Shorter version of TechCrunch: It's the "worst economic environment in our collective lifetimes. Get your ticket for the TechCrunch/LeWeb party!" If this does not make perfect sense to you, please move back to Nebraska.

The economic pain continues to trickle down: Cisco is cancelling a two-week sales conference planned for next August in San Francisco. Conferences like this are a combination of boot camp, old-fashioned tent revivals, and frat keggers, held to rev up a company's revenue generators; ostensibly meant to educate salespeople about new products and compensation plans, they more often devolve into debauchery.For Cisco, even the cancellation is a sales opportunity; the company is pitching it as an example of the money-saving potential of its videoconferencing and teleworking products. Boring! Throwing money at salespeople is the best way to make them feel loved — just another sign that Cisco has no real understanding of what a human network really means. It also suggests CEO John Chambers's influence is waning at the company — since this is the kind of event at which his evangelical delivery shines.

You can buy an iPhone at Best Buy, but more likely you won't buy anything at all this Xmas. The company's revised forecast predicts revenue between now and February may drop by 15 percent. CEO Brad Anderson's official statement is blunt: "Since mid-September, rapid, seismic changes in consumer behavior have created the most difficult climate we've ever seen ... Best Buy simply can't adjust fast enough to maintain our earnings momentum for this year." Cool, but seismic changes? Brad, come on out from Minnesota and we'll demo a real earthquake for you. (Photo by AP/Paul Sakuma)

Chris Alden, CEO of blog-software maker Six Apart, understands his business so well that he posted his own internal memo before any pesky gossip bloggers could extract it from his loquacious employees. He's also sensible enough to admit that there's more to blame for the layoffs than the economy — like the integration of recent acquisitions. He also snuck in a well-disguised hint that the company is cash-flow positive. Well played, Chris! The company is laying off 8 percent of its 200-plus workforce, and shifting more resources into its services business. Cofounder Ben Trott is taking a bigger role running Six Apart's blog-hosting business. Alden and other top managers are taking a 15 percent paycut. The only disappointment: That the company didn't kill off Vox, its interminably boring free personal blogging service.

This just in: Current TV's director of public relations sent us an email designed to be printed in its entirety. (Thanks for that. Since Valleywag fired everyone else, I spend way too much time editing.) Current didn't just cut staff, they reshuffled a couple dozen employees. Instead of the economy, Current blames "a new, innovative programming strategy." That's gotta make everyone feel better. A tipster tells us, "The few spared [in San Francisco] are being made to choose between unemployment or a move to L.A." Here's the statement:

A quarter of the 50-something employees in Wired.com's San Francisco newsroom are gone, a source tells us — and with them, the bubbly delusion that Wired would not just report on the transformation of media by technology, but be a part of the revolution as well. The cuts hit Wired's tech team heavily, though some writers and editors also got pink slips. (CNET reports that 3 out of 28 editorial staffers are gone, but a Wired insider says that the actual number of edit jobs cut is at least six.)Also gone: Kourosh Karimkhany, the VP of corporate development for Wired.com's parent company, CondéNet. (The magazine is run separately by Condé Nast, a sister company to CondéNet.) Karimkhany did the deals to buy Reddit, an online news-discussion site; Ars Technica, a rival tech blog; and Webmonkey, a Web-technology how-to site. With no further deals planned, there wasn't much reason to keep him on, we hear. (Photo by Jackson West)

Current, the cable channel and user-generated-video website backed by Joel Hyatt and Al Gore, is laying people off. "My wife works in the LA office (at least for now!)," emails a tipster. "At least 10 gone from there...." No word from Current's San Francisco headquarters yet, but you know where to send it. Update: A tipster says 32 have been cut from the San Francisco office. "'Bloodbath' is the word being used!" he adds.

Just yesterday, we were hearing gossip about how Condé Nast, the magazine publisher, had spared Wired while slashing Portfolio, its troubled business magazine. Not so: Wired.com is having layoffs due to "unexpected cutbacks," Silicon Alley Insider reports. No details on numbers yet; the publication is having a conference call to discuss the cuts now. Wired.com, which is managed separately from the magazine, had gone on an acquisition spree of late, having bought Reddit, Ars Technica, and Webmonkey recently. It also had plans to resuscitate HotWired, a '90s-era Web property which popularized the banner ad; those may now be on hold. Update: More details have arrived on the cuts. A quarter of the 50 or so staff in Wired.com's San Francisco newsroom are gone.

BitTorrent, the troubled file-sharing technology startup, has laid off another 18 employees — roughly half of its remaining staff — and fired CEO Doug Walker, replacing him with CTO Eric Klinker. [Bits]

I confess, I'd never heard nor read of Solid Cactus, a company that builds Yahoo stores, before the following cri de coeur dropped into the inbox a few minutes ago. I have no idea if any of the accusations in this email are true. But I liked the part where the CEO blogs his vacation pics. "Time to Get Away," indeed.

