When Microsoft (MSFT) made the decision this week to drop out as the sole sponsor of Fox’s upcoming special “Family Guy Presents: Seth & Alex’s Almost Live Comedy Show,” the software giant said, “The content was not a fit with the Windows brand.”

The special from “Family Guy” creator Seth MacFarlane and Alex Borstein, who also works on the animated show, featured skits and bits with jokes about the Holocaust, feminine hygiene, bowel movements and incest. In other words, it was much like a typical episode of “Family Guy.”

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“Hey LA–get out of your cars and get on your bikes. Time to ride. 7:30 tomorrow am. Griffith Park, LA Zoo parking lot. See you there,” Lance Armstrong wrote Wednesday on Twitter.

The message spread quickly, and when 19-year-old Richard Ponce of Silver Lake saw it online, he immediately got on the phone and called his friends to join.

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Here’s a tricky question: should the average electric utility customer pay higher rates so that people who install solar systems can sell power back to the grid?

That question is at the heart of a story today in the L.A. Times about whether to expand a program under which California utilities buy back power from customers with solar panels. Current state law allows utilities to cap solar power purchases at 2.5 percent of their generating capacity; a provision now being debated in Sacramento would quadruple the cap to 10 percent. The piece notes that Pacific Gas & Electric (PCG) could hit the 2.5 percent cap by the end of the year, while Southern California Edison (EIX) and San Diego Gas & Electric (SRE) are moving more slowly.

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The sale of The Pirate Bay probably ranks as the week’s biggest news for those of us who obsess about copyright issues, followed by the ruling that Usenet.com’s newsgroup-access service infringed on the major record companies’ copyrights and the Supreme Court’s decision not to take Hollywood’s appeal of the Cablevision (CVC) network DVR ruling. But two other developments in U.S. courts seem more important to the average music fan because of the potential they have for disrupting digital services.

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Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) shut like a book.

Domino’s Pizza Inc. (DPZ) was late but eventually delivered.

And CNN focused on the good news.

When the three major brands engaged with their Web-savvy fans and critics in separate incidents last week, their responses demonstrated how corporations are still learning how to control their messages–and reputations–in a fast-twitch online world.

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Even a few years ago the word “blog” inspired that peculiar mix of derision and dismissal that seems to haunt new media innovations long after they’re proven. A blogger was a lonely, pajama-clad person in a dark room, typing out banal musings he mistook for interesting ones, to be read by a handful of friends or strangers if they were read at all.

That blogs have now become a fixture of media and culture might, you’d think, give critics pause before indulging in another round of new media ridicule. But it ain’t so.

Twitter, the micromessaging service where users broadcast short thoughts to one another, has been widely labeled the newest form of digital narcissism. And if it’s not self-obsession tweeters are accused of, it’s self-promotion, solipsism or flat out frivolousness.

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If you’re like most cellphone users, you probably think you’re paying less than 10 cents per minute for calls. Think again.

When you do the math, you find the average cellphone customer actually pays more than $3 per minute, according to a report being issued this week by the Utility Consumers’ Action Network, a San Diego consumer advocacy group.

I got a sneak peek at the report the other day.

Researchers arrived at the average $3.02 per-minute charge by comparing the average number of minutes charged in more than 700 San Diego consumers’ telecom bills and dividing by the average number of actual minutes used.

“We knew it was a myth that wireless costs were going down,” said Michael Shames, UCAN’s executive director. “But we were blown away by the actual costs.”

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The Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem announced six new members at the Consumer Electronics Show, taking one more (small) step toward its goal of creating a standard way for consumers to acquire movies and other types of entertainment online. With the additions of two major consumer-electronics makers (Panasonic and Samsung), the initiative now has the support of five of the largest TV manufacturers, six Hollywood studios, five powerhouse tech companies, and an assortment of players in other segments of the industry’s value chain.

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On some bright, parched morning back in the Old West, folks must have heard grumbling as a boy nailed a list of new town laws to the wall of the saloon. And when they saw the sheriff and his fresh-faced deputies looking on with a satisfied grin, that’s probably when they knew the West wasn’t going to be so wild anymore.

A similar scene has been playing out digitally at YouTube (GOOG), the Internet’s video town square. In addition to its longstanding campaign to crack down on illegally copied material, in September the site outlawed videos depicting drug abuse, and last week tightened its guidelines further to restrict profanity and sexually suggestive content. In other words, before the money wagons roll in…

…some law and order needs to be imposed.

[A note about the use of stock tickers: YouTube is owned by Google.]

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People of a certain generation remember when a wire connected the headset to your phone, your phone to the wall and your wall to the world. The big advance in the 1990s was–amazingly–freeing the handset from the wire, allowing you to roam more than a few feet while talking.

Now, according to new data released this morning by Nielsen, more people are taking the wire completely out of the equation. And the whole concept of a landline appears to be going the way of the bulky rotary phone.

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It must be tough to be a delegate at the Democratic National Convention–you have to know when to scream for Hillary, when to scream for Obama and when not to scream at all. And then you have to learn the art of shaking hands and networking while listening for really important announcements such as someone somewhere offering free pizza. Life may be easier if you have a swanky cellphone. At least, that’s what a bunch of companies are trying to convince you as they push their mobile-related products in Denver.

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How is your Olympics-watching experience going?

You may have caught some of the Olympic Games over the weekend, most likely in front of your television set and not online. NBC Universal, which owns the U.S. broadcast rights, said it attracted 114 million TV viewers, which was itself an Olympic record. The Web-viewing audience was a fraction of that, although a lot better than during the last Olympics.

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We’ve come a long way since Pong and Space Invaders. But video and computer games are still striving to be both interactive and realistic. Have you seen the “Saturday Night Live” skit of the interview with Grand Theft Auto IV’s main characters, Niko and Vlad? Their arms move imprecisely, as if they’re puppets underwater.

On Monday, chip maker Advanced Micro Devices, which already supplies the graphics power for the Nintendo Wii and the Xbox 360, showed the “SNL” skit at an event in San Francisco. Then AMD gave a taste of what it says a game maker can do with its new microprocessor: A 30-second clip of what appeared to be a real scorpion skittering around a terrarium, presumably hunted by another equally terrifying bug.

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