Last weekend the New York Times Magazine published a beautiful set of photos of abandoned buildings and such, as a chronicle of the end of the gilded age. Now they've pulled them for probably being Photoshopped. Fakery!

Comcast's announcement of a bandwidth cap for home users beginning in October has raised a recurring fear: Is the Internet being overloaded? It's not a new worry. Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe forecasted a meltdown in 1995. But our growing adoption of BitTorrent downloads and YouTube-like streaming clips must be straining the pipes, right?No. Metcalfe literally ate his words two years after his prediction. In the decade since, Internet infrastructure upgrades continue to outpace growth. So even though worldwide traffic grew by half last year, peak utilization is now less than 50 percent of available capacity. Don't believe out-of-date claims about "last mile" bottlenecks, either. Home broadband users have been built out to more traffic than they're using. Comcast's caps are about per-customer profitability, not system overload. If anything, you should feel encouraged to use the Net even more. Just make sure your ISP is willing to let you have at it. (Photo by zinkwazi)

Even Scoble couldn't save Seagate. Almost a year after the hard-drive maker renewed a sponsorship deal with the prolific blogger, its stock is down 35 percent. Archrival Western Digital, meanwhile, is up 40 percent. So much for the profession of "influencer marketing," a field which has exploded since the 2000 publication of Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point and the subsequent work The Influentials. These books, translated into action by marketers, have prompted companies from AT&T to Yahoo to hire executives expressly to suck up to bloggers. Seagate's Scoble sponsorship is the purest expression of this trend. And the best illustration of why it doesn't work.The theory it's based on is nonsense. It is true that ideas spread virally through the population. But it turns out that there's not a single set of influencers who are reliable Typhoid Marys. Duncan Watts, a former Columbia University researcher who now works for Yahoo, found in a study that the emergence of contagious ideas is random. Repeated experiments found that anyone can start a trend, and it's impossible to predict who those people will be. Watts's research is not 100 percent conclusive; his models might not translate perfectly to the real world. So let's go there! In April, a study by Canadian research firm Pollara found that word of mouth works — nearly 80 percent said they'd buy products recommended by a friend or family member. But word of mouse? Only 23 percent said they'd buy something touted by a blogger. "This shows that popularity doesn't always equate to credibility," Pollara executive Robert Hutton told MediaPost. "Marketers might have to reconsider who the real influencers are out there." In backing Scoble, Seagate hoped to buy cheap buzz. It's a convenient fantasy for marketers: Find the one magic guy to woo, then watch him chat up your company to Wall Street traders! Seagate would have been better off sending big hard drives to a dozen bloggers. Or a hundred. Or, for that matter, a random assortment of people, whether or not they have a habit of typing out the contents of their brain every 3 seconds. Anyone — literally — would have been a better choice than Scoble.

Technologists are instinctively averse to debt. The cycles are too swift and mistakes too punishing, the conventional wisdom says, to subject a startup to the burden of debt; cash is better spent on growth opportunities than interest. But Facebook has never followed the usual script for a startup, and its CFO, Gideon Yu, is no herd-follower, either. No wonder that the news that Facebook is leasing $100 million worth of servers, after raising a $360 million round of venture capital from Microsoft and Li Ka-Shing, is causing such a ruckus — and some misconceptions. Here are the instant myths that have arisen:

LOS ANGELES — I'm the first to admit that I wanted to see the Web kill Hollywood. It just ain't happening. It's finally dawned on the studios that you can now pay artists even less to produce content, and pay YouTube absolutely nothing to distribute it. The problem is you have to sell your own ads — but the studios and networks, unlike indie content creators and Valley startups, have armies of ad sales people still at their command. And it's still a hits-based business. So while it's great to have all the creative freedom in the world, you're still going to have to wait tables and get coffee for producers while working, unpaid, on your own projects and pray to the ghost of Mae West that something ends up with mass appeal. What does success look like in the wake of the online video revolution?

