In a development that only Scrooge and the Grinch would find amusing, the tech industry has entered into a fevered period of pre-holiday job cuts. In the last few weeks, there have been layoff announcements from Adobe (ADBE) (680 jobs), Electronic Arts (ERTS) (1,500 jobs), Sprint (S) (up to 2,500 jobs), Microsoft (MSFT) (800 jobs), RealNetworks (RNWK) (70 jobs), AOL (100 jobs), Sun Microsystems (JAVA) (3,000 jobs), Blue Coat (BCSI) (roughly 150 jobs), Lexmark (LXK) (825 jobs) and Nokia Siemens (NOK) (potentially north of of 5,000 jobs).

Applied Materials (AMAT) could be next.

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Music-download service 7digital faces plenty of skepticism since its U.S. launch two weeks ago.

According to Ben Drury, its co-founder and chief executive, many of the questions–how do you compete with iTunes, how do you stand out amid a sea of music services–are valid ones.

“We didn’t want to just launch a ‘me-too’ store,” he said in an interview in New York, where he’s attending the CMJ Music Marathon and meeting with media companies old and new, including CBS (CBS), eBay (EBAY), Pandora and AOL, to discuss potential partnerships.

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In the early years of the Internet, the more time people spent online, the more they paid a provider like AOL for their connection. But as customers have shifted to always-on broadband services, many Web surfers have enjoyed all-you-can-eat Internet for a flat rate.

Some cable and telecommunications providers are trying to turn back the clock and return to usage-based pricing for Internet connections. Carriers including AT&T Inc. (T) and Time Warner Cable Inc. (TWC) say they may have to switch amid a surge in Internet traffic as more people go online to watch videos and download movies.

Recent efforts to introduce usage-based, or metered, broadband services have met stiff resistance from consumers. But a new push by the federal government to adopt rules that would force Internet providers to treat all Web traffic equally, no matter how much bandwidth they take up, could give ammunition to the broadband providers that want to change how they charge for Web access, Internet experts and consumer advocates say.

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A new executive team at MySpace is trying to reignite the brand by focusing on areas like music, videos and games as users abandon the social-networking site for cooler destinations.

MySpace, which is holding a conference this week for its global ad-sales staff, needs to lure visitors back and kick-start advertising revenue, ad executives say. Research firm eMarketer estimates U.S. ad spending on the site will be $495 million this year, down 15 percent from $585 million in 2008.

The basic challenge is similar to the one facing big Internet companies, such as Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL and Yahoo (YHOO), that are under pressure to reinvent themselves for fickle audiences.

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Phishing attacks that affected customers of Microsoft’s (MSFT) Hotmail Monday have compromised more than 30,000 email accounts, including those of Gmail, Yahoo (YHOO) Mail and other services.

Microsoft blamed phishing, in which cybercriminals try to trick consumers into revealing personal information through fraudulent emails, for a list of Hotmail account passwords that appeared online. The company recommended Hotmail customers change their passwords and said it’s helping phishing victims fix compromised accounts.

But security firms and the BBC said Tuesday that the attack extended to other services, including those run by Google (GOOG) and Yahoo as well as AOL, EarthLink (ELNK) and Comcast (CMCSA).

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Barry Diller, IAC’s (IACI) chief executive, said Wednesday that he’s not interested in acquiring AOL after the Internet business is spun off from its parent company, Time Warner (TWX).

“I have no interest in purchasing AOL, but there are kinds of alliances that are possible for us,” Diller said at an investor conference in New York. “Those maybe will happen, or maybe they won’t happen.”

Time Warner–unable to sell AOL on favorable terms–is planning to spin it off as an independent public company, though it remains a source of acquisition speculation in media circles.

With its $1.6-billion cash pile, IAC is a potential buyer with a stable of Internet businesses that have clear overlap with AOL.

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Can you imagine the Web without cats LOLing, eating spaghetti or playing the keyboard? The day (just a day!) is coming.

Sept. 9 will mark Urlesque’s 24-hour feline-content blackout, also known as “Day Without Cats on the Internet,” and as a lead-up to the event, the site will spend the next few days focused on kitty memes.

The idea came from the AOL-owned property’s sister site, Asylum, whose writers realized that they were constantly blogging about Megan Fox. They agreed that Aug. 4 would be a day-long break from the “Transformers” actress and instead celebrated “Golden Girls” star Betty White.

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While Time-Warner (TWX) moves closer to the spin-off of AOL, the Street is anticipating what they might do after that. An obvious option: shed the magazine business.

In a research note picking up coverage of the company today, Caris & Co. analyst David Miller proposes that the company’s publishing arm is likely head for its “swan song.” While noting that no announcement has been issued by Time-Warner on this, he writes that “it would not surprise us to see management dispose of this business, either through an outright sale, or through equity carve out, though not until the AOL transaction has been completed.”

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I Can Has Cheezburger, the Web site that popularized the “art” of matching cat photos to misspelled captions, is the inspiration for a new independent musical that debuts Friday.

Kristyn Pomranz and Katherine Steinberg, both online editors at AOL, created “I Can Has Cheezburger: The MusicLOL” out of a mutual appreciation for the site.

Ms. Pomranz, 27, has a musical-theater background and is “predisposed to singing about everything that happens around me,” she said. Ms. Steinberg caught her in mid-tune about a LOLcat (which Wikipedia defines as “an image combining a photograph, most frequently of a cat, with a humorous and idiosyncratic caption in [often] broken English–a dialect which is known as ‘lolspeak,’ ‘kitteh’ or ‘kitty pidgin’ and which parodies the poor grammar typically attributed to Internet slang) and realized she was on to something.

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Shortly after Tim Armstrong took over as chief executive of AOL, he asked to see the list of business deals that were being negotiated. He saw 900 of them.

It was too many by far. “If you looked through the deal sheet, would you have been able to see the strategy of the company?” he asked. “I had a hard time.”

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Does Liberty Media (LINTA) want to own AOL?

CNBC’s David Faber raised the question this morning at the tail end of a long interview with Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei. And Maffei indicated that Liberty, the media empire controlled by billionaire investor John Malone, actually does have some interest in the Time Warner (TWX) unit, which is currently on track to be spun off as a separate company via an IPO.

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Drippy Manhattan evenings aren’t usually a draw for an outdoor cocktail party but the FoundersClub NYC Internet Week soiree had something that overcomes a little rain: power. Barry Diller, the chairman and CEO of IAC (NSDQ: IACI), was hosting two of the hottest not-so-new guys in town—AOL’s Tim Armstrong and News Corp.‘s Jon Miller—in the Rooftop Garden at Rockefeller Center and the draw was irresistible for Rupert Murdoch and wife Wendy, Jeff Zucker, Sir Martin Sorrell and more from media, advertising and tech.

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A month ago Dennis Woodside was running Google’s (GOOG) U.K., Ireland and Benelux business out of London, thinking that’s where he and his family would be for at least a few more years. But that was before Tim Armstrong, Google’s president-Americas Operations, decamped for AOL (TWX) and Mr. Woodside was tapped as his replacement, to run Google’s business in the Americas region. Since then, he’s spent a week in New York, then California and then back in New York. Next week you’ll find him in London. And after that he’ll start the cycle all over again–a schedule he’ll pretty much live by until his family moves to the U.S. in July.

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Old computer products, like old soldiers, never die. They stay on the market–even though they haven’t been updated in eons. Or their names get slapped on new products–available only outside the U.S. Or obsessive fans refuse to accept that they’re obsolete–long after the rest of the world has moved on.

For this story–which I hereby dedicate to Richard Lamparski, whose “Whatever Became of…?” books I loved as a kid–I checked in on the whereabouts of 25 famous technology products, dating back to the 1970s. Some are specific hardware and software classics; some are services that once had millions of subscribers; some are entire categories of stuff that were once omnipresent. I focused on items that remain extant–if “extant” means that they remain for sale, in one way or another–and didn’t address products that, while no longer blockbusters, retain a reasonably robust U.S. presence (such as AOL and WordPerfect).

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AOL was the top Internet service provider when it came to customer service in 2008, according to a Forrester Research report. The rub: AOL’s top rating based on Forrester’s “customer experience index” translates into a “just OK” mark.

As a group, ISPs grade out with a “poor” rating of 59 percent based on Forrester’s customer experience index. That tally makes ISPs 10th place out of the 12 industries the research firm examined.

I sought out the Forrester report after AOL trumpeted its customer standing in a press release. I just had to see how AOL, which is trying to wind down its access business, managed to be the best house in a bad ISP neighborhood.

In fact, AOL’s 71 percent rating was the tops, AT&T (T) and MSN were the only other ISPs that had “okay” ratings. Three ISPs–Charter, Comcast (CMCSA) and Road Runner–and “very poor” ratings.

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