“The great thing about blogging is that I don’t need you journalists to interpret me anymore.”

– Whole Foods (WFMI) CEO John Mackey, in a Q&A with Fortune in July 2007. Back then, Mackey’s blog campaign to acquire Wild Oats, a major competitor, drew the ire of the Federal Trade Commission. Now the controversy-courting boss is in hot water again over another piece of writing: a Wall Street Journal op-ed in which he proposes less government involvement in health care. The op-ed hit a nerve with Whole Food customers. Some are rallying for a boycott of the natural-foods grocery giant.–Jessica Shambora

Betsy Morgan is out as CEO of HuffingtonPost.com — and her firing came as a surprise to her, Morgan told me when we connected by phone late this afternoon.

“Bummer.” That was the first word she uttered in our conversation. Morgan says she’s not bitter, however. After all, what a ride Arianna’s web venture has been these past 20 months. Morgan joined in October 2007 — and I remember it well because she was at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit as the news of her hiring hit the papers. Just hours after Arianna Huffington, Morgan’s boss, introduced her new CEO to the 300 women leaders gathered in California, Morgan was called back east. Her mother had died suddenly.

It was a dramatic start of a dramatic 20-month ride. Back in the fall of 2007, HuffPo, as the site has come to be known, was attracting 1.2 million unique visitors a month. This past April, it drew 5.6 million uniques, according to ComScore. While traffic more than quintupled, revenues doubled. The Huffington Post morphed from a political to a mainstream site. And the company, which has raised some $35 million, is edging toward profitability.

Replacing Morgan as CEO is Softbank Capital’s Eric Hippeau, a media-industry venture capitalist who has been on the HuffPo board since 2006. Morgan could have stayed at the company in a lesser role, but she doesn’t want to do that. So, what’s next? She’s asking herself. “My biggest question is,” she told me, “Do I help fix an old media business or do I help grow a new one?”

Having joined HuffPo from CBS (CBS), where she ran CBS News’ digital arm, Morgan knows both sides of the media business. “God, I’ve seen so much of that side where you invent differently and innovate differently,” she says. “But I also know so many media companies that have gone halfway into digital. Do I go help them with that?”

As she contemplates her future, she’ll attract her own traffic — headhunters, that is. Arianna may help her decide her next act. The parting between these two powerful women is neither pleasant nor easy, but it’s amicable. “I loved working with Betsy,” Huffington told me today. “We talked every morning at 7:30. It was always a partnership. And she was always a class act.”

Before Morgan and I ended our conversation, I asked her what she learned from the reigning diva of digital. “Arianna taught me that everything you do, you should do with passion and a sense of humor,” Morgan says. Oh, and one other thing, she said: “The sky’s the limit.”

When I arrived at Pace University at 9:30 this morning in lower Manhattan, the line was already snaking down the side of the building. The crowd, gathered to witness the announcement of a third version of Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle electronic reader, was feverishly tapping at gadgets galore and every so often stepping out of line to take camera phone shots of the assembled group. It seemed their excitement had gotten the best of them, and that even this mundane sight seemed to merit capturing for posterity.

Once inside the auditorium’s lobby, the throng of tech bloggers erupted into a frenzy. They interviewed each other on Flip video cameras and perched at bistro tables, posting the tech world’s version of a “pre-game show” to websites.  I saw delegates from blogs like TechCrunch and Engadget, which leaked early photos of the new Kindle yesterday. On the fringes, folks with name-tags that read “Amazon guest” stood taking it all. The guests I spoke to said they were from book publishers whose offerings included textbooks.

When we were finally led into the auditorium, there was a dash for the front row seats. Soft rock hits from the seventies and eighties piped into the room. Once settled in, the bloggers pulled up their Twitter accounts and began posting dispatches, announcing them aloud to one another. The camera phones were out again, capturing the empty stage and a screen with the Amazon.com logo.

Finally, just after 10:30, the Jeff Bezos show began. The Amazon CEO bid everyone good morning and then opened with his trademark phrase: “Every book, ever printed, in any language, available in less than 60 seconds.” After giving a brief history of the Kindle since its 2007 launch–still no numbers on total Kindles sold–Bezos held up the Kindle DX, which has a screen more than twice the size of the existing Kindle.  In a fireworks of flashbulbs, the bloggers typed furiously away. This is the way news is distributed in today’s world. Can the Kindle be part of this new era? We will soon find out. Click here for more on the Kindle DX. –Jessica Shambora

Did you hear that Research in Motion’s (RIMM) BlackBerry Curve 8900 toppled Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone as the No. 1 smart-phone in the first quarter? So says research firm NPD Group.

While I’ve never considered myself a barometer of technology trends, I have to tell you, the fact that I bought a Curve 8300 on Saturday says something about BlackBerry’s surging popularity.

You see, I am the furthest thing from a gadget person. When it comes to personal technology, I’m a Neanderthal.

At least I used to be.

I shouldn’t be telling you any of this. After all, I’m a blogger. I rely on the Internet to exchange ideas with you. I depend on your respect for me as a journalist who’s well-connected in every way — including technologically.

Okay, my true confession: I didn’t even own a home computer until a few months ago.

I still don’t have a microwave.

For years, I hid my secret — which you might consider to be a sort of anti-addiction to technology. That’s how I see it. If I keep gadgets out of my personal life, I always figured, I wouldn’t be tempted to work much outside the office. It was a workaholic’s self-discipline. Sort of like an an alcoholic who keeps alcohol out of the house to avoid being tempted to drink.

And my self-denial worked for me for a long while. And I faked my tech savvy even as I wrote about the technology industry. In the summer of 2006, for example, when I was reporting a Fortune cover story about MySpace founders Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, called “MySpace Cowboys,” I couldn’t let these cool dudes know that they wouldn’t be able to reach me by email on weekends. I never told them.

Nor could I tell the rising-star women of Silicon Valley, whom I wrote about last October in a Fortune story called “The New Valley Girls.” These women, who included Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and the top female execs at Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO) and eBay (EBAY), assumed that I was as tethered to technology and “with it.”

Hardly.

I began to slip two summers ago when Apple launched the iPod Touch. I bought one immediately. I was pleased that I could access the web in WiFi zones, like Starbucks stores, but not check my work email too easily. Working outside the office was possible, but it took effort.

Perfect. Then, early this year, soon after Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) released its Mini 100 netbook and the market for these compact notebook computers exploded, I bought one. I also called Verizon to sign up for wireless Internet service in my Manhattan apartment.

I was on the slippery slope, I knew it.

What made me cave completely and buy a BlackBerry? The tipping point was last Tuesday, when I spent hours at the White House. The day was memorable for lots of reasons. While I’ve been around plenty of powerful people during my 25 years at Fortune, I’d never spent a lot of time in Washington’s halls of power.

So there I was, on President Obama’s 99th day in office. I had scheduled brief meetings with a bunch of top women in the Obama Administration not to report a story but to tell them about Fortune’s Most Powerful Women, which is our second-biggest brand behind the Fortune 500 and expanding aggressively. Well, my meeting times with these folks inevitably shifted that day, and it was, I quickly realized, insane that they had to communicate with me via phone because I wasn’t on email.

It dawned on me that these people are working their butts off to save America from swine flu — which was the crisis of the day that I visited — and financial meltdown, and I’m inconveniencing them by resisting basic technology. How rude of me. “I can’t believe you don’t have a BlackBerry!” Susan Sher, President Obama’s associate legal counsel, said to me, graciously.

Sher was my tipping point. And so, out of guilt, embarrassment, and also civic responsibility, I caved and bought a BlackBerry. I already can’t live without it.

Hi–I’m on vacation, and Jessica Shambora, my Postcards colleague, is too. Much needed!

We’re taking a short break from blogging. But this is Postcards, after all–so you may hear peeps from our retreats. (Not the same spots, Jess and me, but both warm and sunny, we hope.)

You will definitely hear from me on Monday. I have a fabulous (!) cover story out that day. I’ll send you the link.

We wish you well and hope the markets and the world are still in one piece when we return, well rested, next Wednesday. On on!

“Adversity builds character.”

– Charlotte Sellers, my mother, who died a year ago today, told me this constantly when I was growing up. I try not to use Postcards as a platform to get too personal, but if you’ll permit today–to pay a tribute to her–I’d appreciate that. She was 87 and forceful and generous and beautiful until the end. My closest friend.

Marrying my father in 1944, she thought that she couldn’t have children—and after “the miracle,” as they always called me, arrived, they spent the first year dealing with my illnesses and doubting that I would survive. Well, I did. And I do think that adversity–in infancy for me and within a loving marriage for my parents–made us all stronger and wiser than we otherwise might have been. My dad, Dr. Walter Sellers, soon to be 88, is doing well generally but having a rough day today. So this Postcard is for him as much as it is for my mother and me.

How many public-company boards should a top exec at a Fortune 500 company join?

That’s debatable, particularly in these tumultuous times. But I hardly expected a harsh retort from my colleague Adam Lashinsky after I touched on this topic in Postcards yesterday. I said that Sue Decker, Yahoo’s (YHOO) outgoing president,  has a “breadth of experience” and an “impressive resume” because she’s on the boards of Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B), Intel (INTC) and Costco (COST). Adam took issue on his blog, Go West: “How the hell did someone in a grueling and overwhelming job and who happens to have a punishing commute to work maintain memberships on the boards of three such significant companies? Here’s another question: Why did the board tolerate Decker’s willingness to be even the slightest bit distracted for so long?”

Whoa, Adam! Three outside boards, I admit, may be pushing it, even for workaholic execs like Decker. But there’s no evidence that her extracurricular activities in the governance sphere constrained her performance as Yahoo’s president. She didn’t get the CEO job, which she very much wanted, largely because she was too loyal to CEO Jerry Yang and lacked the general management experience that distinguishes Carol Bartz, whom the board picked.

How do you think Bartz collected the experience she needs to be Yahoo’s CEO? She was chief of Autodesk (ADSK) for 14 years, until 2006, and did a great job there. As Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker points out, she increased the software company’s revenues from $285 million to $1.5 billion and its stock-market value from $827 million to $9.7 billion. But Bartz’s chops also came from serving on the boards of Intel, Cisco (CSCO), data-storage company NetApp, and BEA Systems before it was acquired by Oracle last year. If she hadn’t served on three major boards while also serving as CEO of Autodesk (proving her multi-tasking abilities!), she wouldn’t be Yahoo’s CEO today, I bet.

And she would argue that too. Here’s what Bartz told the Wall Street Journal in 2006: “Some companies don’t want their executives to serve on boards – because of time reasons, liability reasons, all kinds of reasons…If your company says it prefers you not to be on a board, you need to fight that rule. Because women can’t reach into the top executive management levels if they aren’t allowed on boards.”

As I said yesterday, Bartz is always candid. She went on: “Men are still in control and they hire men. The people running boards, which hire the CEOs, are men. At the end of the day, that still is the disease. So we just have to get in there and keep pushing.”

Now that she’s got the top job at Yahoo, she’s backing down a bit. I hear from a good source that Bartz is likely to leave the boards of NetApp and Intel, though not immediately. She’ll probably remain on the board of Cisco, where she’s the lead independent director. Given that a typical corporate director’s time commitment is around 200 hours annually, one outside board makes sense for Bartz, don’t you think? After all, turning around Yahoo is no ordinary CEO challenge.

Happy Friday! At least we have an auto bailout — some reassurance to end another rough week.

As I’ve monitored the page views on Postcards (way up this week!), I’ve noticed a pattern: lots of interest in good news and lessons in leadership — maybe because this is so hard to come by these days. Thursday’s post on Execution dispensed management advice from successful CEOs like IBM’s (IBM) Sam Palmisano and Verizon’s (VZ) Ivan Seidenberg. Another that struck a chord: Tuesday’s post about the second coming of JetBlue (JBLU) founder David Neeleman — or make that the fourth coming, given that his new airline, Azul, in Brazil is his fourth startup. Not bad for a guy who got bounced at both JetBlue and Southwest (LUV).

Monday’s post, Jamie Dimon: No bonuses for you!, drew more traffic than any other since we launched Postcards in June, except one. That most popular post happened to be The Great Depression, as I remember, which sounds like a downer but isn’t. It’s a charming and inspiring reminiscence by my 91-year-old Uncle Walt Stoiber in Ohio.

As for the Dimon post, it drew loads of comments — some negative (“Dimon should stop sending jobs offshore,” wrote Giuseppe Ciaccia, a laid-off employee in New York) but generally positive, like this one from a reader called “working hard” from Newark, Delaware: “Jamie and his team…deserve to be rewarded, but that can come at a later time.” The post also drew speculation about the identity of two former Citigroup (C) execs who followed Dimon to Bank One in 2000 and refused bonuses when that company was in trouble. Among the guesses: Heidi Miller, Bill Campbell, Charlie Scharf , Mike Cavanaugh, Jim Boshart, Steve Black, Frank Bisignano. All those execs followed Dimon to JPMorgan Chase (JPM), where he’s now CEO. My good sources tell me that, actually, the two execs were Charlie Scharf and Jim Boshart. While Boshart retired from JPMorgan Chase in 2004, Scharf is a prime player, as head of retail banking. He, by the way, was Dimon’s assistant straight out of college in 1987, when Dimon and Weill were running Commercial Credit, pre-Citi.

In this era of Bernie Madoff and greed galore, it’s good to hear about people who put a company’s interest above their own. As Dimon said at the Yale CEO Summit last week, “Business is more Shakespearean than MBA.” That’s right, in business as in life, the bad guys get their comeuppance. The good suffer, but usually they win in the end. Keep the faith!

Sarah Palin changed the game for women and power, and it’ll never be the same again. So say a few well-known women — Arianna Huffington, former vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro, White House Project president Marie Wilson, and More magazine editor in chief Lesley Jane Seymour — who met in New York this morning for “The Spin Room: Gender, Politics and Media in the 2008 Election.” The lively panel was sponsored by New York Women in Communications. And the panelists, mind you, are more likely to loathe than love Palin (they lean left politically, after all), but their message is that the Palin Effect is a good thing for women in the long run.

Here’s why: First, Palin matters. “She’s the epitome of the celebrification of politics,” said Seymour, who finds such a trend distasteful yet recognizes that it validates and augments Palin’s power. “She ain’t goin away.” Palin’s popularity ratings have risen, in fact, since Election Day, as she has swarmed the airwaves. Back home in her kitchen, cooking up caribou dogs with NBC Today’s Matt Lauer, the Alaska governor promoted her state and her stance on energy policy. If, as the panelists noted, Palin had performed as well during the presidential race, John McCain might be heading to the White House.

As for sexism — which, depending on your politics, poisoned the presidential contest or did not — Palin changed perceptions of that too. The media, tough on Hillary Clinton, reverted to chivalry with Palin. Remember the vice presidential debate, when Palin could have won simply if she didn’t bomb? Expectations were so low. (Huffington recalled live-blogging about the debate at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit and asking McCain campaign co-chair Meg Whitman, the former eBay (EBAY) CEO, how Palin performed. “Good enough,” Whitman replied.)

As it turned out, another famous woman nixed the paternalistic treatment of Palin: “Katie Couric was the first person who went after her without sexism,” Ferraro said. Couric’s hard-charging interview on CBS sunk Palin’s prospects. It also revived Couric’s flagging career.

Meanwhile, the panelists gave high marks to a little-known woman whom we’re sure to hear more about: Valerie Jarrett, a longtime confidante of Barack Obama who helped his campaign avoid the leaks that typically mar campaigns (and fatally damaged Clinton’s). No drama Obama: Jarrett was key. “I’ve never seen a campaign that’s so good as the Obama campaign,” Ferraro noted. “If he runs the country the same way, we’ll be in great shape.”

What about Hillary Clinton? Oddly, this group had little to say about the supposed first woman president. But don’t read too much into that. At the end of the hour, the panelists forecast that four years from now, America could have two women running for president. Palin vs. Clinton: Can you imagine that?

P.S. In mid-September, 126 participants of the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit responded to a survey that included this question: What role do you think Hillary Clinton will have in 2012? Sixteen percent predicted that Clinton will be president. 40% predicted that she’ll be Senate majority leader. The rest of the group said she’ll be neither. So what do you think?

I went out to lunch today. Really. Even as you’ve read this week about the slashing and shrinking inside my company, Time Inc. (TWX), and across the magazine industry (even Conde Nast, the proud, privately-held protector of privilege and perks is axing), I have to eat. I have to schmooze. My job depends upon it.

Allow me to defend the expense-account lunch. Here are my rules of (lunchtime) engagement, honed over 24 years at Fortune (I survived!) as I’ve watched how powerful people climb higher than I have:

1. Get out of the office. You won’t reach any pinnacle of power–the top job in your company, stardom in your industry, a great gig–by eating at your desk. Today, more than ever, power is about making connections. While information is a commodity (anyone can get it by going online), real knowledge comes come from sharing ideas. In my quarter-century at Fortune, how many times have I eaten at my desk? Once.

2. Find neutral territory. While I don’t indulge my expense account daily (I often eat in the caf, alone), I court key contacts on neutral ground–not their turf, not mine. Neutral territory equalizes parties. My best spot: Michael’s, the media-honcho mecca in midtown Manhattan. If not for lunch over Michael’s Nicoise salad, I swear, I would not have scored exclusive “gets” for Fortune such as profiles of Martha Stewart (MSO) post-prison, hedge-fund investor and Sears Holdings (SHLD) chairman Eddie Lampert, and General Electric (GE) bosses Jeff Zucker and Dick Ebersol. Not to mention countless stories for Fortune’s annual Most Powerful Women issue.

3. Give and Take. To win anything that’s hard to get, I’ve learned, it pays to share something important that you don’t want the other person to pass on. Trust the person. Then they feel compelled to trust you. The hitch: You can’t do this by email or phone. Meet face to face to read their character. Build the trust over lunch. Then, never break it. For a journalist like me, this doesn’t mean writing a puff piece. It means playing fair.

4. Redefine your power. Real power is personal power, as I noted in my first blog post the day we launched Postcards last June. The concept is more potent now that we’re in treacherous times: Real power is the power you have even if you lose your big job or lofty position. Use the lunch out to build your network and maybe the lifeline you thought you’d never need.

5. Enter the conversation. When Hearst Magazines president Cathie Black, my lunch-mate one day at Michael’s, told me this advice about blogging, I didn’t realize how valuable it would be. Black is no blog expert, she admits, but one bonafide expert who visited Hearst told the execs there that the most successful bloggers don’t start conversations; they pick up on the buzz out there already. And they chime in. So, as cost cuts are all the buzz in my business, I’ll chime in: We’ll know things have really turned ugly when people stop meeting for lunch.

P.S. Michael’s GM Steve Millington, in his Guest Post, recollects his most nerve-wracking day a few years ago. But his story has relevance today. One character in it is Vanity Fair writer Michael Wolff, who’s kicking up controversy with his soon-to-be-released bio of News Corp. (NWS) CEO Rupert Murdoch, The Man Who Owns the News. Moreover, in a lousy economy, it’s more critical than ever to love your best customers–as Millington knows how to do.