"For months, dozens of sites have been on an auto-bury list, often with no explanation whatsoever. These sites often get submitted to Digg and then are invariably buried after a certain amount of time." So claims an open letter posted to Valleywag yesterday. The mythical Digg auto-bury list is one of those Internet legends that everyone who's anyone knows about, but no one can produce. Several bloggers have published lists, but none of them have also published a reproducible methodology for determining that list. The score: Gossip 1, Scientific Method 0. Unless the four self-styled "most powerful users in the community" present their own list of banned sites — not one or two URLs, but "dozens" to quantify their claim, along with instructions for obtaining that list yourself — they're even worse rumormongers than we are.

YouTube founder Steve Chen, on the Oprah show, recites the same old tale he and Chad Hurley have been trained to give about how YouTube got his start: Chen threw a dinner party, friends filmed each other with videocameras, and then realized the videos were hard to share. What the two didn't tell Oprah: YouTube's third cofounder, Jawed Karim, claims the dinner party never happened, and he came up with the idea for a video-sharing site.

Success has a thousand fathers, and failure is an orphan — unless you can somehow spin an adoption tale into the mix. That seems to be what Marissa Mayer is trying to do. In a recent interview, Marissa Mayer tries to take credit for both Google's Gmail email service, as well as AdSense, the immensely profitable system which places Google-sold ads on blogs and other independent websites based on their content. Her claim over AdSense? She didn't kill the product outright, despite her fears that it would be "creepy." But she also reveals that Paul Buchheit, the Googler who burdened the company with "don't be evil" as an unsheddable corporate motto, is the true inventer of a system that matched ads to a Web page's content — whether that content is a blog post, an email message, or anything else.

Microsoft and Google are getting into the healthcare business, according to Steve Lohr, the New York Times' most reliable transcriptionist of big tech companies' plans. Both tech giants want to put patients' health records online and help them search for medical information on the Web. But Lohr entirely misses the point. Tech and healthcare have a long, parlous history, intertwined with the industry's laborious regulations. If change in the industry comes about, it's going to emerge from hospital halls and the lobbies of Congress, not from Silicon Valley. So why are Microsoft and Google putting some of their biggest brains on the project?

Everything you know about Craig Newmark is wrong. The tale that Craigslist's founder and CEO Jim Buckmaster like to tell about how eBay got a stake in their company goes like this: Newmark, the clueless business naif, issued shares to an employee, never thinking they'd be cashed in. That employee turned around and sold the shares right under Newmark's nose to rapacious auctions giant eBay back in 2004. It's a good story. But it's nothing like the truth, according to sources close to the transaction. And the truth? That Newmark and Buckmaster, who love to portray themselves as unpretentious types who care nothing for money, can be bought. For a mere $16 million.

Apple shares are down more than 4 percent to $139.53 right now. And why? Because AT&T has revealed that it only activated 146,000 iPhones in the last two days of the second quarter. Analysts, ludicrously, had expected 500,000, a number seemingly plucked out of thin air. Consider that Apple only has 160 U.S. stores, and consider that, while flagship stores like Apple's Stockton Street palace in San Francisco got as many as 750 iPhones for the Friday, June 29, launch, smaller stores got a much smaller supply. Consider that some of AT&T's 1,800 U.S. stores got as few as 15 iPhones. Even selling their entire stock as fast as they could, could Apple and AT&T's retail outlets really have moved many more phones than they had? (Photo by Dan_H)

Everyone's still talking about Henry Blodget's facile guess on his Internet Outsider blog that Microsoft might offer $6 billion for Facebook, the social network of the moment. And Facebook investor Jim Breyer, the Accel Partners venture capitalist who's on Facebook's board, tried to stoke hopes for such an outsized valuation by casually mentioning at Fortune's iMeme conference that Facebook was on track to do $100 million in revenues and turn an operating profit, by some financial measures, this year. But you shouldn't buy Blodget's musings, or Breyer's shilling, for a moment. Here's why.

(Valleywag Emeritus Nick Denton took a break from playing with his iPhone to pen this screed. Enjoy! - Ed.)