Good news, jobless poors: The recession is over, according to the billionaire nerds who run Google. Their computers told them so, and now the executives are in New York to spread the word and count their gold bars.

Speaking to reporters this very minute, CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founder Sergey Brin said the Mountain View, California company is through with its recent belt-tightening, which included layoffs and cutbacks in the company’s famously posh perquisites. “We’re increasing our hiring rate and investment rate in an anticipation of a recovery,” Schmidt said, according to Peter Kafka of All Things D, who has been liveblogging Schmidt’s meeting with the press.

Pressed further, Schmidt, net worth $5.5 billion, added:

From our perspective, the low point was somewhere in the spring. Which is why I said worst was behind us in May, June. Noticed recovery “Juneish”. The conventional wisdom is that US recessions are 18-24 months. Bernanke sees a recovery too, which we agree with.

Added Brin ($15 billion), “And we’re good indicator for consumer spending, and you can see for yourself by looking at Google Trends.”

Meanwhile, national unemployment stands at 9.8 percent and Alan Greenspan, an actual economist and former Federal Reserve Board chair, predicts the economy will just get worse and then stagnate for a good long while. But he cited absolutely zero Google statistics for his prediction, nor does he get free food and laundry and transportation and snacks and internet access and literally actual trips to Disneyland provided for him free at work, so can you really trust it?

Amazon’s a modern day Don Quixote. The company will expand its Kindle service across the globe, but won’t look past the device’s book-related origins. No touchscreen here. And, thus, no competition for Apple’s forthcoming tablet. Silly Jeff Bezos! [Reuters]

Sometimes, while strolling around this crazy world, I see children with cellphones, iPods and other 21st century toys. And it upsets me. What happened to kids living in a protective, imagination-powered bubble? Those days are long gone.

And a new report out of Britain makes clear just how far today’s tots are from the innocent, carefree, ensconced days of yore:

One in five children aged five to seven are accessing the internet without supervision from a parent, it has been revealed, raising concerns about access to adult material and grooming by paedophiles.

One in ten has a mobile phone despite a series of health warnings, and half have a TV in their bedroom, according to research by media regulator OfCom.

Some 85 per cent have access to a games console as children’s lives are increasingly dominated by gadgets rather than physical play.

This data makes me want to cry, wretch and find religion. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: fuck the war on drugs, let’s target technology (except for the websites for which I work, of course).

Image via Vanderlin’s flickr.

The former Mr. Drew Barrymore overcompensated for an apparent drunk-tweet; a New York Times took a screenshot of his writer’s block and Zoe Stagg was all backed up. It was a tough Tuesday for the Twitterati.

The thing about Liquid Plumr is… well, freelancer Zoe Stagg figured it out.

The New York Times‘ Brian Stelter posted this depressing picture early in the workday. Thanks for the pick me up!

Today is the first day of the rest of Tom Green’s miserable, but now significantly less bloated, life. (Probably not, actually, but he had to say something to reconcile “Drink Scotch Ebveryday [sic] !” with “Say no to drugs and alcohol!” for at least a few hours.)

RedState.com’s Erick Erickson had trouble imagining that people might object to his writing on a purely volunteer basis.

Marketer Will Conley says we are being lulled into complacency. But in a bad way.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets – or send us more Twitter usernames.

Martha Stewart’s all-internet-geek show was a clash of cultures just as we predicted. Here’s a clip of the domestic media diva refusing former Valleywag Nick Douglas‘ entreaties to share a little backstage color. Stewart, you see, fears her guests.

Heavens knows what they would think if Stewart just transmitted their intimate off-camera comments to the entire world. The likes of Snoop Dogg might not trust her with their deepest secrets anymore. No, better to keep the Martha Stewart Twitter an occult bible of hellish fire pits opening on the surface of the Earth. Douglas can keep hawking TwitterWit, his printed collection of amusing tweets; Stewart seems more likely to buy — or publish — something along the lines of TwitterWoe.

Two weeks ago, eBay announced a restructuring. As any Silicon Valley trouper knows, that means layoffs will soon follow. And that, in fact, is what’s happening.

The online auction giant does plan layoffs, a spokesman confirmed to us, as part of a restructuring that fuses product and technology leadership at the company and unifies internal organizations devoted to buyers and to sellers. CEO John Donahoe, a former Bain consultant, has been trying to finely tune eBay’s core auction and retail sales businesses while positioning the company as a sort of online Costco.

