Five months after Google sales boss Tim Armstrong left for AOL, his old company is still reshaping its sales group. The latest move: David Fischer, who ran the company’s core self-serve ad business, is going on sabbatical later this month and will return to a different post. Newish sales boss Nikesh Arora says he hasn’t found a successor for Fischer and will step into his shoes in the meantime.

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Twitter has weighed in on the hacker who rooted through the company’s files and on the Web sites that published some of the stolen info. The short version: Don’t blame Google for our security problems; we need to use better passwords. But do be careful about publishing hacked data; we’re talking to our lawyers. “Bring it on,” says Gawker.

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Here’s a scoop from Silicon Alley Insider, published this morning: “Gawker Media announced last night that it acquired BloodCopy.com. It’s a blog about vampires. Really.” No, not really. The business blog got tripped up by a promotional campaign for “True Blood,” HBO’s vampire melodrama.

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Just in case any of you Web publishers haven’t picked up on it yet: The New York Times would like you to stop using the stuff it pays to produce. The latest example: The paper has asked design blog Apartment Therapy to unpublish all the Times’s photos it has run so far this year.

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Eric Schmidt says he’s going to pick an internal candidate to replace Tim Armstrong, the Google sales star who’s leaving to run AOL. And lot of people say David Rosenblatt, the former DoubleClick CEO who started working for Google a year ago after the acquisition, is his best choice.

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First things first: Everyone on U.S. Airways flight 1549, which landed in the Hudson River this afternoon a few minutes after it took off from LaGuardia, appears to be safe. Amazing.

So is this amazing photo from a Twitterer Janis Krums, who posted it to Twitpic, is the “first” photo of the airplane in the water. No idea if that’s true–was someone monitoring all news outlets simultaneously before they reached this conclusion?–but it is an extraordinary photo.

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The iPhone’s long-rumored appearance at the world’s biggest retailer is about to become a reality: Wal-Mart will start selling Apple’s iconic handset starting Sunday, Dec. 28. One rumor that has yet to materialize, though: A cheap version of the phone priced at $99.

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A year ago, the conventional wisdom said that the online ad market would still grow in an economic slump because online ads were cheaper, and more effective. And they are. But if the slump is big enough–like the one we’re in now–then all bets are off. Which is why there’s no longer any conventional wisdom about the future of online ads. J.P. Morgan analyst Imran Khan, for instance, thinks growth will slow next year, and has just reduced his estimates. But Gawker publisher Nick Denton thinks we’ll be lucky if there’s any growth, period.

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