A contrarian take on the much-discussed situation in Iran, via Business Week: While Twitter has been a great for international publicity, most activists are just organizing via word of mouth or SMS, like backward Web 1.0 people.

Who was that insane lieutenant colonel telling Fox News we should bomb North Korea? That would be Robert Maginnis, who fought the gay menace for the Family Research Council, then claimed Iraq had many horrible weapons.

Two months after taking over as CEO, Owen Van Natta is laying off 30 percent of MySpace employees. His outlook remains bleak; when was the last time you heard a CEO call his company "bloated" in a press release?

Here's a new "revenue stream" that you can try out, whether you're in PR, or in media, or just particularly shameless: Giving a sob story to publicists and begging them up for free stuff. That's what this guy did:

Nina Devlin was a partner with fancy financial PR firm Brunswick Group—which was great for her husband, who took information about the deals that Nina was working on and used it to help his friends make millions through illegal insider trading. Now Nina has a new job. With Edelman!

Julia Allison was paid in cash to blog about her trip Sea World, the "lifecasting" celebrity wannabe has belatedly disclosed. So how have the first few days of the trip gone? Allison, who announced her trip with five exclamation marks, seems belatedly conflicted.

Law-enforcement officials have been slamming Craigslist's prostitute ads for years. CEO Jim Buckmaster's response has been benign: We don't profit from the ads, we're very nice and friendly with the cops, etc. No more. Push Buckmaster too hard, and he will cut you, as South Carolina just learned.

Julia Allison sounds so excited: The professional "lifecaster" is headed for "an adventure" at Sea World. As it happens, she's also showing other bloggers how not to make money in a recession.

In your total ripoff Tuesday media column: the worst media internship offer in at least a couple days, flackery invades the media (moreso), and a J-school student would rather not help solve a murder:

After 47 million years, scientists unearthed a fossil which may be the long-awaited missing link between primates and mankind. They immediately turned the fossil into a huge media whore that we're already sick of.

"Everyone today wants to be a professional and most people believe they are." But most of you are deluded. Mark Penn is here to tell you why. And to spout further generalizations, for money!

In your countercultural Tuesday media column: Gay porn mags fold en masse, Chevron is evil as usual, Slate deems women capable of running their very own blog, and prison radio kicks ass:

The New York Times has, in recent months, started punching back at its critics, rather than maintaining the usual dignified silence. But with letters and memos, which, let's face it, are for wusses, right?

The Mexican Swine Flu outbreak and it subsequent media coverage: what does renowned Life Stylist Blair French have to say about it? Enough to issue an ill-advised press release, astoundingly!

"There's an old saying, 'The cobbler's children have no shoes,'" flacks would say to me every single fucking time I wrote about the PR industry's reputation, at my old job. Advertising people: equally bad.

Fox News Channel likes to pound the drums for patriotism and the armed forces. Odd, then, that it keeps letting its military analyst rail against the Pentagon for curtailing money to his clients.

A "former" CIA officer named John Kiriakou told ABC News that spies broke an al Qaeda terrorist in "30, 35 seconds," using waterboarding. The story spread everywhere. Of course it was a horrific lie.

Christopher Buckley's family tell-all has already made him some enemies. Will people look more kindly on the writer's crusade to break the news of his father's suicide urge?

The Wrigley Science Institute (as in makers-of-Doublemint) announced that chewing gum makes you smarter.

Jim Goldman, the shameless Apple parrot and CNBC correspondent, did his best for the computer company in an on-air price comparison the other day. But he had to lift his argument wholesale.