With SFist Rita's report yesterday about Apple settling with Creative, Apple fanboys can console themselves with the news that Microsoft is also getting dinged for even more money in a patent infringment suit. Meanwhile, retail workers who downloaded the development version of Apple's new OS, Leopard, are getting canned left and right (scroll down). But BusinessWeek thinks good iPod news is on the way, while Wired News explores the back alleys of Chennai in search......

A new neighbor has moved into an old house in the 'hood, renovated the place and promises to be part of the community -- going to PTA meetings, Little League games, community centers and talking to local activists. But the guy you know and love will still come back and visit. Vienna, Virginia's Backfence has acquired Dan Gillmor's Bayosphere, garnering further citizen-media cred and a new market! Susan Mernit scooped the blogosphere yesterday morning,......

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day! Did you know that America's "first black Millionaire" was Yerba Buena resident Alexander Leidesdorff? Eric Meyerson got a chance to see Nobel Laureate Jimmy Carter at a recent book signing. And the wheels of the criminal justice system continue to squeak, with this harrowing tale of dealing with the Fremont courts. We'll take a trip around the blogosphere for a minute. Jon "PJ" Swenson at the Sharkspage does......

Beth Spotswood pops ten questions for Gavin Newsom, and we want answers. Speaking of interviews, Shout Magazine raps with local MC Paris. And a crop of top local writers weigh in on the JT Leroy fracas, including Thomas Roche, Mark Pritchard and our own SFist Violet. Arnie will not be charged for driving his motorcycle without the proper M1 certification, eliciting derisive laughter from NorCal Politics and Rangelife. Sophie Maxwell finally makes a public......

Ah, nothing like controversy to get the week off to a good start. Susie Bright isn't particularly happy after lending JT her support early on (scroll down for more from Susie in the comments). And Edward Champion reminds us that JT isn't the only one lacking a firm grasp on the line between fact and fiction, with James Frey under the microscope. Municide publishes a response to their own flight of fancy, purportedly from......

We'll start with the 2005 year-in-reviews. Robert Haaland says 2005 "was a great year to be a queer union organizer." Om Malik points out that the number of broadband connections grew 35% last year. And Jenguin literally looks back at 2005 with a selection of her photos. As for the actual festivities, Beth Spotswood dons a cocktail dress and braves a fancy party. Eric Meyerson laments the stormy state of affairs which greeted 2006.......

Ever wondered how those Googlers spent their "20%" time? Playing with obscene amounts of silly putty, apparently. Susan Mernit points to a blogger's tale of terror at 30,000 feet, the mainstream media coverage they received, and the nasty responses from commenters at an Alaskan Airlines IP address. Speaking of blogger relations, PR pro G.A. Marken drops by Silicon Valley Watcher to guest post about what bloggers mean to the media landscape from a marketing......

Let's start by kicking out the jams. DJ Icewater mixes the sounds of Yay Area soul from past to present for a a Shout Magazine Shoutcast. What's old to Swerbo but new to us are hi-fi recordings of The Slip and Surprise Me Mr. Davis show at the Independent in November. Nicole Lee suggests some music podcasts, including a podcast by geek-rock legends They Might Be Giants. And topping the Yahoo search charts for......

Susan Mernit points to a kerfuffle in the world of Podcasting -- Adam Curry caught anonymously editing the Podcasting entry on Wikipedia; Curry responds, says he was struggling with the Wiki editing format. Speaking of Adam Curry (who's also been accused of cybersquatting in the past), Joi Ito explains the business of "parked domain monetization" and why you can't get the domain name you really want. And in a nice segue piece, Jessie Johnson......

Let's get the tech out of the way first: John Hoar finds an article discussing the potential legal liabilities of Tech Connect. Could Susan Mernit and Chris Lopez be talking about the same thing -- namely, a Knight Ridder-Google merger? And if you needed any more evidence that Apple is selling sex more than tech, see what you come up with analyzing Jessie Johnson's dream. Kevin Cheng can finally talk about his latest project......

The Gavster strikes a humble pose at the Alice Griffith housing development. If you love Arnie, throw a 70's House Party -- because you really want to require parental notification for abortions. Chris Nolan is no longer standing alone as a journalist -- she's got friends and a new redesign. Now that Dubya is back in the Oval Office, Cindy Sheehan has decided to taunt him from where everyone else taunts him -- Berkeley.......

We're currently waiting for our gut instinct -- that Yahoo has, in fact, purchased Flickr -- to be proven right on Tuesday. And by "gut instinct," we mean we shook the old Magic 8-Ball and got "All signs point to yes." In the meantime, we've got another rumor floating around the internets, which we found via a trackback (Thanks, John!) to that post. None other than Reuters is reporting that Apple is rumored to......

So we're up late last night, checking Susan Mernit's blog to see if she had already posted on the dinner at Yahoo yesterday, when we catch her post from earlier in the afternoon. She linked to John Battelle's coverage of a fracas involving a Googler fired for content on their blog. Seems Mark Jen, a new employee at Google, was dutifully using their blogging engine blogger to post to Ninety-Nine Zeros, Life @ Google......

Nothing like media-business wonkery, news aggregation and browser-based application design to get a blogger all hot and bothered. Thanks to Susan Mernit, Beth Laing of Mediacenter invited us to their Emerging Technology Conference. Okay, not really. We just got invited to the casual dinner at Yahoo, where they plied us with booze and chicken and then tried to take advantage of our post-prandial trance to slip some PowerPoint slides by us. Little did they......

SFist was so proud when we broke it to good friend Susan Mernit that she had scored a Bloggie nod in the "Best-kept Secret Weblog" category. Hers is the smartest blog you're probably not reading. When she's not in New York working with her consulting group 5ive (no, not Merlin Mann's hilarious site of lists -- we'll get to him later) to get somebody's business into shape, she's toodling around the South Bay hobnobbing......

Next time we're sending out schwag bags to all the voters. Looks like we've been snubbed by the august nominating committee (read: random cranks on the internets) for this year's Bloggies. Oh well. Gothamist did get three nominations (one more than perennial favorite in every category BoingBoing), and Londonist managed to get the nod in the best blog from the United Kingdom and Ireland category. Some of our nominees made it in a number of......