Very interesting story/rant over on WalletPop.com about the latest in a line of DirecTV (NYSE: DTV) ads -- this one featuring Chris Farley. Jami Bernard, the rant's author, is upset that David Spade is using a famous clip from his and Farley's hit comedy Tommy Boy to advertise the satellite-television provider. Bernard argues that Farley would not have liked to be remembered for a minor fat joke.

How was that assumption exactly made? Farley made fun of his size. He made his money by being an oversized, clumsy, fish-out-of-water comedian, so how can we determine that a "minor fat joke" (which some may argue is the funniest part of a very funny movie) is how he would or would not like to be remembered?

Is it possible to run a business by giving away your stuff? It sounds counterintuitive. But hey, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) gives away much of its offerings, right? I'm actually using Google Docs to write this column, for example.

True, Google is perhaps an exception (it certainly helps to have a huge user base and brand name). But it is worth exploring the concept. In fact, there is an excellent book on the topic -- Free: The Future of a Radical Price-- which came out recently.

When Carl Icahn announced the debut of his blog, The Icahn Report, there was great excitement. Finally, someone with decades of experience was going to expose the incompetence and bureaucratic self-enrichment that ensues at board meetings at most public companies in America.

It got off to a good start with a few interesting posts -- but there's been nothing since April 23rd, and even that was just a reprint of a piece Mr. Icahn did for the Huffington Post. Before that there were a few other reprints and guest posts. The last true Icahn Report exclusive piece by the man himself came on December 17th of last year.

In the wake of Starbucks (NASDAQ: SBUX) stronger-than-expected earnings, I found an interesting article about a study published by wiki provider Wetpaint and the Altimeter Group. The study suggests that when a company/brand is more active with its consumers through social media (the likes of Facebook and Twitter), it is more likely that the company will have financial success. The study looked at a group of 100 companies from BusinessWeek's listing of the top 100 brands of 2008 and their activity on Facebook, Twitter, and the likes.

According to the study, the brands scoring the highest on the engagement scale saw 18% revenue growth in the past year. Those brands with the least engagement saw revenue decline 6%. Companies that were the most active were classified as "mavens," while the least active were called "wallflowers."

The layoffs are already well under way at big media companies including Viacom (NYSE:VIA) and NBCU. But, what about the new media world, all of the blogs which have been created over the last three or four years? Those not owned by large companies (Blogging Stocks is owned by AOL), may simply not make it, even though they have become remarkably popular.

One of the largest blog networks, Gawker, has already said it will need to cut a significant numbers of people. And, it is a profitable company. A lot of independent blogs built up staff and other costs in the anticipation that growing visitors and pageviews would allow them to benefit from increasing advertising revenue. The recession has robbed them of that hope. The blogs backed by venture capitalists may not be able to get more money. Those which never raised money and have never had access to outside capital could be in the most trouble.

Some blogs have been lucky. paidContent was sold to the Guardian group in the UK. Ar's Technical, a tech blog, was sold to Conde Nast. Huffington Post raised $25 million. According to blog measurement site Technorati, Huffington is the top blog in the US. That gives it the advantage of size and branding.

There are several hundred blogs which have become important voices within their fields. Many of those that ramped up expenses in 2006 and 2007 are not going to make it. The revenue they were hoping for is not going to show up.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wall st.com.

Four hundred financial blogs. Who knew there were so many? Perhaps they have come of age now, at least as commercial entities. According to The Wall Street Journal, "Forbes Inc., was set to announce Monday that it will start selling ads this spring for about 400 financial blogs."

It is an open question as to whether Forbes can make money. Some of the larger blogs in the network are still tiny. Take Xconomy, one of the blogs Forbes is pitching. According to measurement service Compete, only a little over 18,000 people visited the site last month. Another site in the network, Talking Biz News, is too small to be measured by Compete or Alexa, another audience measurement firm.

If Forbes can pull together 400 sites with 5,000 visitors a month, however, it can have a network with two million visitors. And that's a lot.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

One source of contention among eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY) users have always been that the company does not listen, or least hear, their concerns. Well, the company is hoping to change that when it launches a new blog next month, "eBay Ink.", which will be manned by social media veteran Richard Brewer-Hay.

Fortune Small Business was able to take a crack at Brewer-Hay and ask him the tough questions that many eBay users are bound to be asking themselves. It was a pretty interesting read to be sure, and according to Brewer-Hay his new blog will be completely his words with absolutely no control by eBay itself.

eBay has definitely been under fire lately. The e-commerce giant has been accused of losing touch with its users, and acting more out of greed than anything else. The company is hoping that this new blog will give users a more direct look into the internal operations and decisions by the company. While eBay currently has blogs and forums for its users to use, these are more geared towards more traditional corporate communications.

Social scientists, unlike some journalists, are reluctant to label anything a trend until they've amassed and evaluated a great deal of data often over years. A journalist can always cite a lack of information, or the crush of daily (and shorter) deadlines as a reason his/her news story did not describe reality, but if a social scientist errs in a refereed-article, well let's just say the action is not conducive to career advancement.

And that's why many social scientists are reluctant to comment on the impact of Sen. Barack Obama's (D-IL) run for the U.S. presidency: it's way too early to articulate informed conclusions that are likely to endure.

Still, that's not to say that one can't comment on developments that may -- and underscoring "may" -- be indicative of a trend. And along that line, here's what we know about the Obama candidacy regarding voting behavior:

Over the past few months, I've received a ton of emails asking what my favorite finance blogs are (other than BloggingStocks of course). So here are my top ten favorites:

(in alphabetical order or else I'd be killed by bloggers)

1. ChrisPerruna.com – the most well organized stock blog around, very useful analysis
2. Dealbreaker.com – if you want Wall Street gossip, this is where you go
3. FeedTheBull.com – an up and coming site where bloggers can submit articles and users can vote their favorites
4. HowardLindzon.com – one of the godfathers of stock blogging, a real pro investor focusing on stocks making new highs
5. pfblogs.org – a blog comprised of posts from 1,000 different finance bloggers, say good-bye to whatever life you had

Hygenie.com lists the Top 10 Dirty Businessmen -- corporate executives whose conduct has, for one reason or another, raised serious questions about their personal hygiene. Here's the list:

• Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer -- Check out the picture of him sweating: Yuck!
• Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky -- Face itcher!
• Virgin Group Chairman Richard Branson -- Streaker!
  

I'm fascinated by the recent attempt of Australia's Virgin Mobile to apply the internet's unruly, free-for-all mindset on the real bricks and mortar world. If you missed it, Virgin used royalty-free images from Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO)'s photo-hosting site Flickr in a print ad campaign, and subsequently faces some courtroom headaches.

Now comes the equally engaging inverse of that case -- a situation that could be woven only on the web. Popular technology blog TechCrunch has been threatened with litigation seeking $1.5 million, accused of misappropriating this professional photo of Ashton Kutcher, the actor and host of MTV's Punk'd.

What's the evidence? This Google search, apparently. Go ahead -- click the search. Assuming Google hasn't switched things around on us, the, uh, dreamy beefcake shot in question should show up at the top, promoting Google (NASDAQ: GOOG)'s image search (by the way, when did the great Googly Moogly start returning "Extra Large Images"? I gotta keep up).

If you click on Ashton's shiny, hairless torso, you'll be taken to this TechCrunch post, regarding the voice-over-IP gizmo Ooma (bewilderingly, Demi Moore's main man-boy is Ooma's creative director). Clicking on a Google image-search result typically takes you to the web page where you can see the picture in context.

Damning evidence? Here's where it gets interesting, at least for those of us whose job duties include ritual prayers to Google -- TechCrunch never actually used the photo. What has the photographer's agency all litigation-happy actually stems from Google's rocket science.

Apparently, a sass-talking TechCrunch reader, in responding to the Ooma post, included a link to the offending photo of Kutcher -- just a link, mind you, not the image itself. In indexing the TechCrunch post, Google's search math processed the linked image and associated it with the TechCrunch post (the ones and zeros at work are somewhat related to Google bombing -- if you're unfamiliar, here's a rundown of the most notorious incident thereof).

The photographer's agency had best walk away from this one -- it has no case. Or maybe Ashton's really Punk'ng TechCrunch, and this is all a brilliant promotion as part of his duties as Ooma's creative director. After all, had you heard about Ooma before?

UPDATE: It figures -- the Google search now links Kutcher's photo to this Yahoo! Answers page -- I guess it's their headache now. Learn more at TechCrunch's post.

What's the price of a blogger's soul? In some cases, it's as little as dinner with a guest at a nice restaurant.

According to The Wall Street Journal, "As online food sites become increasingly influential in the restaurant business, chefs and owners are plying bloggers with free meals to get good write-ups. Some are also posting favorable reviews about themselves on popular Web sites or becoming Internet scribes."

This is as clear a violation of journalistic ethics as you will find. Real food critics dine anonymously and pay their own bills -- a known critic is likely to receive special treatment, which of course could make their experience less than indicative of what their readers can expect.

And then there's another problem: Is it really possible to be objective in a review when you aren't feeling the sting of having paid for it?

Blogs are certainly giving the traditional media a run for their money. But in order for the coup to be successful, they will have to adopt some of the ethical standards of the traditional media. For what it's worth, this is the policy for all blogs in the Weblogs Inc. (owned by AOL; includes BloggingStocks) network:

• Bloggers do not receive free products or services from the companies they write about.
• Bloggers do accept review units (e.g., a new cell phone at Engadget, a video game at Joystiq, or a week-long car loan at Autoblog); however, when they're finished reviewing products, they return these items to the manufacturers. If the manufacturers do not take the items back, we give them to our readers. This is the same editorial policy as the New York Times or Wall Street Journal.

Reuters (NASDAQ:RTRSY) has a blog section at the bottom of most business stories at Reuters.com. It is called Business Blog Posts, and it is powered by Blogburst. Blogburst is part of blog syndication service Pluck. And, Reuters is one of Pluck's owners.

Complicated? Yes.

The business blogs that Reuters runs are mostly small, one-person operations like Phil's Stock World and Captain Currency. Some, like The Kirk Report and Bill Cara, are well regarded. But, Reuters does them a disservice. It keeps the traffic for their content when it runs on Reuters.com. So, Reuters gets the ad revenue on those pages. The bloggers get their names on Reuters, and a link back to their sites, which is probably rarely used.

It is interesting to note that none of the big business blog sites like SeekingAlpha or Ticker Sense run in the Reuters program. They understand that the deal is good for Reuters and bad for the blogs. They aren't prepared to let Reuters compete with them for eyeballs using their own blog content.

It is a shame that Reuters has handled bloggers this way. Many other media outlets like WSJ.com and TheStreet.com comment on blogs but send traffic to the bloggers. Reuters has decided not to give the little guy a leg up.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St. which was approached about the Reuters program and turned the company down.

As newspapers nearly everywhere fret over the threat that bloggers pose to their very existence, one of the best and best-known blogs out there has decided she wants to have more in common with traditional media. The Huffington Post, which sports 43 full-time employees and another 1,800 bloggers, has decided that it wants to become an "all-inclusive digital newspaper," according to the Editors Weblog. Best-known as a left-leaning political blog, co-founder Arianna Huffington wants to make it more balanced, and has even suggested she would like have someone like Karl Rove join the staff.

The Huffington Post could give traditional news sites a run for their money because it links to contents from numerous other sites. It's status as a sort of news 'zine allows it to provide readers with a sort of "best of the web" news coverage -- a one stop-source for everything (some readers think) they need to read.

It remains to be seen whether The Huffington Post will be able to make the crossover into becoming a more "fair and balanced" media outlet. The founder, after all, has a history of switching sides as it suits the prevailing political winds.

And we all love our media "fair and balanced," don't we? We all turn to Fox News (News Corp. NYSE: NWS) as a place to watch right-wing whack jobs spouting their demagoguery, but no one would ever take it seriously as a source of information. Right? Right?!

For many entrepreneurs, the VC world is a mystery. What do VCs really want? What are the valuation metrics? What are the key terms in a shareholder's agreement?

It's all complex stuff (even for some VCs) and, yes, there are numerous VCs who are blogging about these issues.

Is it a good thing? Well, there's a piece on the topic on Boston.com. So far, it seems the answer is "yes."

After all, if entrepreneurs have accurate guidelines, it means that the parties won't waste time. Something else: certain companies – that may provide tremendous benefits – can get the funding they need.

Oh, a blog can also bring more deal flow for VCs, and in light of the competition, this can be a nice advantage.

What's more, VC blogs can be a good source for those who aren't looking for capital. After all, VCs must keep a pulse on the latest-and-greatest. So, they often have some intriguing opinions.

If you want to check out some of the VC blogs, click here.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements.