In response to the rumor that Jackass star Johnny Knoxville is the new Microsoft pitchman, a company spokesperson emails: "Microsoft is planning a consumer advertising campaign with Crispin Porter & Bogusky. We have no other details to share at this time."

With a laptop tracking power and gas consumption and CO₂ emissions, Google.org's four plug-in Priuses serve as a test fleet for the charity's $10 million plug-in electric hybrid vehicle research program. And according to the stats, they're already outperforming the company's two regular Prius hybrids across the board. RechargIT.org is a fantastic PR stunt, but is it good science?

Best Buy's Geek Squad is holding a memorial tonight to honor Arthur C. Clarke. Alas. Everyone was far too polite to say this about the recently deceased sci-fi writer: Had he lived in the U.S. rather than Sri Lanka, he'd be a prime membership candidate for the North American Man-Boy Love Association. "Once they have reached the age of puberty, it is OK... It doesn't do any harm," Clarke told the U.K.'s Sunday Mirror in 1998. More or less exiled from Britain over his underage affairs, he continued to pursue them in the South Asian island nation. Authorities there turned a blind eye. This is all well known among the more sophisticated realms of fandom — but not, apparently, Best Buy headquarters in South Richfield, Minn. At 8:01 p.m., every Geek Squad repairman will pause to think reverently of a champion of child abuse. The press release:

My inbox is full of people asking who Mike Cherico is. The short version: He's a "dudeblogger" who was fired from Glamour magazine for bragging about womanizing. (Wasn't that what he was hired to do?) But what really entertains me is what happened after self-important PR guy Scott Swords spammed every blogger on the planet with an unsolicited press release decrying Cherico's evil ways. One of the recipients: Former Yahoo columnist Penelope Trunk, who cut the barely literate Swords to ribbons. The release, and Trunk's email exchange, after the jump.

Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, has been backed into a corner by the slew of charges against the nonprofit and its founder, Jimmy Wales. She's retreating from her initial line that it was all the fault of a disgruntled ex-employee, as she did with CNET. Now, in a recorded interview with Not the Wikipedia Weekly, she's switched to a new defense: What about the children?

In the wake of his SXSW keynote talk with BusinessWeek columnist Sarah Lacy, is there anyone Mark Zuckerberg hasn't granted an interview? Caroline McCarthy, Stacey Higginbotham, and Nick O'Neill landed chat time with Zuck. Who, you ask? Exactly. Zuckerberg used to privately tell colleagues he didn't want to talk to anyone besides Wall Street Journal reporters (an obligatory move, while he was raising money) and Fortune's David Kirkpatrick (a man constitutionally incapable of writing an unkind word about a tech mogul). That he's talking to anyone who will listen suggests that Zuckerberg is trying to change his ways. He needs to stop, now, before he does more damage to his personal brand.

Online music vendor Amie Street wants you to know just how exclusive their deal with Ashley Alexandra Dupre is. Amie Street's flack's email after the jump. Who's whoring now?

Sorry, Debra. We know TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington credits us with control over life, death and love. But he doesn't trust us with his calendar. You want editor@uncov.com.

She's back! Marcy Simon, Eric Schmidt's ex-girlfriend, has always aimed to be with the hot tech company of the moment. In the '90s, she was all over Microsoft (and, we hear, Bill Gates). Then it was Schmidt and Google. Now that Facebook is looking to hire a VP of PR, could she be angling for the job? We hear she was rebuffed when she tried to land Facebook's outside PR account — San Francisco-based Outcast got the gig instead. But Simon is still relentlessly trying to work her way into Facebook. She's signed up Peter Thiel's Founders Fund as a client, hoping to use Thiel's influence as a board member to get tighter with Mark Zuckerberg & Co. I don't know about this, Marcy. Isn't Zuckerberg a little young for you?

You're bored with the whole thing, but watch and learn, people. This is media training at its finest. "What's happening here is we have a disgruntled former employee. This guy has a blog, and he's used that blog as a platform to spread a bunch of unsubstantiated rumors and gossip. It's hard for us to even respond to — I don't know if you've read it, but it's not entirely even clear necessarily always what's being alleged." — Wikimedia Foundation executive director Sue Gardner on CNET. She praises ex-chair Jimmy Wales's saintly, parsimonious behavior all the way back to last summer.

People say Valleywag will stab you in the back. That's a lie. Valleywag will stab you in the face. Yet this whole Gene Simmons / Jimbo Wales perfect storm has gotten us added to every press release mailing list on the planet in the past week. The earnestly typed pitches from former co-workers are even worse. So, dear PR people, garage startup founders, and aspiring pundits: Take us off your list. Stop asking us to write a "snarky" post to promote your launch/event/deal/screwup. If you want coverage, send a Twitter to Robert Scoble and promise him an exclusive (I don't know what that means, but PR people say it all the time.) To get on Valleywag, go out and do something truly humiliating. If you get it right, you won't need to email us about it.

CEO Ratmir Timashev begins this interview by stealing the microphone. Then he's unable to explain how to pronounce his company's name. Or why it has that name, which is Veoh, Beem, Meme, Veep or something. And then, when he forgets the company slogan, he looks off camera to a PR flack for help. Too late.

A tough message to deliver: "Mr. Zuckerberg is also seeking to hire ... a vice president of communications and public policy, says Facebook spokeswoman Brandee Barker." Barker's title? Director, a level below VP. Mark Zuckerberg isn't just hiring someone over Barker's head; he sent her to relay the news to the Wall Street Journal. The position's so new that it's not yet listed on Facebook's website. Is this how Zuck told his spokeswoman she wasn't getting the VP job? Harsh, dude. (Photo by Brandee Barker)

Did Jimmy Wales misuse funds from the Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit he set up in 2003 to oversee Wikipedia? Publicly, the foundation's leaders are saying no. Privately, foundation chair Florence Devouard has alternately bragged about how she's mislead reporters and upbraided Wales over the scandal.

News.com reporter Elinor Mills flew across the country to interview Google CEO Eric Schmidt on all sorts of topics: search, advertising, Yahoo-Microsoft, and the ostensible reason for the interview, Google Health. Newly installed editor-in-chief Dan Farber writes: "A few minutes before the interview, she was told by a Google spokesman that Schmidt would only answer questions about Google Health." That's not very Googly.

Nortel, the second-rung maker of telecom equipment, is losing money. In an attempt to stop doing that, the company is firing 3,100 workers. Of course, that's not how Nortel PR is spinning it. The AP reports: "The company said it plans to cut about 2,100 jobs globally and will shift approximately 1,000 additional jobs to lower-cost areas." Even with our mere powers of journalist math, we can calculate that the company is really firing 3,100 employees and hiring 1,000 more for lower pay — a likely euphemism for "shifting jobs overseas."

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice goes to China next week. Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang is insisting she press for the release of Shi Tao, the Chinese dissident Yahoo helped to imprison. He wrote her a letter to say so. And Yahoo lawyer Michael Samway published it on Yahoo's corporate blog. Which isn't a distasteful public-relations gimmick at all! Especially when you consider that the terms of a settlement with Shi Tao's family requires Yang to lobby for his release. Here's the letter:

I'm going to venture a guess here: The demographic overlap between Valleywag and Seventeen is approximately zero. But it turns out teenage girls are just like us! "Weekends are usually a time for slowing down and relaxing," a Hearst PR flack informs us. They squabble over whether BlackBerrys are better than iPhones! They think the MacBook Air is really thin! They like Wi-Fi enabled bunnies! They have a crush on the Jonas Brothers Band. Okay, not exactly like us. Find more similarities in this feature, available in the April issue of Seventeen, on newsstands March 4.

Comcast spokeswoman Jennifer Khoury admitted that the cable giant paid some people to arrive early for an FCC hearing on network neutrality. The purpose? Supposedly to hold places for Comcast employees who wanted to attend the hearing. Some of those lineholders didn't just wait in line — they attended the meeting, taking spots which would otherwise have gone to members of the public. Some even fell asleep. Comcast says it didn't intend to block anyone from the hearing, but it doesn't really matter. What Comcast did wasn't illegal, just bad PR, done on the cheap. Next time, ply the seatwarmers with extra-shot Starbucks so they don't get caught napping. That seems easier. (Photo by AP/Stephan Savoia)

Apple has rolled out a minor update to its notebook line this morning. And yet the news has garnered 1,836 headlines on Google News. Why the crush of coverage for such a relatively small announcement? One could simply say "because it's Apple," but that's lazy, tautological thinking. Joshua Weinberg, a consultant who "as never worked for Apple, but observes the company closely," explains Apple's advantages in an essay on AllThingsD: Well-designed products, coordination, theater, knowing the difference between a small announcement and a big one, great product names, secrecy, and prompt fixes to major problems. He then expends an additional 2,475 words on the subject, but you can safely skip them.