Those who can't do, teach. And those who teach, when it comes to Facebook, are charging handsomely for the privilege. RockYou, a maker of Web "widgets," those Web pages in miniature that clutter up blogs and MySpace pages, has not, apparently, figured out how to make money directly off of the Facebook apps they've created like Super Wall and Zombies. The Sequoia Capital-backed startup has, however, figured out how to make money from Facebook app developers. How? By charging them to sign up users by advertising their apps on RockYou's Facebook apps. The fee? Half a buck per user. It sounds like the perfect Ponzi scheme: As long as venture capitalists and clueless big companies are overpaying for startups based on the number of Facebook users they've signed up, it should work brilliantly. After the jump, slides from RockYou's pitch to fellow application creators.

Is the Internet boring? Well, generally speaking, duh. Except, of course, when blogging luminaries get into a scrap over whether it is. Billionaire entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban started things a month ago when, in an offhand sentence, he declared the Internet "dead as a growth platform" because of a stagnation in the speed of home broadband connections. He reiterated his comments to Portfolio.com, and then repeated them on his blog. Say something often enough, and people start to notice. People like Web 2.0 venture capitalist Fred Wilson. A classic blogfight — observing the three rules of the genre — ensued.

It's odd, sometimes, the contortions reporters will go through to make a story out of nothing — especially when they miss the real one. Take, for example, this report from IDG News about the planned departure of Intuit CEO Steve Bennett. The subhead of the article: "Intuit chief executive's resignation is not tied to April tax database snafu." The first sentence: "Four months after a database problem prevented thousands of U.S. users from paying their taxes on time, Intuit Inc.'s chief executive announced plans to step down." Obsessed with an embarrassing, expensive, but ultimately meaningless, glitch in Intuit's tax-prep software, IDG misses what's interesting about Bennett stepping down in December to make way for Intuit SVP Brad Smith.

How long will it take the corporate suits at Viacom to realize that MTV Networks will never, ever, ever succeed in digital music? The latest move, folding MTV's Urge online music store into RealNetworks' Rhapsody service, is just another example of its fumbling. One could point out that MTV doesn't actually broadcast much in the way of music these days; to the extent it's holding onto its youth demographic, it's doing so with a TV schedule packed with reality shows and teen soap operas. Do its viewers even know that the "M" in "MTV" stands for "music"? But never mind that. The reality of MTV is a decade-long history of complete and utter failure in digital music. The timeline of missed opportunities, botched deals, and general cluelessness, after the jump:

When you talk about "the Valley" in tech, it's taken for granted that you mean Silicon Valley. But in the world of porn, "the Valley" is the San Fernando Valley, where the adult-film industry has established itself. Now, as porn goes online, there's a long, drawn-out war for dominance fought by the two valleys. And a tremendous battle has just been lost — by AdBrite, the online-advertising network based in San Francisco. AdBrite, Valleywag has learned, has lost the partner that gave it an entrée into the business of selling porn ads.

The first rule of Valleywag: Never pitch Valleywag. But sometimes the temptation just proves too great. In response to a post about Google and Yelp's rivalry in local search, a MerchantCircle employee contacted us to tout the company's supposed leadership in the market, pitching the site for some Valleywag love. Well, here's some tough love. We've looked into MerchantCircle's business model .. and found nothing but self-love.

Local TV reporters are infamous for practicing "ambush" journalism — but as they try to take their gotcha practices to the Web, increasingly they're the ones ambushed. The first rule of hacking, after all, is "Don't get caught." And Fox newsman Darrell Phillips may have broken that rule, Drew Curtis has told Valleywag. Curtis, left, is the founder of Fark.com, a thoroughly juvenile, and entertaining, social news site where users pick the headlines. Phillips, to his right, is the new media manager at WHBQ Fox13, a News Corp.-owned TV station in Memphis, Tenn. And Curtis claims to have assembled all-but-conclusive electronic evidence that Phillips has tried to hack into Fark's servers, potentially breaking several laws.

Ladies and gentlemen, rev up your RVs, pack your SUVs full, gas up your private jets, and start making your way to Black Rock City, the site in Nevada for Burning Man, the annual art festival and orgy of self-indulgence. The most hardcore of "burners," as attendees call themselves, will start making their way there a week from now. And while you're on the road, guzzling gasoline, make sure to feel really, really guilty about all the carbon you're spewing into the atmosphere. By organizers' own estimates, Burning Man puts 27,000 tons of carbon dioxide into the air. This year, of course, they hope to minimize the impact with a "Green Man." Nonsense.

Blogs are, fundamentally, about writing in the now, embracing the 24-hour news cycle, and keeping everything up to date, right? Wrong. Not, that is, when you can dredge up an incident in the past, dress it up as news, and pawn it off on your readers to score points. This week, both TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington and Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg dug up old stories to relight the flame on old feuds.

Founders never share power willingly, gracefully, or for very long. That's a lesson that Facebook's Owen Van Natta should have learned at the knee of Jeff Bezos, when Van Natta was an executive at Amazon.com. Instead, though, he's been schooled in it by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who just demoted Van Natta from COO to chief revenue officer and VP of operations, Kara Swisher reports on AllThingsD. Zuckerberg's former No. 2, once trusted to attend the Sun Valley media-mogul conference in his stead, now shares key duties with a host of other executives. Here's a rundown on Van Natta's new rivals.

Despite CEO Eric Schmidt's promises during Google's most recent earnings call, his company continues to metastasize. This time, it's threatening to swallow up all of New York's Chelsea neighborhood. I have an idea: Rather than lease expensive new real estate, why not boot some current Googlers to make room for new ones? Which brings us to this, the second edition of Toogle Many Googlers! Want to nominate a Googler for toogling? Send in a name and pic.

Yahoo has turned over its corporate blog, Yodel Anecdotal, to Chad Johnson, the NFL superstar and wide receiver. Why the long bomb to spice up the usual corporate blather? Why, it's a promotion to advertise a video contest promoting Yahoo Sports and Chad Johnson himself. We hope Jerry Yang, the mild-mannered CEO of the beleaguered Web property, is reading. He could learn a thing or two from the blustery sports personality known as Ocho Cinco: If you can't actually lead, at least sound like you do.

Rip up your Facebook revenue estimates and start over, everyone. Since February, Facebook has doubled the rates it charged for sponsored groups from $150,000 to $300,000. Since exposing Facebook's supposedly nonexistent rate card, I've received a more recent version from June. Much of it's the same, but I'm posting the revised cards from Facebook's PowerPoint deck, with comments, below.

Here's a new Facebook revenue estimate to think about: $90 million a year — from sponsorships alone. Sure, I've poked fun at Facebook's fanciful figures. The social network's board members, after all, can't get their stories straight on how much the company is making — so why should we trust their wild-eyed, multibillion-dollar valuations for the company, either? But now it gets real, folks. An informant has forwarded me a Facebook rate card — a rate card the company claims doesn't exist. It's dated February, so keep that in mind. And any rate card, of course, is a salesman's fantasy numbers, not the real ones that get hammered out in a sharp-elbowed deal. But the contents of the card square with what I've heard from insiders. After the jump, what it takes to buy your way onto Facebook.

I've been thinking, obsessively, about the revelation Google CEO Eric Schmidt made in last week's earnings call that his company had overhired. Even more curiously, Schmidt defended the hiring binge, expressing his delight in the quality of the people Google's overeager recruiters had brought on board.

I'm a dunce. I was wrong. There, I said it. In running a tip on Tuesday that a drunk employee brought down 365 Main, the San Francisco datacenter which hosts servers running some of the Web's most important sites, I trusted a source I shouldn't have. Here's the story behind my 365 Main post. A warning to readers of sensitive dispositions — I'm about to take you inside the sausage factory, and it's a bloody mess.

Wil Schroter, CEO of Go Big Network, writes of the value of "friend"-making being equal to, if not greater, than fundraising or business planning. And it's true. In Silicon Valley, like it or not, the entrepreneur with the most "friends" wins. (Even when they lose.) Business plans rarely matter; truly compelling ideas get overlooked. There is plenty of funding to go around. But "friends"? They matter. Schroter's wrong, however, when he says there is no cost to making "friends."

A failed side project, dubious funding, and an inconvenient employee gets scrubbed from the site in this story about the meltdown of one of the Bay Area's most-known tech video networks. (I'm not chronicling the death of PodTech out of glee for sticking it to the man, but because the company has broken its promises to the community that tried so hard to make it work, and because its founder John Furrier has shown blatant disregard for the truth and for his employees in his crass race to inflate PodTech's value and sell off the doomed company. Okay, also a little glee.)

The tip, incredible. The source, ironclad. Microsoft has apparently told executives at one of the world's largest PC makers not to expect a formal release of Windows Vista SP1 — the first major set of upgrades and bug fixes to its Vista operating system — until 2009 at the earliest. That explains why Microsoft was so desperate to correct erroneous reports, spread by a careless team of developers at Microsoft, that a beta version of SP1 would be out last week. Microsoft now says it "currently anticipates" a beta of SP1 later this year. Anticipations, of course, are not always met. Especially if you're a sluggish beast like Microsoft, with thousands of developers to keep in train on a release. And this delay would have wide aftershocks.

Fortune's summer party, scheduled for today, has been postponed, ostensibly for weather reasons, as New York is under siege from a nor'easter. With sister publication Business 2.0 on the rocks, it might have been seemly to cancel it altogether. We've learned, however, that the all-day shindig has been rescheduled for tomorrow. So, as Fortune staffers party, Business 2.0 employees will continue huddling under a storm of their own. Rumors, true and false, are flying. (I should note that I'm covering this as a former Business 2.0 editor who worked at the magazine for seven years — but events are moving so fast that all of this comes from new reporting since I left, not any knowledge I acquired on the job.) Here's what I know, and what I don't know, so far: