Not even the biz reporters we reblog have much to say about Pandora laying off 20 of its 140 employees. Last month, founder Tim Westergren had sent out warning signals that online music royalties could be a problem. Cutting 14.2 percent of staff this week, though, seems more pro forma than panic. Westergren's "A Sad Day" bears no news, but serves as an intriguing template of that new writing genre, the layoff blog post. Spot the patterns:

The dirty secret of YouTube's Chad Hurley: Despite selling an online-video startup whose slogan is "Broadcast Yourself" to Google for $1.65 billion, he's still desperately uncomfortable in front of a camera. Google PR's media training has only turned the millionaire's awkward mannerisms into a hilariously stiff folksiness: "Having the opportunity to sit down with some press, communicate to them the deals we've been working on, meet with partners." Is he consciously imitating our tongue-tied president? Or rather, Will Ferrell's Saturday Night Live version of Dubya? No: I think he's just doing a bad impression of Chad Hurley.

Anathem, Neal Stephenson's latest thousand-page nerdapalooza, is a good book. And I'm all for giving readers more ways to connect with authors and their works. Yay Internet! So when an email came in offering "a press release about an online marketing campaign for NY Times bestselling author Neal Stephenson," I did what one of Stephenson's characters would do: Sit and marvel at how many verbal tokens someone strung together to try to get me to write a story. Okay, I'll bite: Here's an article about a press release about an online marketing campaign for NY Times bestselling author Neal Stephenson. Jeez, Neal, I'm glad you only publish once every four years.

The long, slow process of scientific peer review makes a dull story. It's much snappier to throw out a contrarian question like, "Has Google made us stupid?" After the topic bubbles around a bit, it's appealing to find an exclusive new study that rebuts the media's own conventional wisdom. When that reporter's need arises, PR people are there, exclusive new studies in hand.Science from UCLA now suggests that searching the Internet a lot, for years and years, is measurably good for your brain. Awesome! I'm glad to learn I haven't been giving myself brain damage since 1981. To celebrate, I used the Internet to find out how many people are on UCLA's media team pushing that study. I miss the old days, when they'd have bought me lunch.

Alan Marks, eBay's top flack, has a new buzzword for layoffs: "simplification." It's a simplification so simple that Marks had to send a 1,078-word memo explaining it. The bottom line: He cut 15 out of 105 people, or 14 percent of his staff worldwide, but he's hiring another 8 people into new positions. This makes me wonder: Is Marks so immersed in PR-speak that he's lost the ability to compose a blunt and honest communication? Or does Marks, an eBay novice who only joined the company in April from Nike, simply distrust his staff, and thus feel obliged to sanitize all of his internal emails in case they get leaked — as this one has? Read on:

Mail Goggles is a Google-built version of a feature email users have joked about for decades: It makes you stop, think and pass a sobriety test before sending messages after a certain hour or on weekends. The name is a pun on Beer Goggles — but it gets the logic backwards. Somebody must have been drunk.Michael Arrington at TechCrunch worries Mail Goggles is a hoax — fair enough, since Google developer Jon Perlow didn't explain how to find it unless you already know where it is. Typical engineer. To test-drive Mail Goggles, login to a Gmail account. Click Settings in the upper right corner, then click Labs at the far right. Mail Googles is halfway down the Labs page in alphabetical order. That alone should serve as a sobriety test. (Photoillustration by Digital Inspiration)

Grant Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg this much credit — she's endlessly creative in her explanations. Take her reasoning for opening up an international headquarters in Dublin, Ireland: "The talent pool in Dublin is world-class and recruiting local talent will help us better understand the needs of local users and the regional dynamics that, in turn, can give us better insight into what features matter most.” What she really means: It's a cheap place to hire a lot of drones in customer support. And Ireland's tax rates are rock-bottom low. If Facebook ever makes money, it'll be set. Kudos to Sandberg for dressing up a cost-savings maneuver as a way to advance international understanding.

