC bested CNN in the cable news ratings. Fox News remained in first place, as usual. [Daily Finance]
• More bad news for CNN: Campbell Brown returned from maternity leave this week and immediately returned to fourth-place in the ratings. [THR]
• A new Harvard Business Review study reveals that 10 percent of Twitter users account for more than 90 percent of Twitter messages sent. [AdAge]
• Jon & Kate Plus 8 is still generating obscene ratings, sadly. [AP]

Half-Jewish, half-Korean White Nationalist Marcus Epstein, the Tom Tancredo PAC director who karate chopped a black woman in 2007, took a wonderful trip to Ethiopia, and wrote about it on his Facebook page.

Facebook's making the best of its move from downtown Palo Alto to an old Hewlett-Packard building in the suburbs. As if to prove the campus is sufficiently cool, one engineer shot a video in which he skateboards through the building. Someone else took pictures.

An outcry from breastfeeding mothers wasn't enough to get Facebook to lift its ban on "exposed breast" earlier this year. But a breast cancer awareness campaign has finally ended the absurdly broad restriction.

It seems Facebook's new investor is keen to downplay its ties with "the hard man of Russia," an oligarch one critic called a "gangster and racketeer." How inconvenient, then, that said oligarch is reportedly buying up more shares.

The Financial Times reports that "among the biggest backers" of Facebook's new funder is Alisher Usmanov. He might be playing sugar daddy to a freewheeling social network, but the Russian oligarch is also known as a "devourer of websites" that dared to mention certain allegations about his past.

• Rumor has it Richard Branson may be interested in buying Playboy. [ChiTrib]
• Two Boston Globe unions have agreed to concessions with the NYT Co. [E&P]
• Why did the Times pick Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim to invest in the paper instead of David Geffen? It seems publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. was "worried about Geffen's ambition to take over the company." [AllThingsD]
• Mayor Bloomberg plans to introduce legislation in Albany to extend the city's popular—but broke—film/TV tax credit program. [THR]
• Tom McGeveran has been named interim editor of the New York Observer. He'll take over for Peter Kaplan, whose last day will be this Friday. [NYO]

Facebook settled a long-running trademark suit from Aaron Greenspan (pictured), the Harvard student whose "Universal Face Book" system predated Facebook and was used heavily by its founder before he publicly branded his own social network. Greenspan is just the latest mess Facebook has tidied up.

Facebook accepted a rumored funding round, taking $200 million from a Russian investment group. The deal values the company at $10 billion, a third less than what the company was supposedly worth a year and a half ago. But it could have been far worse.

• How is Twitter going to make money? With a reality TV series, naturally. The show will involve "putting ordinary people on the trail of celebrities in a revolutionary competitive format," in case you were wondering. [Variety]
• The primetime lineups for next year "are chockablock with shows meant to make recession-weary viewers laugh and feel better." How encouraging! [NYT]
• Ratings are down for CNN's Anderson Cooper as well as for Roland Martin, who has been subbing for Campbell Brown recently. [Page Six]
• Bravo's next Real Housewives installment: Washington, DC. [Daily Intel]
• Fox News nut Greta Van Susteren may not be around for long. Rumor has it her contract won't be be renewed and Megyn Kelly will replace her. [NYT]
• New York lost close to $5 million last year; with ad pages down 37 percent thus far in 2009, "losses are expected to be even higher this year." [NYP]
• A Russian investment firm has dropped $200 million into Facebook's bank account in return for a 1.96 percent stake in the company. [NYT]
• Ben Stiller's Night at the Museum sequel beat out the fourth installment of the Terminator franchise with a four-day pull of $70 million. [Reuters]

Bloomberg has distributed a policy to newsroom staff on blogging, Twittering and Facebook updating. And in keeping with the company's tyrannical management culture, the rules are far more authoritarian than similar admonitions recently dispensed at the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and elsewhere.

Being a startup is way more fun than being a business. Which is why we see Twitter and Facebook in seeming economic denial this morning. Who wants to confront financial reality, like Google?

• Monthly mags continue to suffer: Ad pages have dropped by 23 percent on average, although the situation is particularly dire at Condé Nast. [NYP]
• Maureen Dowd landed in a bit of hot water after it was revealed she'd "borrowed" from blogger Josh Marshall for her op-ed column yesterday. She's since offered a (dubious) explanation and apology. [E&P, HP, Politico]
• Television networks start selling ads for the fall season today as part of upfront week, although the economy is putting a damper on things. [NYT]
• Despite few successes and many failures, NBC golden boy Ben Silverman still has a job. For how much longer, though, is anybody's guess. [NYT]
• Angels & Demons was No. 1 at the box office with a $48 million haul. [WSJ]
• If you can't find Newsweek on newsstands, that may be because the magazine has totally redesigned itself. [Newsweek, WaPo, HuffPo]

Dear Ryan:

As I head to NBC to run its Bay Area site, I'm leaving you one Silicon Valley gossip blog, used but in good condition. A few thoughts on how to keep it that way.

What do you get the social-networking mogul who has everything? Click to see Valleywag's gift to the 25-year-old blunderkind CEO of Facebook!