But inside eBay, staff are worried for their own hides. The eBay spokesman said layoffs should be “small” in scale. But one eBay-er we spoke with believed the MBA-led company is planning to cut the lowest-performing five percent of staff, emulating an old General Electric tactic. eBay said five percent is “not even close” to the limited layoffs planned — way too high.

So staff should cast a skeptical eye on the other rumor going around, that eBay plans no severance for laid off workers. Still, given Donahoe’s apparently readiness to break with past company culture — or, as he calls it, “religion” — it’s no wonder some employees worry they’ll be lost in the shuffle.

(Pic: Donahoe at Allen & Co. Sun Valley schmoozefest in July.)

Hollywood blogger Nikki Finke has always been cagey about her Web traffic. But having sold her website, the stabby gossipmonger can’t keep her numbers private any longer. All she can do is try and push them up. Which we’d recommend.

Finke’s numbers just went onto Quantcast, no doubt through the efforts of her blog’s new owner, heir and budding Web mogul Jay Penske, who presumably hopes opening his stats will help sell advertising. Finke is making north of $625,000 from Penske over eight years, according to the New York Times.

She gets around 30,000 to 40,000 people on her site each weekday. The may indeed be influential people. But there aren’t that many of them. Except when Finke is the subject of a New Yorker profile, which she can turn into a traffic-spiking multimedia catfight.

It is, perhaps, unfair to expect Finke to attract the several hundred thousand daily readers of an LATimes.com, or the couple hundred thousand of a Gawker.com. Her site is very specialized in insider gossip, more akin to a Variety or Hollywood Reporter. In fact, 30,000 is roughly the circulation of one of those Hollywood trades, if not both.

But if Penske wants to use Finke as a linchpin of a robust online empire — and if Finke wants to seize the incentives that could reportedly double her take to $10 million over the life of her deal — those numbers will need to come up, which means Finke will somehow need to broaden her appeal. Loud fights can only take one so far, after all.

The bad news is that 30,000 Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, and other email accounts have had all their login info posted online, by hackers. The good news is, it’s their own dumb fault.

Yesterday news came that 10,000 Hotmail accounts had been compromised, but all of you internet snobs were like, “Hotmail? Haha, (some sort of internet snob joke about varieties of email, and which are cool and which are not).”

Well now your precious Gmail has also been compromised, the BBC reports. But, sayeth Google:

The firm stressed that the scam was “not a breach of Gmail security” but rather “a scam to get users to give away their personal information to hackers”.

Stop being so dumb and you won’t get “compromised,” like that! Same advice dads have been giving to their daughters for years.
[Want more expert insight on this issue? Sorry, Ryan Tate's not awake yet.]

We always thought that just nerds were felled by the 21st century’s most over-hyped ailment: internet addiction. We were wrong. Some smarty pants scientists have crunched the numbers and figured out exactly who falls prey to the World Wide Web.

After studying 2,300 11-year olds, Taiwanese researchers found that internet addicts are, shockingly, a lot like drug addicts:

Across the sexes, they found depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), social phobia or feelings of hostility to be the most prevalent predictors of which children would go on to develop an internet addiction as adolescents.

For girls, social phobia and depression were markedly the strongest predictors, the team report.

The report’s writers declare they want to “alert pediatricians to what might become a major public health problem,” which now means that parents, doctors and other busy bodies can take this information and apply it to virtual addiction camps which, oh yes, have been cropping up across China.

Then kids, overwhelmed by all the meddling, will take up good old fashioned addictions, like weed and smack. World order, restored!

Image via altemark’s flickr.

Jon-Barrett Ingels was fired as a waiter thanks in large part to Jane Smith. The co-star of HBO’s Hung couldn’t pay her check, then failed to tip when she did. The waiter complained on Twitter; Smith complained to his boss.

Ingles, reports the Los Angeles Times, was then fired. But Adams can’t take all the blame: Ingels had to know it was coming. If you’re going to tweet about which musician didn’t wear a bra in your restaurant (Ali Harter), which Office star was hungover (BJ Novak) in your restaurant and which actress looked hot (Tori Spelling) in your restaurant, you probably aren’t long for that restaurant. Especially if it’s located in Beverly Hills.