Henry Blodget at Silicon Alley Insider is sitting on a pile of unconfirmed information regarding Facebook’s current common stock valuation, the upshot of which is: “… it is inaccurate to say that Facebook’s valuation has fallen from $15 billion to $4 billion. But it seems safe to say that Facebook will have trouble selling preferred TODAY at a $15 billion valuation, given the change in expectations for the company’s business outlook over the past year. Perhaps Gideon can find some folks in the Middle East stupid enough willing to pay that.”

Blodget’s source also says Facebook’s revenue this year will be an estimated $265 billion. On this Blodget says: “A key upcoming event for Facebook will be the renegotiation of the Microsoft advertising and search deal: The source believes Microsoft overpaid the first time around and will therefore try to negotiate a better deal this time. This could hit Facebook’s future revenue growth.”

Meanwhile over at VentureBeat, Eric Eldon takes a long hard look at Facebook’s continuing search for revenue, saying: “Even if Facebook makes that $265 million this year, it does not mean shares in the company are a lot closer to worthless. It has been holding operating costs down as it prepares for the long haul, we’ve heard, through doing things like building its own servers. Meanwhile, as the blog AllFacebook recently examined in detail, Facebook may be rolling out a targeted ad service that works across the web.”

SixApart lays off staff, prepares for 2009
Chris Alden, CEO of Six Apart, has posted news of the company’s plans to prepare for the tough trading conditions anticipated in 2009 – including an 8% staff cuts and management taking a 15% pay cut.

He writes: “We’ve been reminded lately that blogging was born out of the last recession in 2001 – 2002, and that during tough economic times creative voices look to powerful, cost-effective ways to connect and communicate with the world around them.”

Owen Thomas at Valleywag is full of praise for Alden’s blog-savvy handling of the news, with one caveat: “The only disappointment: That the company didn’t kill off Vox, its interminably boring free personal blogging service.”

UbiVu may be the answer to this discussion mess we’re in
London-based UberVu, one of this year’s Seedcamp winners, is days away from launching a service which will allow users to pool all the activity around a given URL, including blog posts, Twitter conversations, Friendfeed comments and even recursive trackbacks, all handily packaged as a threaded interfaced on its site and via an API.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch can’t wait, weighing in with a potted history of those who have gone before in their attempts to make sense of the chaos: “This is an area that startups have experimented with for years, either aggregating by user or by URL. CoComment was an early attempt at aggregating unique user comments across sites (Disqus, SezWho, JS-Kit, Intense Debate and BackType are more recent examples). Less has been done on aggregating discussions around a specific story or URL, but FriendFeed’s API allows publishers to pull in specific FriendFeed comments on a story, and Quotably has tried to aggregate Twitter discussions (it is now deadpooled).”