Yesterday, Diane Sawyer of ABC World News sat down for an interview with the always-uncomfortable-on-camera Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The interview is pretty long and rehashes a lot of what most people already know about Facebook. But amidst Sawyer’s predictable questions and Zuckerberg’s predictable answers, there were a few noteworthy nuggets. Here's a summary:

On an IPO, Zuckerberg says: "When it makes sense, right. I mean, what we're most focused on is just building these tools that help people stay connected with the people that they care about. And at some point along the path, I think it'll make sense to have an IPO. But we're not running the company to do that. We're running the company to serve more people."

On “The Social Network,” the upcoming movie about Facebook, Zuckerberg says: "I just think people have a lot of fiction. But, you know, I mean, the real story of Facebook is just that we've worked so hard for all this time," he said. "I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded."

On whether or not he signed away 84 percent of the company in a contract years ago, Zuckerberg says: "…I think we were quite sure that we did not sign a contract that says that they have any right to ownership over Facebook."

On whether or not he hates interviews, Zuckerberg says: Nothing and blushes.

The Big Money presents the Disrupters, a new podcast that zeroes in on companies like Facebook, Google (GOOG), Hulu, and Apple (AAPL) as they change the face of American business. Chadwick Matlin hosts. On this week's show, the Disrupters discusses how a status update culture has changed the way we take the pulse of a nation. The Big Money's Twitter blogger, Steve Spillman, joins, as does a researcher from Harvard who has analyzed years' worth of tweets to see how happy we are.

Listen using our audio player below or download the MP3.

Subscribe to TBM podcasts on iTunes.

Podcast production by Jesse Baker.

As Google (GOOG) launched its now-famous confrontation with China last January, everyone and their mothers all had the same thought: "This will be great for Baidu." And it was.

Baidu (BIDU), of course, is China's domestic search engine, the one that most directly competed with Google. And by competed we mean pretty thoroughly trounced, controlling some 60 percent of the search market. It's the Fox News of search in China; while more people used Baidu, they tended to be less educated and less affluent, while the intellectual class stuck with Google.

Now, as Google has slowly been disengaging with China, Baidu has really stepped in and cleaned up. The company has just released its second quarter numbers, and they're damn impressive. Net income is now at $123.6 million, more than double what it was this time last year. Sales are up 74 percent. The company's stock value is double what it was when Google and China came to blows seven months ago. Baidu's share of the search market has now risen to 70 percent.

Interestingly, there may be more than Google at the root of Baidu's growth. According to IDG News Service, Chinese interest in the World Cup was awfully strong, considering China doesn't have much of a soccer tradition, nor did it have a team in the tournament. World Cup searches spiked during the Cup, giving Baidu a fresh and unexpected source of popularity.

In fact, Baidu's growth is so impressive that Wall Street Journal writer Andrew Peaple wonders if the company will now face the same anti-trust questions Google faces in the United States. "Such market dominance could have a downside for Baidu," he writes. "Few, if any, Chinese companies are so preeminent in their sector, even among state-owned enterprises. On the face of it, the company could face threats under China's anti-monopoly law, in place since mid-2008."

And while we're on the subject, here's one last one Baidu detail. Just a day or two after Google revealed that very sophisticated hackers in China hit their internal systems, Baidu itself was hacked by an outfit calling itself the "Iranian Cyber Army." Now, it appears that Baidu is suing the American domain name service provider Register.com, alleging that the company's negligence and recklessness allowed the hackers to take control of Baidu. Reuters reports that yesterday a Manhattan-based federal judge allowed the lawsuit to continue, suggesting that the plaintiffs have a pretty serious case.

File this one under “things I didn’t know existed.” Listen, people, I try to be as comprehensive and definitive as possible, but sometimes something escapes my purview. I had no clue Twitter was making wine.

As it turns out, last October Twitter announced that it was starting a wine label called Fledgling with the help of San Francisco DIY winemaker Crushpad. The wine, which will be bottled and shipped next month, costs just $20 a bottle, $5 of which goes to Room to Read, a nonprofit that supports literacy efforts in India. Neither Twitter nor Crushpad make any real money from it. Because, as Twitter founders Biz Stone and Ev Williams say in their introduction, “if you can’t read, you can’t Tweet!” Really.

In the spirit of Twitter, there’s a dedicated feed documenting the whole winemaking process. In April and May, Twitter and Crushpad invited followers to purchase “tasting packs” of a few varieties of the Fledgling Wine. On May 7, Twitter held a barrel tasting for all its employees and invited a few of its closet wine experts to host a live-tasting for all those early adopters who bought the tasting packs.

Lucky for us, the video is available online, and it’s amazing. Maybe it’s cliché to make fun of wine people, but this thing is RICH.

