The obvious goal of the blog post is to advertise Digg's available jobs to prospective engineers. But in so doing, Adelson's alerting everyone to Digg's ever-expanding payroll expense — without talking up where the money is coming from. Digg has a sweetheart advertising deal with Microsoft, which sells ads for the site — but it hasn't found a revenue model of its own.

And Digg has a management problem which will only get more obvious as the company swells. Adelson, who commutes to Digg's San Francisco headquarters from his home in upstate New York, has admitted that he's not as committed to the company as he could be, having been burnt at a previous startup, Equinix. Founder Kevin Rose, who still commands considerable respect among Digg's contentious users, has made it plain he's not interested in running a big company and taking it public. It's hard to picture Rose and Adelson staying if Digg is sincere about getting big.

Michael Wolff was talking to lefty media blogger Rory O'Connor at the bar.

We asked him if he'd been asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement for Newser.

He laughed. "Never! No NDAs, never," he said. "That's the rule of the road."

So there might very well be a tell-all in his future. Rory laughed and said, "It's inevitable!"

Wolff agreed: "Inevitable."

"It could be called, "I can't believe those idiots gave me money to do it all again!" Rory said.

We asked Wolff about the algorithm that is Newser's kind of main claim to fame. Users can move an indicator on a continuum that runs from hard to soft news. "I have no idea how it works," Wolff said. "The tech guys explained it to me but I zoned out halfway through. Go ask that guy," he said pointing into a web of white-haired bespectacled men. "The one with white hair and the glasses."

Later, Caroline Miller was lingering by the door, ready to escape. Man, why didn't she get an NDA out of Wolff? "Because I'm feckless!" she said. Nice.

"Michael doesn't even have a contract," she said. "This whole thing is all on a handshake."

So what exactly does Wolff do for Newser? Here's what he does not do: "He's not allowed to talk to anyone on the inside," Miller said. "He's not allowed to manage anybody. What he discovered a long time ago about himself is that he likes to fire people. He has the ideas but I make them happen."

So he has ideas. And did he bring the money? No. "It's all Pat's money anyway!" That would be Patrick Spain, the CEO of HighBeam and soon to be the main character of a really harsh book about how the internet sucks.

It was beautifully wrought. Your Personal Net it was called.... Your interests are our interests, we were saying; we know you don't want to have to trudge through all this data and technology. Enter Paris in a search engine and get back six hundred thousand matches...we figured it would only irritate someone who was going to Paris.... We were proposing to have actual normal people—intelligent, too—help you get this thing to work.

Yahoo press release, ten years later:

"The integration of Yahoo! Answers with Web search demonstrates the Yahoo! Search vision to enrich people's lives by enabling them to find, use, share and expand all human knowledge," said Eckart Walther, vice president of products at Yahoo! Search. "Yahoo! is providing a better search experience by making it easier for people to tap into the collective knowledge of others online for everyday questions."

Sing with Shirley Bassey now: "It's all just a little bit of history repeating."

Yahoo! Search Leverages Human Knowledge From Yahoo! Answers To Improve Web Search [Yahoo PR]