What is Josh Quittner, the former editor of Business 2.0, doing for his next act? Since September, he's had an unhappy career at Fortune, the Time Inc.-owned corporate sibling which took him and a few other refugees from the magazine in. He's been earning what we hear is a mid-six-figures salary playing Scrabulous, and then writing about it. (Actual quote from a recent column: "Clearly, I had too much time on my hands.") The latest I'd heard on Quittner, my former boss, was that he was leaving Fortune to return to Time, where he worked before joining Business 2.0, as its Marin County-based tech correspondent. But he may have another exit strategy in mind. in 2006, Quittner registered roofmagazine.com.

Fortune magazine, ever servile, provides a ready platform for the powerful with something to say. The latest on stage: Jim Breyer, the Accel Partners VC with a seat on Facebook's board. Breyer has a fair point: We may be seeing the cyclical bursting of another Silicon Valley bubble. Breyer says this happens once every seven years, roughly. But his timing is suspicious. Last October, Breyer gladly took Microsoft's bubbly $240 million for a microscopic stake in Facebook. Declaring the bursting of a bubble now may help hasten its advent, and in the process, make it harder for Facebook's rivals to raise money. But for Fortune readers' tech-stock portfolios, an early warning might have been more useful. Why didn't the magazine ring him up last fall? Fortune never mentions this. (Illustration by Sean McCabe for Fortune)

A further revelation in Peter Elkind's Fortune profile of Apple CEO Steve Jobs: In a June 2005 commencement address at Stanford University, he told students, "About a year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer." Jobs first learned he had a form of pancreatic cancer in October 2003. [Fortune]

From October 2003 through July 2004, Steve Jobs hid the fact that he'd been diagnosed with a form of pancreatic cancer, according to a profile of Jobs in an upcoming issue of Fortune, now posted online. A serious charge: Jobs should have promptly disclosed his health scare to Apple shareholders, since he seems practically irreplaceable as Apple's CEO. (Only now is he admitting to thinking about a successor.) But Jobs's cancer scare is old news to most readers. Why is Fortune bringing it up now?

The soyabean (okay, alright, soybean) boom in Brazil is a good story, if you're an agribusiness fan; and it's natural that US journalists would want to find an American angle. So one wouldn't want to harsh too much on Fortune's recent exploration of a subject covered by rival Forbes in 2005. (A three-year lag is nothing compared with the latest Portfolio's rehash of a story from two decades ago.) However, the Time Inc. business magazine could have, in the lede of its recent story on the lure of Brazil's cheap land, found a refugee American farmer from a state other than Illinois. Click the thumb for a side-by-side comparison with Forbes' very similar piece.

After reporting that Time Warner was going to sell its AOL internet portal to Microsoft, media reporter Tim Arango of the was asked about his scoop-mongering secret. "It's about cultivating relationships, getting out, getting meals, a few drinks, with people who know stuff," the New York Post writer said. People who know stuff? Arango meant Rupert Murdoch, the Post's owner, presumably. So, just asking, how is Arango doing now he's at the New York Times, without a gossipy tycoon to pass him tips?

Was Portfolio's production team projecting just a smidge when they chose to illustrate a column this month about the city's declining commercial real estate market with a "foreclosure"-stamped photograph of the Time-Life, Simon & Schuster News Corp and McGraw-Hill buildings? The buildings house most of Portfolio's big competitors: Time Inc.'s Fortune and Money, as well as McGraw-Hill's BusinessWeek. While we wouldn't put a little petty retaliation past editor Joanne Lippman, a bored (or clueless) photo editor is likely behind this one. Artful art there, kids!

Fortune, counting down 2007's "Dumbest Moments in Business," offers its "Top Tech Flops" of the year. Coming in second are electronic voting machines, with a blurb mentioning the recall of 5,000 Diebold machines after massive security holes were revealed. First place was taken by a toilet that was recalled because it explodes! LOL! [Fortune via CNNMoney]

Before Fortune magazine's little dustup about Facebook's controversial new advertising products, Andy Serwer's court jester, David Kirkpatrick, produced a hardly hard-hitting video on the subject. Just how much of a puff piece was this? Fortune managed to dig up some intercutting shots of a very enthusiastic Facebook user. Recognize her?

An extraordinary public slap, rarely seen in the genteel world of magazine publisher Time Inc.: Fortune appears to have momentarily taken executive editor Josh Quittner's Techland blog away from him and handed it to rival tech writer David Kirkpatrick. Quittner's recent blog rant about Facebook's Beacon was wrongheaded enough, but entirely undeserving of this humiliation — republishing, duplicatively, a Fortune.com column by Kirkpatrick in Quittner's blog. Kirkpatrick, left, declared that Quittner, right, had been "silenced" on the Facebook issue. He went on to tear apart, at length, Quittner's argument. All the more shaming, because Kirkpatrick is — how to put this gently? — a laughingstock among his colleagues.

Fortune.com — what magazine publisher is calling Fortune's little corner of CNNMoney.com — relaunched today, and the Observer's Media Mob notes the site is "sleeker, whiter, cleaner" but bears a "strikingly" duh-we're-copycats resemblance to Portfolio.com. Whatever, let us know when Forbes.com relaunches with a design inspired by Fake Steve Jobs's Blogger template. In the meantime, here's a Valleywag poll asking you to pick which Web design best helps you forget that no one reads magazines — if you can even tell them apart.

Which is mightier, the pen or the search engine? On October 19, Fortune editor Andy Serwer blogged a short-lived rumor that Google cofounder Larry Page will marry girlfriend Lucy Southworth on December 7. Short-lived, because the passage about the smooch-prone couple's happy news quickly disappeared from the page:

Remember former Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner, whose tech magazine got shut down by parent company Time Inc.? Now an executive editor at Fortune, he outranks, on paper, assistant managing editor Jim Aley — the man he replaced as Business 2.0's editor five years ago. Which makes the following curious: The New York-based Aley, pictured above, is in town this week. Valleywag hears he started off his visit with a breakfast with Quittner. And then Aley met with the remnants of Business 2.0's staff, who now make up Fortune's San Francisco bureau — without Quittner. Remind us again who's in charge here? And if you want your startup written up in Fortune, who's the right guy to schmooze?

Fortune managing editor Andy Serwer has some probing queries in his recent "Captain's blog":

From today's Keith Kelly "Media Ink" column:

Time Inc. has officially announced Business 2.0's closure in an internal memo obtained by Jossip. In it, Time Inc. executive John Squires explains that folding in some of Business 2.0's staff into Fortune will give it "the largest San Francisco bureau of any major business publication." The Wall Street Journal bureau will still be twice its size, but never mind — we assume Squires meant "magazine." No, what's interesting in the memo is what's not said.

There's no official word on the fate of Business 2.0, the Time Inc.-owned magazine where I used to work. The publication, once fated to shut down after its September issue, is still alive, thanks to a hastily granted extension of life support. The staff is working on the October issue, while higher-ups consider offers to buy the magazine that streamed in after word of its impending demise leaked. But they seem to have resigned themselves to the fate of being absorbed into larger sister publication Fortune, based on this sign: A magazine logo near the entrance has been altered to read "Fortune 2.0."

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:

Fortune editor David Kirkpatrick catches a clue, says he won't use the silly iMeme name for next year's conference. [The Sam Whitmore Sampler]

Everything you need to know about the VC panel at today's Fortune iMeme conference, including the sartorial choices of prominent moneymen. (Accel's Jim Breyer wore a CBGB shirt!) [Barrons]