Because it’s nearly half an hour long (!) I’ve faithfully live-transcribed the best parts below.

VIDEO LIVE BLOG

00:01 Three guys are at a table. The guy on the left works for Crushpad. He’s smart. In the middle is my favorite guy, Raymond Nasr, a Twitter adviser. The guy on the right (let’s call him “black shirt”) was the director of search at Twitter, Doug Cook. He has since left the company.

00:42 Guy on the left: “You’re going to get it on the nose.”

03:20 The guy in the middle must be New York Magazine art critic Jerry Saltz doing a performance art piece, right?

03:45 Middle guy about the wine's aesthetics: “The visual on this, against a white backdrop, which I always like to do, it’s a little bit chartreuse!”

04:52 Middle: “It’s crunchy on the nose., which is a funny way to put it.”

05:19 Everybody just started smelling at the same time.

05:51 The guy in the middle has become my clear favorite. Everything he does is hilarious, but then nobody responds, which just makes it awkward. That he keeps pointing at his face and gesturing wildly doesn't help.

06:36 Oh, here comes the guy on the right, saying something actually interesting. He knows real things about the science of wine! It's about the different types of acid!

06:58 While trying to find a food to go with the wine, the guy in the middle says: “For our friends in Iowa, maybe corn-on-the-cob? With lots of butter?”

08:24 Guy on the left breaks down and says “butter” like, four times.

08:45 My favorite man is drunk! I think!

09:15

09:42 Lefty says California chardonnay has a reputation for being “a little dumb.” And now I’m a little smarter.

10:01 French accent from my favorite guy!

11:02 “Overblown” is said for the sixth or seventh time.

11:52 “If I may recommend a food-wine pairing for this, a triple-cream brie, perhaps a [French thing I can’t understand], with a fig spread, on a water cracker.” —Guess who! (It was the middle man.)

13:56 Left: “We’ve got here clones 828 and 777.”

14:36

15:45 Middle: “Bing cherry, bing cherry, bing cherry!”

16:08 At this point, I am no longer recommending that you read this liveblog instead of watching this video. I’m upgrading the video to a MUST-WATCH!

16:40 My favorite guy keeps taking these awkward looks at the black-shirt guy.

17:30 I actually learned something about champagne! There are red grapes in it, and I didn't know that! Great work, black-shirt!

18:32 Now we get the real message. All of this benefits Room to Read! A nonprofit educating future tweeters nationwide!

18:35 The guy on the left just actually said, “Social-media-created wine.”

19:05 From the suckup on the right: “I’d pay 20 dollars for this, even if it wasn’t going to charity.”

19:17 Middle continues to bring it. And bring it hard: “Food-wine pairing: leg of lamb, rosemary sprig, roasted new potatoes, and some green beans. I’ll be there. Eight o’clock.”

19:33 Guy on the right, with a less ridiculous recommendation, “Also, duck.”

20:16 “I hope people following along are also tweeting what they think of the wines.” Remember when Slate did exactly that?

20:46 Middle: “Barrel tastings are about the future, just like Room to Read is about the future, and Twitter is sort of about the future, in a way.” OK, he’s definitely drunk.

21:25

22:10 Middle: “Are you guys getting just a tingle of effervescence on the palate?”

23:40 I really hope this ends with them all clinking glasses on a freeze-frame.

24:33 I got my clink! But no freeze-frame. Boo.

24:41 The sign-off, from Mr. Left: “Wherever you are on the planet, world peace, and good wine.”

Slate sister site The Big Money has an immediate need for a part-time copy editor in our New York office for 20 hours a week (preferably five days per week, hours flexible). The copy editor will be responsible for applying Associated Press and house style to articles and blog entries (for several very active blogs) as well as doing some fact-checking and correcting grammatical, usage, and typographical errors on tight daily deadlines working in our Drupal publishing system (you don't need to know Drupal to apply). The position demands quick and accurate copy-editing; familiarity with AP style; and excellent grammar, usage, and spelling skills. Two years of editing experience in an online or print environment under daily deadline pressure is preferred. Candidates must also be flexible and able to work independently, keep an even keel during busy times, balance many projects at once, prioritize tasks in order to meet deadlines, be at ease with technology, and be able to manage and respond to a large quantity of daily e-mail. A four-year degree in journalism, English, technical communications, or a related field preferred. An interest in business journalism would be ideal. For the right candidate, there may also be some freelancing writing, blogging, and/or editing opportunities. The Slate Group is an equal opportunity employer and offers a competitive hourly rate. To apply, please send a cover letter and résumé to slatecejob@gmail.com by July 30, 2010.

Once you remove the complexities of distribution from the book equation, an author has to ask herself what she gets from a publisher. After all, publicity is a function of the author's own fame, talent, or personal story. And publishing is, at its very core, nothing more than publicity plus distribution.

In the contemporary book business, the publishing house's role is really one of risk displacement. A publisher puts up a guarantee in exchange for a portion of the profits if the book sells better than the author or her agent expected. Remember, that's what an advance is: The author and agents bet that more money is to be had up front than over time. (Yes, they still get royalties, but at a lower rate than the effective royalty rate for all but a few advances.)

Most times, the agent gets it right because most books fail in the marketplace. A few times, agents and authors get it wrong. Their book becomes a big hit and they have to give the publisher a greater share of the proceeds than they might like. In other words, the publisher gets to make a profit. Don't feel bad for the agents and authors, though. They usually make it back on the next deal when expectations run higher.

Well, that's the way publishing used to work. But as the marketplace shrinks and publishers are forced to become more selective, agents are having a harder time placing work. They're also waking up to the fact that distribution is easy to accomplish with e-books. So a number of agents or former agents have gotten into the e-book business, including Arthur Klebanoff, Richard Curtis, and Scott Waxman.

Today, in a nice feat of publicity leverage, Andrew Wylie announces in the New York Times that he, too, is becoming an e-book publisher:

Odyssey Editions will begin modestly, with 20 titles that have never been available in e-book format. Among them are “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, “The Naked and the Dead” by Norman Mailer, “Midnight’s Children” by Salman Rushdie, “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov and “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” by Hunter S. Thompson.

All of the books will be priced at $9.99 at the Kindle store, said Russ Grandinetti, the vice president of Kindle content for Amazon.

Mr. Wylie said on Wednesday that he had not discussed the project directly with the publishers who own the rights to produce in print many of the books on his list. Stuart Applebaum, a spokesman for Random House, said in a statement:

“We can’t comment on this matter, in part because we have not been made directly aware of any plans affecting specific Random House Inc.

What Wylie is doing here is something different. Having built his international business around exploiting the backlist rights of literary writers, often through their estates, Wylie's core business is mature and somewhat threatened by the global transition away from print. If the future of reading, especially in college courses, is on tablets, Wylie needs to get his substantial backlists in a broad range of languages selling in digital form. And he can't accept the publishing house's meager e-book royalties. The decline of backlist sales makes it unsustainable for his estates.

So Wylie is absolutely right to circumvent the publishers. There is precious little marketing done to promote backlist literary titles. All the work has been done over the lifetime of the author or posthumously by the culture that validates a writer. A publisher, in this instance, is only making sure the books are printed and arrive at the bookstores on time. With e-books, the publisher really has no role.

However, Wylie's backlist business in author estates is somewhat unique in the publishing world. Once he has established a digital publishing house—and by giving Amazon (AMZN) an exclusive he really hasn't created a publishing company so much as given the books to Amazon to publish—will Wylie be willing to risk his own capital as a publisher?

Once all such backlist books are released in electronic form, what's next for the evolution from agent to electronic publisher? Will any of the agencies be willing to risk their own capital when an author needs some money to pay the bills while she takes time off to write?

If you're on Facebook and you don't play FarmVille, you know how hard it can be to keep the online game out of your life. Now FarmVille is coming to grocery stores, in the form of stickers on some Green Giant brand fruits and vegetables. And you can't hit the "hide" button in the produce section. General Mills (GIS), owner of the Green Giant brand of canned and frozen veggies, licenses the brand to Growers Express for fresh produce. 

Fortune.com reports that the stickers will bear a redeemable code for FarmVille currency, the money people spend on the game's virtual goods rather than trying to earn more real money for their actual lives. The stickers will appear in 4,000 stores nationally.

So, a Treasury secretary, a labor union leader, a hedge-fund billionaire, and an heiress walk into a conference call.

It's not a Catskills joke. It was the teleconference staged Wednesday morning by United for a Fair Economy's Responsible Wealth Project to discuss the need to reinstate the estate tax. The situation surrounding the estate tax is truly bizarre. The excellent book Death by a Thousand Cuts, by Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro, describes how a tax that falls on the slimmest minority of Americans was set on the path to extinction in 2001. Legislation called for the tax to decline to the point at which it disappears entirely in 2010. Then it would bounce back to its pre-2001 level in 2011. The Republican advocates of the legislation assumed that Congress would act in the interim to permanently abolish the tax. But they didn't, in large measure because—shocker!— Republicans in 2009 refused to cooperate on a compromise. And so 2010 is turning into an excellent time for rich people to die. Sens. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., and Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., are working on a proposal to reduce estate taxes going forward. (They are an odd pair: The number of Arkansans subject to the estate tax each year could fit into the master bathroom of a Greenwich, Conn., mansion, and Kyl is one of those foolish deficit faux-hawks who can't abide increases in debt but is happy to push legislaton that would increase the deficit by a few hundred billion dollars.)

The purpose of the press conference was to show that abolishing the estate tax massively increases the deficit in order to help a few very wealthy people. Former Treasury secretary and former Citi chairman Robert Rubin opened the call, playing the role of the wise establishmentarian. He argued that the current deficits are unsustainable, and public investments in infrastructure and education are necessary to keep America strong. "Our country faces tremendous unemployment and shortfalls in investment, and we have a fiscal path that is unsustainable and dangerous in many different respects," he said. And since the estate tax "supplies revenues with no adverse supply-side effects," the proceeds could be used for deficit reduction, for public investments, or to help people afflicted by the economic crisis.

Second on the call was the union leader. You know the type: barrel-chested, tough-talking, confrontational, very much into class warfare. In the union leader's worldview, the top 1 percent has been bogarting all the economic gains for the past few decades. Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, appealed not just to reason, but to emotion. He started by reading a quote from Theodore Roosevelt about the evils of inherited wealth. Speaking with disdain of the Kyl-Lincoln proposal, he said, "We think it's ludicrous that some in Congress are proposing to end the estate tax at the same time they oppose action to create jobs. Anyone who pretends to care about cutting deficits while opposing reinstatement of estate tax is clearly residing on a different planet than working people."

Trumka was followed by the hedge fund magnate, one of those self-made, public-minded billionaires who can be found here and there in the tech and financial industries. These guys are acutely aware of the differences between people who make money (them) and people who receive it (rich kids), between the multipliers (them) and the spenders (rich kids). To Julian Robertson, the founder of hedge fund giant Tiger Management and a major philanthropist, the economic and moral case for an estate tax increase was simple. "You get out of a credit crisis by getting your house in order, and in America's case bringing your deficit down. This implies tax increases." The fairest way to do it, he said, is to tax "the least deserving recipients of wealth, which are the inheritors." The tax is not just good for America, he said, but even for the heirs and heiresses. Robertson noted that "there are indicators that inheritors have difficulty adjusting to their inheritance." (I guess he watches Gossip Girl too.)

Finally came the inheritor, on whom the mantle of great inherited wealth frequently weighs heavily. Heirs who favor an estate tax are motivated less by liberal guilt than by unease, realism, and historical perspective. They've seen how their families amassed, preserved, and passed down wealth in spite of income and estate taxes that were far higher than they are today. "My life of great comfort was made possible in spite of the estate tax," said Abigail Disney, the grandniece of Walt Disney, a filmmaker and philanthropist. "And my grandfather [Roy Disney, brother of Walt] would be the first to tell you that he was able to amass his fortune not in spite of, but because of, the American system."—the roads that enabled people to get to Disneyland, the patents that protected Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, and the Marshall Plan, which helped provide a vast European market for the company. Heirs know that while charity has its own rewards, the estate tax and charitable deductions provide huge spurs to philanthropy.

Coming from far different places, the quartet arrived at the same destination. In an era of rampant inequality, low taxes on owners of assets and capital, and record deficits, the estate tax's impending revival couldn't come at a better time.

Just like it did a few weeks ago, the official Twitter blog Wednesday featured an acknowledgement of the recent technical problems plaguing the site. But this time, Twitter knows what it’s going to do about it! Take it away, blog:

When you can’t update your profile photo, send a Tweet, or even sign on to Twitter, it’s frustrating. We know that, and we’ve had too many of these issues recently.

As we said last month, we are working on long-term solutions to make Twitter a more reliable and stable platform. It’s our number one priority. The bulk of our engineering efforts are currently focused on this issue, and we have moved resources from other projects to focus on it.

But still no mention of what those long-term solutions are. Until, that is, you read Twitter’s engineering blog. It filled in what its sister blog left out: Twitter is moving into its own data center this fall. It will have full control and customization of its storage space for the first time ever, meaning it should be much better- equipped to handle overload issues in the future.

This looks like an enormous boost to Twitter’s struggling image in the two communities that matter most: its users and its developers. If they can make the data-center switch easily, the company should be equipped to try newer and better things in the future, on the strong platform of a stable and scalable site. Here’s hoping!

California's Legislative Analyst's Office on Wednesday issued a report concluding that legalizing marijuana in the state "could result in additional revenue for local governments and free up law enforcement to prosecute other crimes."

In other news, meteorologists report that rain comes from clouds in the sky.

Seriously, though. The nonpartisan body's report was hailed by the Drug Policy Alliance and other proponents of Proposition 19—this fall's voter initiative on legalizing recreational pot—as confirming many of their arguments in favor of the measure.

But it also includes caveats, some of which make sense and some of which don't. State and local governments might potentially reap hundreds of millions of dollars from pot in the form of taxes and license fees, but the actual amounts "are subject to significant uncertainty," according to the report. It largely depends on how many local governments license growers, and what kinds of taxes and fees they impose.

There's also the problem of the feds. Pot is still against federal law, and will remain so even if Prop 19 passes. "It is not known to what extent the federal government would continue to enforce" those laws, the report warns. The Obama administration has vowed to make marijuana a low enforcement priority, particularly when it comes to now-legal medical pot (though the DEA is still conducting raids). But what happens if we have a President Palin?

The report also states that legalization "could result in savings to the state and local governments by reducing the number of marijuana offenders incarcerated in state prisons and county jails, as well as the number placed under county probation or state parole supervision. These savings could reach several tens of millions of dollars annually."

The report's assertion that legalization "could lead to an increase in consumption of marijuana" is true enough. But it goes on to conclude that this could "potentially" result in "an unknown increase in the number of individuals seeking publicly funded substance abuse and other medical services."

"Potentially." "Unknown." These weasel words are included because we're talking about pot here. There might be some increase in costs for these services, but it likely won't be much, because if you're smoking too much pot, or want to stop entirely, the easiest, cheapest, and most effective method is to just stop smoking pot. I think it's safe to assume that most pot smokers know this, and prefer this method to rehab, even if the state is paying for it.

The report also shoots down a myth about Prop 19 that some opponents have been spreading. If passed, the law will not force employers to hire or retain potheads. Employers are barred from discriminating against workers for "engaging in conduct permitted by the measure," the report notes. "However, it does specify that employers would retain existing rights to address consumption of marijuana that impairs en employee's job performance."

So, you can't fire people for smoking pot, but you can fire them for being stoned. 

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke had little good news when he spoke on the economy’s outlook yesterday. According to the New York Times, unemployment, which has remained high at just under 9.7 percent, is expected to still be more than 7 percent by the end of 2012. The Fed considers full employment to be about 5 percent. In 2008 and 2009, the United States lost 8.5 million jobs, and the economy has remained unstable from the European debt crisis. Despite a slight growth of 100,000 jobs a month during the first half of 2010, Bernanke said that it is “insufficient to reduce the unemployment rate materially.” The Fed is also expecting small changes in economic growth.

In the wake of the government’s second moratorium on offshore drilling, four oil companies are banding together to create a rapid-response system in case of another oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, according to the Wall Street Journal. Exxon Mobile (XOM), Chevron (CVX), Royal Dutch Shell (RDS), and ConocoPhillips (COP) will spend a combined $1 billion on the system, which would “contain up to 100,000 barrels of oil a day flowing 10,000 feet below the surface of the sea.” The system would be available for use by other companies drilling in the Gulf, although it will take a year and a half to be put into place. Overall, the system will be similar to what BP (BP) has relied on for the last three months, with “several oil-collection ships and an array of subsurface containment equipment.” In the event of a spill, crews would mobilize within 24 hours to install a cap that would redirect oil to pipes connected to ships. BP wasn’t invited to join because the group felt the company had enough to deal with right now, but “ultimately the four companies would like the rest of the industry to join in the effort.”

In the past six months the administration has tackled health care and financial reform, and now President Obama is eyeing the housing market, reports the Washington Post. Perhaps the largest concern with the financial regulation that Obama just signed into law was that it didn’t get at the root of the problem, of what really caused the financial crisis. Now, the administration wants to address that issue with “an overhaul of government policy that could diverge from the emphasis on homeownership embraced by former administrations.” The new financial reform bill requires Obama’s administration to have a housing reform proposal that includes “restructuring or replacing Fannie [Mae] and Freddie [Mac]” by early 2011. The government is aiming at “fewer homeowners overall” by placing “more barriers to lower-income people buying houses.” However, the changes would bring about a more stable market.

While Google (GOOG) ran into censorship problems with the Chinese government, rival Baidu (BIDU) reaped the rewards, according to Bloomberg. Already China’s most popular search engine, Baidu beat estimates with a strong second quarter. The company’s net income more than doubled to $123.6 million or 837.4 million yuan. Baidu gained new advertisers when Google had to shut its China-based site because of censorship rules. During the second quarter, Baidu gained another 3 percent of China’s search-engine market, bringing it to 70.8 percent; meanwhile, Google’s market share dropped from 29.5 percent to 27.3 percent.

Finally, although growth in the United States is slow, Credit Suisse (CS) believes there is “zero chance” there will be a double-dip, reports Bloomberg. However, what the financial group does predict is that the United States will be affected by this past recession for many years to come. As a result of the crisis, “U.S. contractions will be more frequent and severe.” The rebound from this recession has been very weak, which has made the economic slowdown seem even worse. Still, recent “gains in business investment on equipment and software” are helping the United States “avoid a renewed recession."

Honda used to be basically bulletproof, but of late, some have been questioning its mojo. Back in May, Edmunds AutoObserver wondered aloud about problems at the Japanese carmaker:

Honda, which always used to be so good at having its finger on the pulse of the buying public, seemingly has exhausted its famed product-development mojo. Yes, the cars - including the now almost 5-year-old Civic - still sell. The company reversed losses from the global industry downturn and for the fiscal year that ended in March recorded a $2.9-billion profit, a 96-percent surge. Honda maintains a top-drawer quality reputation.

Yet analysts, industry watchers and even Honda loyalists continue to murmur the company is losing its legendary edge for forward-looking engineering and an uncanny ability to apply that engineering in a way that delights customers.

Maybe Honda has been listening, because it's jumping on the electric car bandwagon, according to Portfolio.com:

Honda’s looking to come from behind against Japanese and worldwide rivals in the electric vehicle game.

Japan’s second-largest automaker announced this morning it would roll out plug-in hybrids and electric cars in Japan and the United States by 2012. Among major automakers, that’s fairly slow adoption. GM is rolling out its extended range hybrid Volt this year, while Nissan’s all-electric Leaf is expected to hit American and Japanese roads this year as well. 

Slow adoption indeed. By the time Honda gets a plug-in hybrid to market, Chevy and Nissan will already be considering revisions to the Volt and the Leaf. For Honda, that's not even like giving the competition a head-start—it's like telling the competition that you're going to run a different race in a parallel universe. 

Saying "We'll have something by 2012" really makes Honda sound clueless in 2010, which is after all, the Year of the Electric Car. One wants to give the extremely successful carmaker the benefit of the doubt. However ...

There’s nothing investors like to talk about more than their “10-baggers”—the blockbuster stocks that shoot up 10 times or more in a few years. A few 10-baggers can make a portfolio or an analyst’s reputation. Many of the great 10-baggers are household names, companies that started out strong and went on a long tear.

And then there’s Priceline (PCLN).

Few companies have been as far down in the dumps as Priceline and survived (at least without a Federal bailout). A few years ago, Priceline would easily have made any list of companies that seemed fated to fail—an outrageously promoted dotcom that went public before showing any profits and plummeted in the ensuing Internet stock crash.

Founded in 1997 by Jay Walker, an entrepreneur with a talent for selling himself as an Internet visionary, Priceline had every element investors were looking for in a dotcom story. There was Walker’s “idea incubator,” called Walker Digital (another one of Walker Digitals inventions: slot machines that offered free long-distance calls). There was a clever, “name your price,” patented business model that was going to be as big in travel as eBay (EBAY) was in retail. There was backing from all the right venture capitalists, and a high-profile chief executive. There was the obligatory blockbuster IPO in March 1999.

It didn’t matter much at the beginning that Priceline sometimes spent more to buy tickets from airlines than it made selling them. Or that Walker’s “name your price” idea may have owed a fair bit to a failed reservation-by-fax service. Or that the hype surrounding Priceline was so big that the company seemed to exist in an alternate reality of impossible expectations. The story was good, and the press (despite a few naysayers) and investors jumped on Priceline as they did on the other dotcom darlings.

Then came the decline. Walker, the media-savvy founder, resigned in 2001, with $276 million in proceeds from stock sales. Priceline’s business model was only marginally profitable, and it wasn’t exactly making it up on volume. Instead of the hypergrowth that investors had counted on, Priceline’s revenues actually declined from 2000 to 2002. Air travel crashed after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and even when it came back, airlines cut back on surplus seats and pushed to sell the seats they had through low-commission, online travel services.

By late 2002, Priceline was close to getting delisted, as its stock price flirted with penny stock territory. The chief executive job went to the company general counsel, Jeffery Boyd (a former insurance company lawyer) in the corporate equivalent of a battlefield commission.

Now jump ahead eight years. Since Boyd took over, Priceline’s stock has gone up almost 18-fold. Boyd embarked on a wholesale rethinking of the business—effectively under the radar, because hardly anyone but well-paid spokesman William Shatner really cared much about Priceline anymore. For less than $300 million (chicken scratch in Priceline’s multi-billion dollar glory days), he bought two European travel sites and turned Priceline’s focus overseas.

Now, with almost no attention from the business press (with notable exception of Ari Levy and Roben Farzad of Bloomberg BusinessWeek, who, to give full credit, noticed the amazing turnaround before me), Priceline has become a very profitable operation (you can check out the financial details for yourself here). Of its $471 million in operating income, 75 percent comes from the European businesses Boyd acquired. Most of the rest comes from advertising revenue. The name-your-price business that is still Priceline’s calling card in the United States still exists and now ekes out a small profit.

In other words, what happened with Priceline is summed up simply by saying that the company succeeded despite the hype—and only after the press moved on from the big Priceline “story.” I’ve written before about how the search for the surprising story makes journalists really bad stock-pickers. Of this, it’s hard to find a better example.

Priceline’s high-concept business model was red meat for the press in an era when the Internet was going to change everything. By contrast, the reality of building a profitable travel business was not something that Priceline could ever sell as a hot story—or especially tried to (though, in one 2005 radio segment, you can hear Boyd unsuccessfully trying to interest the interviewer in something other than “name your own price” and William Shatner).

The bottom line is that the business that Boyd built out of the dotcom rubble is successful. It is also, from the point of view of most reporters, dull—though from the point of view of investors, it is emphatically not at all dull.

This is not to say that all successful businesses are dull or that effective chief executives are colorless. Some great businesses are interesting and full of counterintuitive insights. Some great chief executives are colorful characters (as Boyd may well be in person—it’s a bad idea to try to guess a person’s character from his resume). But the story of Priceline highlights the persistent difficulty the media has, and probably always will have, at disentangling an interesting story from the fundamentals of a business—at least until the story is recast along the dramatic lines of a high-stakes turnaround.

That general problem is pervasive in reporting about business and, more broadly, about the economic scene. The history of Priceline makes for a story of corporate resurrection that might someday make a good case study for business schools. But it’s also a great study in the distance between media hoopla and business reality that’s worth noting in journalism schools as well.

It looks like small pot producers in Oakland might have a future after all. It depends on what the city council does to make room for them in their licensing scheme.

On Tuesday night, the council voted to create just four licenses for the manufacture of pot in industrial sections of the city. Those four indoor growing operations will be huge—they have to be, because the licenses will each cost $211,000 a year and operators will be required to take out $3 million in insurance.

But the council also said that it would come up with ways to let them keep operating. Precisely what that means, however, is still unclear.

Before and during the council meeting, small operators—there are hundreds of them in the city—loudly complained that the licensing scheme would put them out of business, or at least keep them illicit while also making it harder for them to sustain themselves. That, in fact, was one of the major reasons for the ordinance. The council said it wanted to be able to regulate the city's pot-growers, and many fly-by-night operations pose health and safety hazards. Several fires in the city have been blamed on pot growers, for instance. They are often housed in boarded-up homes, abandoned buildings, and private garages.

In the meantime, some smaller operators and their customers (medical marijuana businesses) are still complaining that the huge facilities will result in the "McDonalds-ization" or the "Wal-Mart-ization" of the pot business. Smaller businesses will be priced out of the market, they say, and the big outfits' weed might be inferior besides.

That last bit is pure theory. So, for that matter, is the rest of it, since, again, we don't know what the revamped licensing scheme will look like. But as long as the city allows smaller operators to continue and doesn't impose onerous restrictions or overly hefty fees on them, it's hard to see what the problem is. Steve DeAngelo, president of Harborside Health Center, the city's biggest medical marijuana facility, told a local TV news station that with the big pot farms, there would be "a big problem with the product. It would be the difference between a fine wine from a Napa vineyard and a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20."

Last I looked, there were plenty of high quality Napa wines (and Sonoma wines, and imported French wines) filling the shelves at my local grocery store. And if the smaller growers' product is really superior to that grown by the big farms, they'll do fine. This will be all the more true if the customer base widens, as it would if this fall's California voter initiative to legalize recreational pot use succeeds.

But no matter what the city does, the movement of big business into the pot industry is inevitable, and for that reason, there likely will be fewer mom and pop pot operations. But the best operations will survive just like neighborhood hardware stores. And meanwhile, pot smokers will be paying less for their weed. That's capitalism, for good and for ill.

To celebrate Larry King's coming retirement, Steve Elliot of Toke of the Town has amassed what he says are the top five marijuana moments from the Larry King show over the years.

It's better than I thought it might be. In a recent appearance, Mick Jagger shares his commonsense views on legalization and on recreational pot use. (Don't be high at work, even if you're a rock star.) In another clip, Larry lights a joint for Robert Randall, briefly famous as a medical marijuana patient who came off as a total square. Elliot takes the opportunity to note that Randall, who had glaucoma, was part of a federal initiative, the Compassionate Investigational New Drug program, that "has for years supplied a limited number of patients with cans of 300 free, ready-rolled joints every month."

There are only a few patients left in the program, which was discontinued as the federal government shifted to a zero-tolerance policy toward medical pot. Randall, whose lawsuit prompted the program's creation, died in 2001. In two more clips, both Willie Nelson and Snoop Dogg tell Larry they got high before their interviews.

The iBooks app gets an update that adds a dictionary function and closer views on in-line images.

Flashlight app was secretly letting you tether your laptop to your iPhone—until Apple (AAPL) caught on to the ruse. (MacRumors)

The Filemaker Go app sneaks volumes of data onto iPhones and iPads. (Macworld)

iChatr, a mobile Chatroulette, is yanked from App Store. Nude exhibitionists despair. (9to5 Mac)

The amount of data your iPhone stores about you is more frightening than you think. (Free Press)

Attention developers: The iPad is still in need of a killer app. (BusinessWeek)

Why is it that news of a startup raising venture money automatically confers the aura of success around a company? Did we learn nothing from Friendster, the social-network pioneer that burned through millions of Kleiner Perkins' dollars before being blindsided by MySpace and Facebook?

So when the buzz started around Flipboard, I was a little skeptical. Flipboard launched an iPad app that imports links from Twitter and Facebook feeds and displays them in an iPad-magazine style format. It's a seductive pitch—your own customized digital magazine!—and it raised $10.5 million in funding from VCs including, that's right, Kleiner Perkins.

When I tried Flipboard, it wouldn't let me import my own Twitter feed because its servers were too busy. That was a temporary glitch, and I suppose it speaks to how well the hype is working. Once I got it working, I did agree that the design looked good, at least at first blush.

But I soon found enough niggling issues with the app that I ended up feeling I won't be using it very often. Instead, I'll stick to Twiter clients and news apps like SkyGrid and Pulse. Flipboard doesnt cache content for reading offline. If you click on a story you want to read, you only get the first couple of paragraphs, and you have to click again to go to the full story in a browser. So instead of clicking once on a link in Twitter, I have to click twice to get to the story in Flipboard. No, thanks.

I did like that I can set up feeds from individual sites, like a fancy RSS reader. But the design didn't let me know who the authors of the posts were, which is a problem on sites like GigaOm, where authors have distinct personalities and use the first person a lot. And on Hacker News, it stripped out other information useful in navigation like the number of votes and comments for each story.

Flipboard is a solid idea that has a promising enough start. But the execution of the idea is tricky and needs to be fleshed out more in the details. Maybe Flipboard will fix these niggling issues. If not, someone else is likely to steal Flipboard's thunder, the way MySpace stole Friendster's.

A very observant and funny post from USA Today's auto blogger, Chris Woodyard. A sampling, after Lindsay Lohan was driven away from the Beverly Hills courthouse yesterday:

As Lindsay Lohan was carted off to jail today in Los Angeles, the star's fall from the glam life to the slammer couldn't have been more apparent than in her mode of transport. You can barely see the back of her head as she is chauffeured to jail in that unmarked Ford Crown Victoria sheriff's car.

Life lesson to be learned here: You want to do everything you can to avoid riding in the back of a Crown Vic.

Of course, just because YouTube is host to Kagan videos doesn't mean it can actually do anything. It's merely a platform where others post videos for a variety of reasons. But now, the Senate Republican leadership has decided to employ it in their last-ditch efforts to scuttle the confirmation of Elena Kagan as the next member of the Supreme Court.

Even as the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to send Kagan's nomination to the floor, GOP leaders have created a new YouTube channel, "RepublicanSCOTUS," in which they have collected all the most virulent criticisms of Kagan they could muster during her confirmation hearings. Front and center, of course, is everything Alabama Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III had to say during the dog-and-pony show. Here's a sample clip.

As you watch it, remember some of the interesting things that came to light during Sessions' own failed bid to become a federal judge during the 1980s. Our favorite bit has to be from former assistant U.S. attorney Thomas Figures, who claimed that Sessions said he used to think the Ku Klux Klan was OK, until he found out they smoked a lot of reefer. The man has his standards, after all.

It’s official. This morning, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook now has 500 million active users. InsideFacebook points out that “If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest on the globe, trailing only China and India.” Zuckerberg says that while half a billion is a “nice number,” he’s more impressed by the meaningful interaction that happens on Facebook every day. So, to celebrate the milestone, Facebook has launched the “Stories” App, which lets users share short accounts of their positive Facebook experiences. Facebook explains, “Organized by geography and theme, Facebook Stories illustrates how people are finding what's been lost (from old loves and pets to class rings), supporting others (whether through a wall post or a kidney donation to strangers), and even changing the world through social movements.” While the app is pretty cheesy, it does highlight the fact that Facebook connects a massive group of people in ways that no other Web site ever has before.