An anonymous reader writes:

Remember SimCity? Remember what a joy it was to build up a fully functioning, living, breathing city, full of life and wonderment? Then, at some point down the road, after you've built up your city to the peak of its productiveness, you'd start mashing the disaster button and a wide variety of tornadoes, earthquakes, and fake Godzillas would come tromping through, laying fiery waste to every bit of what you'd worked so painstakingly to create? Yeah. It's a little bit like that. Except someone hit the disaster button for me.

Credit the Google PR machine with this much; They know how to stir up media froth without serving up any real products. Android and the OpenSocial initiative showed that much. Of course, the process is often as simple as leaking "scoops" to the Wall Street Journal. Today, for example, the Journal reports that Google is working on an Internet storage service that will work like just another hard drive. This would be a scoop, of course, if the software, codenamed "Platypus," hadn't been out for a year already. The paper cites "people familiar with the matter," but you can safely describe them as product managers eager to test the market without accountability. Remember the Journal's big Googlephone scoop over the summer? Same thing.

Improbably named book author George Orwel "inadvertently" added five paragraphs from a Wikipedia entry, without attribution, to his book Black Gold: The New Frontier in Oil for Investors. As with any undue reliance on Wikipedia, Orwel's act wasn't wrong, just stupid. There's a saying at magazines: Don't use Wikipedia as a source. There's no way of knowing how accurate the information is, and the online encyclopedia expects contributors to add only information that can be verified elsewhere. Not that that stops lazy deskbound journalists for leaning on the loser-generated encyclopedia for facts.

Beatblogging.org is a new site about hybrid forms of collaborative information gathering backed by thirteen credible news publications including Wired.com and the San Jose Mercury News. The premise:

You heard about Abu Dubai snapping up 8.1 percent of AMD? Well, FBN anchor Alexis Glick read the tape wrong as the news came across the wire and announced Apple invested in the chipmaker. This led to a good three minutes of hjinx as contributor Charles Payne analyzed the news. When Glick tried to correct herself, it just got worse. SAI transcribed the whole thing, but here's an excerpt:

Mainstream media pros — that's me — climbed over each other to cover last week's overhyped Facebook event. Founder Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the social site's new ad models and proclaimed a stupefyingly conceited Zuckerberg's Law — "Once every hundred years, media changes." But if the server logs at Slate are an indicator, no one cares but us hacks. My edgily-headlined report, "Why Facebook's Dinky New Ads Won't Topple Google," got prominent placement as Slate's No. 2 story of the day last Wednesday. The traffic report for last week shows it as one of my least-read Slate articles ever. It's well below the one about the talking pen, and far behind a primer on night-vision goggles that drew 20 times as many clicks (400,000 vs 20,000). No matter how good or bad the article itself was, readers didn't click to find out. Facebook vs Google? Yawn. The logs show they were much more interested in my editor's essay on how to fix Sports Illustrated.

Whenever I read a story about security threats without numbers, my bullshit detector goes on high alert. And so it went with the Wall Street Journal's latest salvo on the perils of file sharing. The release of personal information to identity thieves over peer-to-peer networks is a "real and growing" problem. So real that "precise data on the incidence are hard to come by." Hundreds of millions of people use file-sharing networks, but the WSJ, by my count, only cites 52 actual cases of identity theft by this method. And then the kicker: A company called Tiversa, according to the Journal, charges $24.95 a month to monitor customers' computers for this ominous threat. Beep! I'm sure that the phenomenon of identity theft via peer-to-peer networks is real enough. But the possibility that a company is going to exploit this new security fear for undue gain? My detector says it's dead certain.

When we first began to cover the many close relationships between flauntrepreneur Scott Jones's ChaCha search engine and Indiana University, the Indiana Herald-Times was one of the few local newspapers to closely question the relationship. Steve Hinnefeld of the Herald-Times was even following Valleywag's coverage, and came to similar conclusions: Although nothing legally wrong occurred, IU officials' failure to disclose their ChaCha ties was suspicious. However, since then the newspaper has provided the issue little attention. Why?

As the only Valleywagger who writes for the Wall Street Journal, I get lots of email from readers who want to know Sweet, how can I land that gig next time you're busy? Careful what you wish for. Freelance writing is hard work. Unless, that is, you follow my easy guide to slacking your way to the top — well, not really the top, but sort of near the top. Which is the whole idea.

We're becoming obsessed with the story of the shoot-out on Friday night at the poker game in "unmarked office on the seventh floor of a commercial building at 251 Fifth Avenue, at 28th Street." There isn't much new on the story—but as a former math professor from New Jersey was killed in the poker den, it gave the "North Jersey Media Group"</> the opportunity to write this immortal line: "Those who knew Frank DeSena say the Wayne man had been dealt a good hand in life." URK. [NYT]

So this guy in Florida is driving along a bridge, and he Twitters that maybe he should jump off it and become the first Twitter suicide. Then, reports the New York Times, Twitter users come to the rescue! Well, they fruitlessly text him and call the cops, who arrive the next morning to find the man didn't kill himself but slept in his car on the bridge. Now he's moving to San Francisco so he can have real friends. Not exactly Web 2.0 saving the day, but enough to fake it for some positive Twitter PR.

As we noted earlier this week, Wired editor Chris Anderson published 329 email addresses that he had blocked in the past 30 days; most were PR firms sending unsolicited pitches. Anderson stated (and several PR and media professionals corroborated) that it's foolish and counterproductive to send pitches to a magazine's editor-chief rather than a more specific writer or editor, especially since Wired publishes staff writers' addresses.

A Lexis-Nexis search confirms our suspicion that today's Wall Street Journal review of Fake Steve Jobs's Options contains the first-ever use of the phrase "Holy friggin mother of Jesus" in a U.S. newspaper.

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:

If you're going to call someone a liar, first be sure it's the truth. I'm rockin' the house to Craig Morgan's "International Harvester," catching up on last week's infighting between Secret Diary of Steve Jobs author Dan Lyons and videoblogger Robert Scoble. Lyons says Scoble's company, PodTech, is "going under." Scoble says the company is "restructuring its business and refocusing its resources." It's all fun and games until the Scobleizer repeatedly asserts — on Twitter, of course — that yours truly at Valleywag prints LIES!

Dan Lyons, the Forbes editor behind the Fake Steve Jobs media empire, has written a new book. Or he might has well have. Have you seen the man's LinkedIn profile? For interests, Lyons lists: "Skiing, rowing, running, chasing my two-year-old twins around the house." He should have added: "going on and on." The monstrosity comes in at 2,000 words. His summary alone hits 121. We wanted Paul Boutin to write a 100-word version, but he's too busy writing his review of Options for the Wall Street Journal on his BlackBerry. So here's my mercifully brief version of Lyons's "Experience" and "Education" fields, which he could use to outline his memoir:

I'll be sad if Techcrunch editor Michael Arrington ever figures out what all those tedious journalism-school terms like off the record and deep background actually mean. Because I hate the way tech people act as if Arrington and other established writers work for them. They see journalists as outsourced copywriters, under specific orders what and what not to write. Yesterday Arrington blogged, "We got a senior person at MySpace to talk to us about it off record .. . this person confirmed that [MySpace cofounder Tom Anderson] is really '36 or 37' and that MySpace has been trying to keep this quiet." He was promptly chewed out by a member of the Valley's most know-it-all caste: a software engineer.

"Web 2.0 is rubbish," Donnacha DeLong writes in The Journalist, a magazine from the U.K.'s National Union of Journalists. (Socialist swine!) DeLong writes that journalists provide "truly authoritative content" and that bloggers foul up the facts in the course of democratizing media. Yes, old media hacks always get to the bottom of everything. Like Visto's history of IPO attempts, for example. Oh wait, that was us. The Telegraph's Shane Richmond took umbrage with DeLong's article, calling it a "reactionary, badly-argued piece." Just like you'd find on the blogs, in other words. What I want to ask DeLong: Who said we wanted to democratize media? (Photo by Gastev)

Hey, folks! Check it out: The Washington Post has done a really well-researched story about layoffs at AOL. I wonder where they got all that incredible detail. [Washington Post]