YouTube announced a new channel called "Your Money" yesterday, describing it as place to "learn more about borrowing, investing, and saving, along with Financial News and Analysis." YouTube said the channel would feature content from Bloomberg, Reuters, Wall Street Journal. But now YouTube Your Money is gone. So is the blog post announcing its arrival. A Twitter message from YouTube PR, a Google search result and a logo screen-captured by Epicenter remain and are copied below. I have two theories on why this happened.Since Wired links to Bloomberg News as the source of its information, one possibility is that Bloomberg published a story about the new channel before they were supposed to. That kind of thing seems to happen a lot at Bloomberg these days. Seeing the article, YouTube PR panicked and pushed out a blog post that triggered a Twitter message. Then Bloomberg pulled its story and YouTube PR followed suit. Update: In an updated post, Wired now calls the link to Bloomberg their own "big goof." Another possibility: Bank of America, named as a channel partner, pulled its support from the project because it either doesn't have cash to throw at experimental sponsorships or would prefer to keep a low brand profile while weathering the current financial crises.

"Gigya announces $11 funding round," says one of the better typos in this morning's inbox. But seriously, closing $11 million this week? I'd be excited, too.

So Al Gore, who cofounded Current TV, promised to have a Twitter account by Saturday. It's Monday, and the algore and albertgore account don't look anything like they're being maintained by the former American vice president and current free marketeer. If you find him under shouldawon00 or some other catchy handle, do let us know. I couldn't find anything from his wife Tipper, either — tipper is a Twitter bot for calculating tips, and tippergore doesn't exist. And it's for shame. Because how fun would it be if they really embraced the medium, instead of just showing up to press the flesh at staged events? Below, pure speculation as to what we all have to look forward to.

Were John McCain's web team pulled away from their desks yesterday to throw their shoulders into the Wall Street bailout? The Popeye-like Senator's site still promises a debate with Barack Obama on Friday, and several more next week. I haven't been this stumped by a candidate's behavior since Ross Perot flipped out in October 1992.

It can't be any fun fielding press queries about layoffs, reorgs, and hostile takeover three times a day. Add to Yahoo PR woes: Bitchy coworkers. Last night, a tipster sent us an account of a few "chatty Cathys" from Yahoo PR who, after a few drinks, were only too pleased tell anyone who would listen that "heads on the PR team need to roll." Yes, they named names — including the hapless Brad Williams, the target of an accusation in August that he was sleeping on the job at the company's annual meeting, a charge Williams strenuously denied.

The canned marketing script says, "Oracle Beehive provides a complete range of collaboration services including conferencing, instant messaging, email, calendar, and team workspaces." Translation: It's a competitor for Microsoft Sharepoint. More cynically: Oh boy, an Oracle wiki. Beehive's unveiling was supposed to kick off this week's 45,000-attendee Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco with a bang. But attendees blogging and tweeting the event were just not impressed."Not a lot new really," tweeted a conference-goer. "Beehive demo isn't that great — hard to follow the screens" an Oracle employee helpfully typed. Oracle's bigger-than-Larry-Ellison's-yacht PR machine wants me to blog that "customers and partners are buzzing about Beehive." It's a phony press-release story, for which they've helpfully provided a Google News-friendly headline and a geekbait mention of the European Space Agency. In reality, the online silence about Beehive has been conspicuous. I'm serious: Larry, get your buddy Steve Jobs to help with your next launch. (Photo by AP/Ben Margot)

When users revolted against a Facebook redesign in 2006, CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote a post in response titled "Calm down. Breathe. We hear you." In it, Zuck came off defensive and condescending. "We're not oblivious of the Facebook groups popping up about this (by the way, Ruchi is not the devil)," he wrote. Now, Zuckerberg's written another post defending the site's latest redesign, which more users — though a far smaller percentage of them — also don't like. It's titled "Thoughts on the Evolution of Facebook." It reads like the inoffensive pablum you'd read on, say, the Official Google Blog. Why is that?No surprise there: Besides top flack Elliot Schrage, Facebook has hired at least three PR people from Google in recent months — Debbie Frost, Barry Schnitt, and Larry Yu. Zuckerberg's preprocessed blog post predictably mentions "Facebook's mission," which Zuck tells us "is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected." That sounds exactly like the talking points Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg — also an ex-Googler, trained in the delivery of political messages from her time in the Clinton White House. For his investors, an uncontroversial Zuckerberg is a profitable Zuckerberg. If he's to stay CEO through an IPO and beyond, he'll have to practice putting shareholders and analysts to sleep with similar language. We sure will miss the clumsy honesty of Zuck's original post, though. Compare the old versus the new, below. Mark Zuckerberg before the Googlers came — defensive, condescending and honest:

