We hear Yahoo is in talks to buy Tumblr, a blogging startup run by 22-year-old David Karp for "low-to-mid eight figures" — which would translate to a small fortune for the New York entrepreneur.

TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, left distraught after a stranger spat on him at a tech conference in Munich, promised he'd take February off. Two days in, he's having a hard time leaving the Internet.

Someone buy something, please. Our New York sighting of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer with Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock missed one: Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes, who'd like to unload AOL.

So much for a new boss ending Yahoo's drama. Why did the company's chairman meet Microsoft's Steve Ballmer at the Time Warner Center Thursday, two days after Yahoo named Carol Bartz its new CEO?

Google has axed six services, from Google Video uploads to a shopping-catalog search. But none has sparked more outrage than the closure of Dodgeball.com. Dennis Crowley, the friend-locating service's twentysomething founder, is miffed.

No one wants to buy Yahoo. And the only person who wants to run Yahoo is an insider who helped sink it. Is there any hope left for the beleaguered Web giant?

Perhaps Digg really is the future of the news business. The headline-discussion site, once an icon of the Web 2.0 movement, is losing millions of dollars a year.

Another day, another hare-brained scheme to buy Yahoo. This time, the player isn't Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, but former AOL CEO Jon Miller, who now runs a venture-capital fund. But the prospect of a deal seems as far off and fanciful as Microsoft, which spent most of the spring and summer trying to buy Yahoo,…

People who use Twitter, a service which posts short updates to the Web and cell phones, love nothing more than to Twitter about themselves, and the medium they've so enthusiastically adopted. If you go by the Twitterers' collective reporting, every event, from an earthquake in Los Angeles to terrorist bombings in…

Earlier this year, Leah Culver appeared on the cover of a tech magazine blowing an enormous pink bubble. But the shrill-voiced San Francisco programmer no longer desires fame — even the modest sort afforded Silicon Valley's microcelebrities. The turnabout seems odd, considering how aggressively she once courted…

Microsoft's chair-hurling 800-pound gorilla slammed the door on talk of a renewed Yahoo acquisition deal at today's shareholder meeting in Bellevue, Washington. "We are done with all acquisition deals with Yahoo ... We did our best. We've moved on." In business, this often means: We'll be back. For now, though,…

It only takes hearing so many jokes about Al Gore inventing Twitter to figure out that the former vice president has signed up for the microblogging service. Wisely, he's not really participating in the site, just using it to market his websites and announce his interview with Digg founder Kevin Rose, which airs…

If wireless Internet access is such a hot technology, why is it such a dud business? I asked that question in Wired five years ago, and I still don't know the answer. Since then, eager-to-please Wi-Fi startups have gone the way of boutique ISP service. AT&T, once broken up by law for being an evil monopoly, has…

Time Warner has reported its third-quarter results, including AOL's numbers, and they are dismal. Internet-access revenues were down 26 percent, a loss everyone more or less expected, since the dial-up business is moribund. But advertising sales were down 6 percent. AOL management can't blame the market meltdown for…

Scott Moore, the head of Yahoo Media Group, is leaving the company, reports BoomTown's Kara Swisher. A bad sign for the company: Moore ran some of Yahoo's most successful operations, including its news, finance, and sports websites. Why is Moore leaving now, having survived most of Yahoo's annus horribilis with his…

“This is not just unloading AOL for us,” a source close to Time Warner told Kara Swisher. “It is also an important strategic move for our future to get this right.” I love the way anonymous sources lie so convincingly. The truth, Swisher blogs, is both simpler and more boring: Yahoo and AOL don't really like each…

Web hosting? So 1990s. Rackspace is now into "cloud computing." The company has acquired Slicehost, a small but popular virtual private server host, and JungleDisk, an online-storage startup. The deals comes as Rackspace is pushing its Mosso service as an alternative to Amazon.com's computing-power rental offerings.…

We already took our shot at what was behind Samsung's so-crazy-it-makes-sense attempt to acquire SanDisk. Samsung, we said, has supplied the memory chips for Apple's iPhone since its launch last year. That's why Samsung needs to bulk up to contend with the might of Apple, one of the largest buyers of flash memory. Now…

The good news: Jack Dorsey, the handsome programmer ousted as Twitter's CEO yesterday, can put his nose ring back in and stop seeing that CEO coach he hired. The bad news: His cofounder, Ev Williams, who's replacing him as CEO, is sugarcoating Dorsey's exit. Dorsey is not going to be working in Twitter's office, and…