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By David Carr, Columnist, The Media Equation, New York Times

The great thing about modern technology is that you never have to miss anything on television. That’s also the terrible thing about it.

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Talk about quick rebounds.

One month after resigning his position at Hewlett-Packard amid allegations of business-standard improprieties, ousted HP CEO Mark Hurd has a new gig: Co-president of Oracle.

Ending a long weekend’s worth of speculation, Oracle on Monday said Hurd will serve as co-president alongside Safra Catz, taking up a role vacated by current president and fellow scandal cultivator Charles Phillips, who has evidently resigned.

“Mark did a brilliant job at HP and I expect he’ll do even better at Oracle,” Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said in statement. “There is no executive in the IT world with more relevant experience than Mark.”

Indeed, Hurd’s knowledge of HP’s (HPQ) server and data-storage-systems business will undoubtedly come in handy at Oracle (ORCL), which has been aggressively moving into that very space ever since its acquisition of Sun. In that sense, Hurd’s hiring is a real coup for Oracle. Who better to put the screws to a rival than a former CEO with a bone to pick?

Perhaps that’s what Larry Ellison was thinking when he spanked HP for canning Hurd. “The HP board just made the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs  many years ago,” he said at the time. “That decision nearly destroyed Apple and would have if Steve hadn’t come back and saved them.”

Do we really need another pop-culture site? Sure, says Wetpaint CEO Ben Elowitz. His pitch: We’ll build a better mousetrap–one that covers every flickering detail about the likes of “Glee” and “The Jersey Shore”–using “data and science.”

Until now, Elowitz has been in the business of helping other publishers build sites with wiki-based tools. But now he’s opening up his own shop at Wetpaint.com, which should be working by the time you read this. (If not–take a look at the sample screenshot at the bottom of this post.)

Elowitz is presenting Wetpaint as a sort of upscale, thinkier version of content factories like Demand Media. Like Demand, Wetpaint uses technology to help it figure out which stories to assign–in Wetpaint’s case, via an “ingestion engine” that is supposed to crawl the Web looking for spiking stories on discussion boards, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

The difference is that Demand is primarily interested in finding lots and lots of stories that will appeal to a relatively small group of searchers, which is how it ends up with search bait like “How to Donate a Used Car in Dallas.”

But Wetpaint is trying to create a destination site for a large number of eyeballs, and says it will use its tech to get them more of what they want, produced by a core group of 10 editorial employees and a freelance squad of 20.

“We don’t care about Google,” Elowitz says. “We’re not trying to get long-tail, we’re not trying to get search traffic.”

Okay. So that’s a bit of hyperbole–Elowitz would like some Google (GOOG) juice as much as the next publisher, which is one of the reasons he’s using the existing Wetpaint name for his site.

But he’s clearly set on exploiting social networks, too. He says Wetpaint.com, via its focus on Facebook-friendly TV shows, has already garnered 500,000 fans on the social network.

Elowitz is also positioning himself as a competitor of pop/gossip Web sites published by old media brands, specifically Time Warner’s (TWX) People, TMZ and Entertainment Weekly sites. But the people who read that stuff online don’t limit themselves to a handful of brands, which is why big Web players like Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO) are there, too.

Add in freelance upstarts like Perez Hilton and millions more you’ve never heard of, and it’s a very, very crowded field. Elowitz will need a very clever tech team to make this work.

By Ben Worthen, Joann S. Lublin and Robert A. Guth, Reporters, The Wall Street Journal

Mark Hurd, who resigned as chief executive of Hewlett-Packard Co. last month, is in talks to join Oracle Corp. as a top executive, people familiar with the matter said.

The exact nature of Mr. Hurd’s new job couldn’t be learned. The people familiar with the matter cautioned that talks weren’t complete and it was possible Mr. Hurd’s hiring could still fall through. Oracle’s board still needs to approve any appointment, they added.

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By Amir Efrati and Thomas Catan, Reporters, The Wall Street Journal

The Texas attorney general’s office is conducting an antitrust review of Google Inc.’s core search-engine business, a sign of widening government scrutiny of the Web giant.

Texas’s top prosecutor has inquired about allegations by several small companies that Google unfairly demoted their rankings in search results or the placement of their advertisements on the search engine, Google said Friday.

The Internet giant disputed the allegations, which have been reported previously, tracing them to three companies with ties to rival Microsoft Corp.

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It’s Labor Day weekend, so let’s stop zinging Apple’s (AAPL) Ping, wondering how many regulators are eyeballing Google (GOOG) and trying to grok incessant exec departures at Yahoo (YHOO).

Instead, it’s time to chillax.

(The picture of me here with that very motto was sent to me by Chris Carmichael, who liked my tweet using the word, and made a lovely presentation–which you can see here.)

So, sit back and enjoy these Labor Day-related videos:

Chad Vader

Mud Bogging

Betty’s Labor Day Cheesecake with Cherry Pie Topping Recipe

By John Murrell

If you’re going to launch a new social network in this hotly competitive market, it helps if you start with a devout fan base of millions ready to crash the doors the moment the ribbon is cut. Apple announced today that in the 48 hours since it was released, iTunes 10 has been downloaded by more than three million users, and more than a third of them have joined Ping, Apple’s new network for sharing and discovering music.

“Modern Family” creator Steve Levitan says he loves the Internet, but says he wants his show off the Web. Because the eyeballs it attracts don’t do him any good.

Wish granted! Temporarily.

Turns out, Levitan’s show has been off the free Web–Hulu, ABC.com and ABC’s free iPad app–for the past month or so. Hulu, which is co-owned by News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox, Disney’s (DIS) ABC, and GE’s (GE) NBC, explains that its streaming rights for the show expired on July 27. And that the show will be back this fall.

That seems a little weird, because you can still watch online episodes of most other big network shows that aired last year. But I’m told that while some ABC executives were actually in favor of taking Levitan at his word, “Modern’s Family”’s temporary absence isn’t a punishment, but has to do with the release of the show’s first DVD set, due out later this month.

Which makes sense. Because even in 2010, Hollywood–in this case News Corp.’s Fox, which produces the show–still values analog dollars more than anything the Web can produce. So if the TV guys think there’s a chance that free Web shows cut into DVD sales….

And while these windows/channel conflicts aren’t going away anytime soon, they remain confusing.

For instance, you can still watch the last episode of “Lost” on Hulu, even though the DVDs of the last season went on sale a couple of weeks ago. But Hulu says the series finale  will disappear from its site on September 20. And that it won’t be showing seasons 1 to 5 after the end of 2010. Go figure.

But! You can still watch “Modern Family” on the Web, without breaking the law. All you need to do is wrangle a Hulu Plus invite, and you can watch it on your Web browser, or on your Apple (APPL) iPad or iPhone, for that matter. Is that worth $10 a month to you?

In the meantime, cheapskates will have to get by on free Web clips like this one:

And here’s a clip of Levitan explaining his beef with Web video, at our D8 conference in June:

[ See post to watch video ]

By John Murrell

Perhaps out of concern for all the ice-cream-loving children of the world, Google is lowering the comprehension difficulty level of its privacy policies. The search giant said today it would be updating its privacy documents on Oct. 3–no changes in practice, but much rewriting of legalese and wringing out of redundancies. That should cut down on the plethora of individual product policies currently linked from the Google Privacy Center.

If you’re reading this on a Toshiba laptop, you might want to switch from AC to battery power before continuing.

The company is recalling 41,000 of its Satellite computers for fear that they may overheat and injure someone. And while that hasn’t yet happened, there have been 129 reports of the computers overheating and deforming the plastic casing around the AC adapter plug. The affected models are Toshiba Satellite T135, Satellite T135D and Satellite Pro T130 notebooks. If you happen to own one of those, go and download Toshiba’s latest BIOS revision, which will determine whether your machine is overheating, and if so, disable its AC power and contact Toshiba for a free repair.

By John Murrell

Vestel Group, the largest television manufacturer in Europe, announced today that early next year it would begin turning out Yahoo Connected TVs, bringing widgets, apps and all manner of Internet entertainment into living rooms across the continent.

By Kamau High, Speakeasy, The Wall Street Journal

Duke Nukem Forever, a video game synonymous with never being released, is finally being released.

The first person shooter about a space marine with a penchant for off-color humor who battles aliens with increasingly destructive weapons, was to be the fourth installment in a series of games that garnered critical praise and generated controversy for its depiction of women. After 10 years in development, 3D Realms, the studio behind the game, announced it was shutting down in 2009.

The game is being finished by Gearbox Software and will be published by Take-Two Interactive, maker of the “Grand Theft Auto” series. The game is being shown to consumers and the press for the first time at a video game convention today.

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Last night, BoomTown got to grill some “Catfish”–as in the three young hipsters responsible for the new documentary about a twisted online romance on Facebook.

That was for a Q&A after a screening in San Francisco, where I got to talk to Ariel Schulman, Henry Joost and the film’s subject, Nev Schulman, about how they decided to make it.

“Catfish” is being released by Universal Pictures, which picked it up after it got a lot of attention at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year.

Before the social networking site’s CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg gets his knickers in a knot, “Catfish” is actually not the Facebook-bashing one.

Instead of a semi-fictional film–that would be “The Social Network” from Sony (SNE)–this one is a rumination on identity in the digital age.

As I previously wrote, I won’t give away the particulars, except to say it shows the range of human emotions that social networking engenders, from desperation and loneliness to serendipity and hope for love.

We talk about all that and more in the video of the interview I did before our discussion with the audience at the screening:

[ See post to watch video ]

By John Murrell

If Google keeps this up, it’s going to find itself with a busy little bargain basement filled with engineers and developers poking around for deals on discontinued products. First it was the house brand Nexus One smartphone finding new life among Android developers after failing to grab the public. And soon the guts of Wave, the ambitious but amorphous and ultimately abandoned collaboration tool, will be made available as an open-source, client-server package, called Wave in a Box, to those interested in building on Google’s experiment.

Earlier this year, the travails of late-night television talk show host Conan O’Brien and his epic battle with the inept suits at NBC became a gold mine of Internet-fueled comedy mayhem.

Well, Team Coco is back in November on TBS, and it has a name.

And it’s a good one, as you will see in the video below.

Enjoy:

Why does Digg have a new design and a new CEO? Here’s one answer, via a handy chart.

This one comes from Christopher Mascari, a Gawker Media marketing guy, and it illustrates the blog network’s traffic from social media sites. Less than a year ago, Digg was the single most important social site for Gawker, Gizmodo, Jalopnik et al. Now it has been eclipsed by the likes of Facebook, Twitter and, a little surprisingly, StumbleUpon. And note that Reddit, Condé Nast’s “Digg clone,” is catching up as well:

The other big takeaway from the data is the story that many publishers have been telling in the past year or so: Social traffic is becoming as important, or more so, than search traffic from the likes of Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO). Last fall Gawker was getting 10 million visits a month from social sites; now that number is up to 20 million. And Facebook, at 7.7 million visits, now represents more than a third of that number:

“Shocked” by demand for the iPad after it launched, Apple (AAPL) has ramped up production of the device to meet it, but there’s work left to do yet. Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty says Apple recently doubled its monthly iPad builds to two million. And while that’s likely the reason we saw iPad shipping times fall from three to five days to within 24 hours of purchase, the company evidently wants to have still more product on hand. Says Huberty, “Apple recently indicated to its suppliers a desire to move to 3 million per month in C4Q10. This implies a run rate of 36 million in CY11, close to the current 40 million supply chain forecast.”

Seems, then, that it’s not slowing demand that has pushed the supply-demand ratio into equilibrium as sum have suggested, but increased production.

It’s $4.99 a pop at Apple’s (AAPL) digital store, and publisher Atlantic Media Company got Dow to pony up for the right to be the “launch sponsor” for the app. App developer RareWire did the technical heavy lifting.

Germany is the last major European market with a single iPhone carrier. But not for much longer.

Deutsche Telekom (DT)-owned carrier T-Mobile’s iPhone exclusivity deal with Apple (AAPL) is nearing expiration and has not been extended. People familiar with the matter tell The Wall Street Journal that the company’s exclusive rights to sell the device may end as soon as October, opening the door for Vodafone and O2 to begin selling it as well. Discussions between Apple and both carriers are said to be underway and deals are expected to be signed in time for the holiday shopping season.

By Juro Osawa and Daisuke Wakabayashi, Reporters, The Wall Street Journal

Inside Tokyo’s bustling Shinagawa train station here, a futuristic-looking vending machine has replaced rows of drink bottles and cans with a 47-inch touch-screen monitor.

When a person stands in front of the screen, a camera captures his image and a sensor determines the person’s gender and approximate age.

Based on that reading, the machine “recommends” drinks that fit the customer’s profile.

“With this machine, we can actually see who is buying what, instead of relying on educated guesses,” said Toshinari Sasagawa, general manager of sales at an East Japan Railway subsidiary that operates vending machines in train stations.

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