So, you’re a company that thrives primarily on advertising. You’re about to open up your IPO to the world, and in fact are now demanding more money per share.

Do you really need a major company like GM yanking $40 million a year in advertising buys, stating that basically those ad buys have no impact?

No? Tough, Zucks, it’s happening anyway, and they’re not the only ones thinking about it.

Industry analysts have recently reported that companies are beginning to re-evaluate social media-based advertising. “Companies in industries from consumer electronics to financial services tell us they’re no longer sure Facebook is the best place to dedicate their social marketing budget—a shocking fact given the site’s dominance among users,” wrote Melissa Parrish, a Forrester analyst, on Monday.

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Throw Etsy onto the patent trolling pile: they just got sued by one because they dared, DARED, to use technology that involved transmitting messages and to have investors that gave them enough money to make them a target.

We often rail about patent trolling around here, for two reasons: one, it limits innovation by letting the slimy and the lazy sit on a patent and raise the barriers to entry to founding a successful company on the Internet, and two, it sucks money out of the economy.

There’s a Boston University study on the topic, but a few key points:

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If you went to college, inevitably, you got stacks of handouts photocopied straight out of a published work. Technically, that’s illegal, but nobody ever questioned it; hey, the professor just saved you from buying a $45 book.

The digital equivalent of that are “e-reserves,” and it’s something the textbook industry is hugely nervous about, what with the fact that it doesn’t require students to pay $1000 or more for books each semester, and that’s not fair to them. So they sued, specifically Georgia State University, to force them to at least use a photocopier, for Pete’s sake, so somebody sees some cash out of the deal.

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If you’re the administrator of a page, or several pages, on Facebook, you already know about the Weekly Facebook Update, wherein Facebook lets you know that these pages exist and hey, you should log in and look at them!

And apparently Twitter decided that was such an awesome idea that everybody needed it, because now you’re going to get yet another “weekly newsletter” of “most relevant” Twitter messages:

Twitter has begun sending users a weekly e-mail digest of the “most relevant” tweets and stories shared by the people they follow. The introduction of the feature comes a few months after Twitter acquired Summify, a startup that gathered news from a user’s various social networks and compiled it in daily e-mails.

Notice there was nothing in there about how users demanded this feature.

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I’ve really got to ask, in light of all the breathless coverage by tech blogs on this: does anybody actually care about Yahoo? The last time I paid attention to it was when they announced Scott Thompson was going to be their CEO, and I thought “Wait, that guy from ‘The Kids In the Hall’?” Hence the GIF, since frankly even the Yahoo! logo is a little boring.

Turns out he would have been a better choice: Thompson got the boot on Saturday for lying on his resume. He also found out last week that he has cancer. In other words, last week was not a good one for Scott Thompson.

Thompson claimed to have a computer science degree, which he didn’t, and, as it turns out, no one at the company checked to see if he really did before hiring him. Currently, some guy you’ve probably never heard named Ross Levinsohn — who formerly headed up Yahoo’s media interests — is running the company.

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For those unfamiliar, Bitcoin is a digital currency that will soon teach a lesson in market forces. The idea is that users “mine” for Bitcoins, by which they mean automate the process of turning out said heavily encrypted strings of code.

Even the people running Bitcoin think it’s risky and it’s mostly an experiment in creating a secure, decentralized money system using digital technology, not a viable currency. As such, it’s fascinating to the kind of person who thinks the government is oppressing them by collecting income taxes, or those who want to buy weed on the Internet without getting the DEA’s attention (often these two intersect). Hence the rise of sites like The Farmer’s Market.

The problem is that Bitcoin is backed by, well, nothing. It basically runs on clapping your hands and believing, which makes it incredibly volatile, as enthusiasts are learning the hard way. Once it becomes too hard to mine blocks, people will simply stop caring and move on to some other fad, and Bitcoins will become worthless.

Not that this is stopping the FBI from freaking out over its anonymity.

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Blizzard, better known as the Internet’s favorite digital crack dealer, takes a long time to put out games. But when they do, the reaction is usually massive.

Like, for example, the reaction to “Diablo III.” For the record, “Diablo II” came out twelve years ago. And now “Diablo III” is the most preordered PC game of all time on Amazon, as well as Blizzard’s most heavily preordered game ever.

And that’s because…because…er…well…honestly, we’re not sure. It’s not like the original two Diablo games were bad or anything, but “Diablo III” seems to very much a “click until the target falls over” type of game.

Then again, that’s all “World of Warcraft” is, and they make $150 million a month off it, so maybe we’re not the people to ask on this one.

(Image via Activision Blizzard)

Iran’s attempts to create a “halal” Internet have hit new heights of irony. In an attempt to convey to his people that free access to information and alternate points of view (not to mention tools to coordinate protests against his regime, what with all the beating with the clubs and the torture and the raping), will not be tolerated, well…

Khamenei, according to a translation by RFE, replied: “In general, the use of antifiltering software is subject to the laws and regulations of the Islamic republic, and it is not permissible to violate the law.”

However, his own use of the word “antifiltering” apparently triggered Iran’s own filtering system, making Khamenei’s words inaccessible to most Iranians.

AHAHAHAHA!

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Hey, look, a new incentive to not buy DVDs!

That ridiculously over-the-top logo, right there, will be your new, unskippable, ten-second long warning on all DVDs when you watch a movie on DVD. Paired with the other classic unskippable warning from the FBI about how stealing movies is wrong.

Here’s the thing: yes, movie piracy is not a victimless crime, and we’d also argue that it’s pointless — unlike music, if you don’t want to pay ten bucks to see a movie, all you really have to do is wait about six months and you can get it from Netflix or Redbox for dirt.

But does the government realize that annoying warnings like this are one of the reasons why people download pirated movies in the first place? To avoid all this unskippable crap?

(Image courtesy the National Intellectual Property Rights Protection Center)