Top Stories for the Week of March 16-20, 2009

South by Southwest Interactive ended this week in Austin, and there actually were portions of it that didn't involve Twitter. Lots of awards: A digital fiction site called We Tell Stories, from start-up Six to Start and publisher Penguin, was named Best of Show. Mashable has all the winners here. Microblink runs down other cool stuff including WeFollow, a user-powered Twitter directory backed by Kevin Rose, and Blellow, a microblogging site for specifically collaborative work (really?) "This week tons of people were asking me "what's the 'Twitter' of this year's SXSW conference," says Scobleizer. Umm, Twitter? No, it was the breakout of location-based stuff like Foursquare, a game that's based on where you and your friends are. Much of the rest was about, uh, Twitter. There was a live Twitter feed from the show, whose "near endless tweets quickly became a fire hose of noise and valueless updates," Microblink says. Also, famous singer John Mayer Tweeted on about his break-up with Jennifer Aniston and wrote "this heart didn't come with instructions." Does someone smell double platinum?

Also in tech, Apple has previewed its next-generation 3.0 operating system for the iPhone, and it supposedly has 100 new features, reports electronista. "At long last, iPhone users will soon be able to copy and paste text and images," revels Between the Lines. Thanks to copying, "you can also send more than one photo at a time," says Lifehacker... One cool thing: "If you accidentally paste something you didn't want to paste, just shake your iPhone to undo it," says Gizmodo. "Some of the cute features like shake to undo aren't exactly original - Etch a Sketch had that way back in '06," notes Bleeding Edge. The Giz runs down some other new stuff like a landscape keyboard mode, cross app search capability, and 3G tethering that theoretically lets your laptop use the iPhone as a wireless modem. When is all this jazz available? Geeksugar notes that Apple sometime this Summer--it'll be free for iPhone 3G owners, $10 for Touch owners, and free for first generation iPhone users, who'll get most but not all the features.

Meanwhile, the AIG bonus scandal is coming back to bite hard in Washington, and we're getting a slow reveal of who put the loophole in the stimulus law that made the outrage possible. Sen. Chris Dodd first said it wasn't him and then said, oh yeah, it was him, but the Treasury Dept. made me do it. "Liar, Liar, pants on fire!" says Buzzflash. If only pants being on fire were our worst problem. Hold Fast buys Dodd's assertion that he opposed the AIG bonuses--it puts the blame on the Treasury guys. Yep, it's totally Treasury Secretary's Tim Geithner's fault, says Matt Flam, who predicts Geithner will be the first Obama cabinet member to resign. Outside the Beltway agrees, calling Geithner Dead Secretary Walking: "At the rate he's going, he might not last to summer." "The wolves are circling," adds BitsBlog "but is Timothy Geithner the main course or an appetizer?" Other bloggers just want to know: Who is the man that got the $6.5 million payout?

Hey, that's why they call it March Madness, baby! The president has locked in his bracket selections, proving further that you can't please everyone: Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said, "Somebody said that we're not in President Obama's Final Four, and as much as I respect what he's doing, really, the economy is something that he should focus on, probably more than the brackets," reports Jay Mariotti at Fanhouse. But the nation's economists do seem eager to escape the economy for a moment and mess with something meaningless. Environmental Economics is running a pool. Economix says to win your office pool you really need a contrarian champion strategy. This Number Crunching Life takes a statistical approach to its bracketology: "I regularize the latent vectors by adding independent zero-mean Gaussian priors." Well, who wouldn't? "Everyone this time of the year turns into a Bracketology expert," says Sports Glance with Lance. "People that haven't watched basketball all year, suddenly know every 5-12 upset that's going down."