Bluetooth headsets make you look like a rambling idiot, addressing an audience of one. San Francisco startup Aliph solves that problem: Wearing its sleek Jawbone makes you look like a stylish, rambling idiot. An appropriate accessory for CEO Hosain Rahman. Venture-capital news site PEHub reports that Rahman ordered $500,000 in new, high-end furniture for the office, instructed employees to box up their things, and then laid off a third of the company's 75-person staff. The company has raised $42.5 million in funding. Its backers include Sequoia Capital, the VC firm which recently issued a cost-cutting fatwa to its portfolio companies. Whatever one might say about Rahman, one should credit him for good taste: He has also commissioned a mural for the office from DeYoung Museum artist-in-residence Tucker Nichols.

As recently as a year ago, Google was scrambling to get more office space in New York's Chelsea neighborhood. Now, just as swiftly, it's trying to offload it, putting 50,000 square feet up for sublet. The company has cut back on snacks in New York, as elsewhere — but real estate is a far more serious thing to trim. With less room for warm bodies, it suggests Google will soon be shedding staff.

Reid Hoffman's heft regularly makes reporters turn to their thesauri for polite terms for "fat." BusinessWeek, to keep the tone of a new profile appropriately flattering, writes of his "expansive body." But the article is anything but expansive in its probing of LinkedIn's business. It focuses instead on how Hoffman is trying to figure out survival strategies for his portfolio of startups. Nowhere are LinkedIn's own layoffs mentioned. Instead, Hoffman implies that the employees he put out on the street should use the site to seek new careers: "Every individual is a small business." Not an expansive one.

Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, has a promising career as a cult leader. In a blog post, the online shoes-and-clothes retailer's boss acknowledges the layoffs his employees were Twittering about this morning, writing that the company had laid off 8 percent of its workforce. He all but admits the cuts were forced on him by investor Sequoia Capital. The severance packages are generous in comparison to most startups; two months or more of pay, and six months of health insurance. Sweet enough, perhaps, that people won't ask a key question about the layoffs."Tony cares about his company and his employees more than anyone else around," says an entrepreneur who knows Hsieh. His employees, even the former ones, seem to be returning the favor on Twitter. But if he loved his employees so much, why didn't he resist the pressure from Sequoia to make the cuts? We hear Sequoia is insisting that all of its portfolio companies cut payrolls by around 10 percent, regardless of the particulars of their businesses. Zappos seems to be doing well in its e-commerce niche — well enough, at least, to afford a generous severance. Hsieh's company offers free returns if the shoes its customers buy don't fit. Why didn't he just mark Sequoia's orders "return to sender"?

The world's biggest IT services firm fed the New York Times a copy of a speech CEO Sam Palmisano was scheduled to make today in front of the Council of Foreign Relations in New York City. Sam's proposal is blatant: "A technology-fueled economic recovery plan that calls for public and private investment in more efficient systems for utility grids, traffic management, food distribution, water conservation and health care." Also, free Zipcars for gossip bloggers.

No company has embraced Twitter quite like Zappos, the online shoes-and-whatever-else retailer — from its CEO, Tony Hsieh, on down. It even hosts a live feed of all Zappos-related messages on the microblogging service. That has made it easy to gather that the company is going through a tumultuous round of layoffs.Zappos_Jackie reports that she was laid off an hour ago; other ex-employees are proclaiming their lasting love for Zappos. We look forward to the New York Times updating its trend story about how companies blog about layoffs. They must now Twitter them instead, lest misinformation spread quicker than sluggish RSS feeds. (Oddly, Hsieh never mentioned the pending layoffs in an interview he gave to the Times about Zappos' vaunted corporate culture.)

What's the only thing worse than another "Open Letter to Jerry Yang?" A freaking poem to Jerry Yang. Shakespeare was so much better at this, plus he didn't put his vanity site's URL in the final stanza.

A boilerplate statement from Linden Lab confirms yesterday's rumor: "We've had to make some hard decisions about resources and as a result we eliminated four positions out of our headcount of nearly 300." That's not as bad as the "9 or 10" we'd been told were cut. In a statement sent to Silicon Alley Insider, Linden says they're still hiring. There are 45 job listings on the company's employment page. Are they all still open? Huh, maybe Second Life really is an alternate reality. What temperature does water boil at in SL?

You would think an online print-on-demand bookstore would be able to print books on demand. But you'd be wrong! A reader reports that he wasn't able to finish checking out a book on Lulu, a print-on-demand startup. (Red Hat founder Bob Young, shown here, was inspired to start the company after he ended up with boxes of unsold copies of his Linux nonthriller, Under the Radar.) A customer-support rep said that the company had known about the ordering bug for a week, and might not fix it for another week. An online store which doesn't want its customers' money? Odd. The only possible conclusion: Lulu doesn't have enough actual customers to worry about letting them conduct business with the company. Here's the exchange with the support rep:

LinkedIn, the richly funded business-networking website, is indeed laying employees off today. (No numbers available yet; if you know more details, please send them in.) But we know of at least one person who's skipping sticking around for the cuts: Reid Hoffman, the company's chairman and cofounder. He's in Japan, speaking at a conference. A convenient absence. Hoffman is described by his underlings as generous and kind, but we hear he didn't oppose the layoffs. We also notice he wasn't kind-hearted enough to cancel his trip and console his employees in person. Update: We're now told Hoffman did cancel his trip to Japan for the conference, at the last minute.