Did anyone else read Tim Arango’s recent NYTimes’ article about Vivi Nevo, Internet man of mystery, and wonder why the journalist didn’t invoke Jay Gatsby, the self-made man of another bubble-infused age?

Of all the characters the media business attracts — and creates, for that matter — perhaps no one is more remarked upon, wondered about or marveled at than Mr. Nevo. Among his many overlapping circles of friends, nearly all say that Mr. Nevo is a force in their lives: a loyal friend, a trusted conveyor and keeper of information and someone who never forgets a birthday or a bar mitzvah.

You get the feeling Arango had some off-the-record allegations he wanted to unleash but couldn’t cajole into the daylight, hence the repeated and elaborate “what does Vivi really do?” incantations?

Those who knew Mr. Nevo in the 1980s, after he moved to New York from Israel, have watched his rise with curiosity.

“You’re asking questions I’ve asked myself many times,” said Nicolas Rachline, who met Mr. Nevo in the late 1980s when both were part of a fashionable New York expatriate crowd that hung out at Le Bilboquet, a French restaurant on the Upper East Side. “What the hell does Vivi do? He seems to be a powerful player in the entertainment industry. How, I don’t know.”

Maybe we’ll know someday.

Mediapost credits Perez with scooping other major news outlets on the quake.

This year’s Netroots Nation in Austin was amazing. Great people, conversations, energy, ideas, debate. But it looks like Netroots Nation will be held in Pittsburgh next year. Conferences are all about building a culture, and Austin is an amazing place to build a culture. I’m skeptical about Pittsburgh.

Newspaper holding company AH Belo announced yesterday that ad revenues were down 21% in the second quarter. That 21% is the biggest decline I’ve seen yet. (Belo publishes four daily newspapers, including the Dallas Morning News and Providence Journal.)

For broader context: here’s an article about the ill newspaper industry in the International Herald Tribune, ironically, a newspaper I used to write for. Yes, the article includes that dire phrase “since the Great Depression.”

More thoughts on the phrase “worst since the Great Depression”.

More Cuil weirdness…

I’ve been noticing the phrase “worse than the Great Depression” cropping up in news reports.

So, right now, there are 11 references to “worse than the Great Depression” in Google news. And 11,600 references in straight Google news.

Then there’s “worst since the great depression.” There are 53 of those in Google news and 12,500 of those in regular Google search.

This metric isn’t perfect, since the words will often be things like “the worst housing recession since the Great Depression” or “Beer sales in pubs are now at their lowest level since the Great Depression of the 1930s – down seven million pints a day from the height of the market” or “The US home foreclosure crisis has deepened to a level not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s…”.

All of which suggests we also watch “since the Great Depression” too. Right now, there are 2890 results for that combination in Google news and 588,000 in regular Google search.

(For fun, I tried the same searches on Cuil.com, the $33 million Google killer. I get 472,817,893 results for Great Depression. Wow! Wait a second, I get just 5,396,452 results for “great depression.” And just 330 results for “depression.” Guess Cuil hasn’t programmed the quotation mark restriction into their algorithms. Definitely the worst search results since the great depression.)

The new Google killer looks slick. But it lacks advertising. I’m not just talking about the kind that pays the bills, I’m talking about the entire content category.

We just created this draft of our tutorial video. What suggestions?

Having installed a cool new WordPress blog, I’ve got some good (but not perfect) spam filtering in place. Thank you to Zudfunk for being the first to notice and chip in.

It seems criminal that Wachovia, which yesterday took a monstrous $8.7 billion loss and already is preparing for another $5.6 billion in losses, is still paying a dividend. The bank has a toxic portfolio of $122 billion of the riskiest mortgages, called pick-a-pay, which allow borrowers to make no payments on principle for an initial period.

$122 billion.

Wachovia currently projects that 12% of these mortgages are going to default. Why should any of these mortgages, most of which are in housing quagmires California and Florida, not end up in default?

$122 billion.

Losses on anything like that scale would force Wachovia to borrow money from taxpayers, you, me, our children and grandchildren. So continuing to pay dividends to shareholders while in such dire straights is akin to seeking to shelter assets from potential creditors.

Congress, busy trying to stop intelligent investors seeking to profit from the stupidity of others by selling short-selling the shares of still-overvalued companies (like Wachovia), should instead be prosecuting money-losing banks that insist on paying dividends with “extra” cash that’s just an accounting fiction.

A dividend is by definition a distribution of profits to shareholders, so how is it legal, or morally conscionable, for unprofitable companies to pay dividends?

Hey, let’s say it one last time: Wachovia’s mighty vaults sit on a $122 billion pit of quicksand.