Doing not a thing to dispel the notion that most user-created online video is nonsense, here's the latest press release from 12seconds.tv. The mini-video startup's announcement is written in a thick pirate dialect — familiar to Boing Boing and kid's tv show fans, sure, but impenetrable. Ha ha, you're celebrating Talk Like a Pirate Day by opening your site up to new users, that's adorably newsy. But will those social media upstarts scrambling to get into yet another exclusive website even understand the invitation they so crave? The whole mumbling thing goes like this:

I generally try to avoid clicking through any of the dozens of startup pitches from flacks that land on Valleywag's doorstep daily, but dirty-minded pervert that I am I figured schmap.me merited attention — after all, "schmap" rhymes with "fap," and who doesn't love to fap? Instead, I found I'd already had an account on the mapping service set up in my name. Clicking through, there was even an incorrect location entered, though it was coincidentally close enough to where I'm actually sitting that it freaked me out on first glance. "Any feedback as to how we could improve this free service would be much appreciated." How about not using my name and associating it with a location? Full pitch after the jump. It almost goes without saying that startup blog TechCrunch thinks it's "ingenious."

BoomTown's Kara Swisher went to Palo Alto’s MacArthur Park restaurant for a luncheon hosted by Germany’s Hubert Burda Media yesterday, the organizers of the DLD conference. A target of her shaky videocam work: Facebook flack Brandee Barker, who hid behind a fern. Asked if Microsoft was buying Facebook, Barker shouted, "Never!" Brave words, if not exactly consistent with Facebook's fiduciary duties to shareholders to consider all reasonable offers. Besides Barker, Swisher captured Silicon Valley figures like nerd chanteuse Randi Zuckerberg; Wired writer Steven Levy, fresh from his fly-on-the-wall writeup of the making of Google's Chrome browser; and layoff-happy Loic Le Meur. The crowd is shown descending into a happy drunkenness, giggling about Wall Street all the way down. After the jump, the full clip and a guide to the best moments:Click to view

A startup whose slogan is "giving technologies new meaning" lives up to that promise, with a polysyllabically dense pitch spammed to Valleywag's tips inbox. Did you know that "the scope of Cognition's semantic map includes over 10 million semantic connections that are comprised of semantic contexts, meaning representations, taxonomy and word meaning distinctions?" What they're really trying to say is that they hope Google will buy them. That's the only explanation for this press release, which requires a Stanford Ph.D. to understand it:

"You're looking at the miracle that John McCain helped create," said McCainiac economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin, waving a shiny iPhone-like device at reporters. His premise was that McCain's work on the Senate Commerce Committee helped paved the way for breakthroughs in telecommunications. But really, what was he thinking? The AP, pouncing on the obvious comparison to Al Gore's Internet boast, had Holtz-Eakin's quote out on the wires faster than you could thumb-type OMG NO DOUG NO. (Image by Research in Motion)

Interesting things end up in our inbox, but none as cavalier as the nonapology that Andy Wibbels, a Six Apart product manager, sent us. He acknowledges that he unintentionally spammed a number of blogs with a mass email promoting the company's new blog directory, but flips off criticism of the mail's impersonal tone on "one of our interns [who] was obviously mismedicated." I must be doing this intern thing wrong, because my boss has yet to offer me any drugs, let alone accuse me of being on them. Andy, here's a Management 101 tip: Be a mensch and own up to your mistakes. A good leader doesn't let shit roll downhill. Full email: