Rumors in the blogosphere that Microsoft is preparing to lay off 17% of its workforce appear to have been quashed. The blogs Mini-Microsoft and Fudzilla reported that the large lay offs were to be announced prior to the company's fourth quarter earnings call on Jan. 22. Fudzilla later backtracked on its report, saying that a large chunk of the 17% would come out of Microsoft's pool of agency staff, or contractors. Mini-Microsoft, which initially reported a 10% layoff, went a step further in a follow-up report titled "No Layoffs at Microsoft." Meanwhile, CNBC seemed to corroborate both reports, saying …

Wired says that Steve Jobs latest health statement, in which he described his dramatic weight loss as having stemmed from a hormonal imbalance, "is contradictory and makes little sense" according to medical experts contacted by the tech news site. Robert Lustig, a prominent neuroendocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco says there are three medical threads running through the statement, and they "don't add up to a very strong cable." In an open letter, published Monday, Jobs wrote: "Doctors think they have found the cause -- a hormone imbalance that has been 'robbing' me of the proteins my body …

How will online advertising fare in 2009? Adweek says there are two schools of thought: optimists see tighter budgets shifting more dollars from less measurable media like TV and print to the Web; pessimists believe that weaker ad budgets will result in cuts across all media, although digital should fare a little better. With that in mind, search spending is expected to remain stable, while display and ads and microsites could come under pressure. Social ads are also likely to remain top of mind this year, as marketers look to move beyond experimenting with social media toward really engaging and …

This year is going to be a rough one for brand advertising, according to a new report from JP Morgan Chase. The economic downturn has created a climate in which performance-based advertising will grow at an even faster rate than it has compared to brand advertising in previous years. The report, "Nothing But Net: Outlook for Global Internet Stocks in 2009," notes that performance-based advertising has steadily gained share of total U.S. online advertising dollars over the past five years. This year, search is set to increase by 10% to nearly $16 billion, while graphical ads, both performance-based and branded, …

Search guru John Battelle weighs in with his annual predictions for the Web media industry for 2009. He says the industry will be hard hit by the economic recession in the first half of the year, but by year's end, it will have sufficiently recovered. "The web is where people are spending their time, the web will be where marketers spend their money." Battelle thinks Google will see its search share decline "significantly" for the first time ever this year. He also believes the Web juggernaut will struggle to find an answer as to how it will diversify its revenue. …

The once-lofty goal of marrying television to the Internet is coming closer and closer to reality, The Wall Street Journal reports. The missing ingredient thus far has been set-top boxes that have networking connections built directly into them. For example, Netflix today is expected to announce a deal with LG that will make its online video rental service available on a new line of high-definition TVs created by the Korean electronics giant. Netflix offers more than 12,000 movie and TV titles. This and other Internet-TV developments are on display at this week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which …

Apps are clearly here to stay, notes TechCrunch's Michael Arrington. The year-and-a-half-old Facebook Platform now supports tens of thousands of applications. MySpace, mostly through Google's OpenSocial, has made more than 4,500 apps available, and Apple's App Store, barely six months old, offers more than 10,000 programs for the iPhone. However, Arrington claims there's a gaping hole in the app universe: None have a direct payment platform to let app developers collect micropayments from users. So far, the only ways for app makers to collect revenue on their products is to either charge one-time fees for downloads, or to sell advertising …

In an open letter, Apple CEO Steve Jobs reveals that poor health was indeed the reason he decided not to keynote this year's MacWorld Conference and Expo. In other words, Apple lied when it said the reason for Jobs' mysterious non-appearance was that it was simply phasing out conferences. That may be the reason Apple has decided to forego appearing in future MacWorld conferences, but it's certainly not why Jobs won't be giving the keynote this year. Fortunately, it's not as bad as everyone thought. In the letter, Jobs says that his dramatic and publicly noted weight loss is …

Behavioral targeting can be something of a double-edged sword for publishers, Ad Age's Michael Learmonth explains. When a user visits a site like Edmunds.com, he or she instantly becomes an "in-market car buyer", a valuable asset, but one from which Edmunds.com might not necessarily benefit. Like most Web publishers, Learmonth says that Edmunds doesn't participate in the "mini-economy that flourishes after visitors leave" their site. Instead, "a host of ad networks will sell that 'in-market car buyer' to advertisers at a fraction of the rate, thereby increasing ad inventory while driving down ad rates for Edmunds, KBB.com and other sites …