<![CDATA[Gawker: valleywag, david karp]]> http://tags.gawker.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/gawker.com.png <![CDATA[Gawker: valleywag, david karp]]> http://gawker.com/tag/valleywag/davidkarp http://gawker.com/tag/valleywag/davidkarp <![CDATA[How To Be a Man, By Lance Armstrong]]> David Karp lectured the twittering masses on acting "classy," Lance Armstrong held forth on what Real Men don't do on the internet, and Andrew Keen detested your inspirational quotes. The Twitterati were feeling judgy.



Tumblr founder David Karp ate dinner with some really famous people, but he's not one to brag, so you didn't hear it from him.



Celebrity healer Deepak Chopra really feels he made a connection with the entire Twitter Family, whoever that is.



Internet pundit Andrew Keen is not-so-quietly judging you.



Macho cyclist Lance Armstrong presumed to lecture the males of Twitter on how to be men. It was almost as though he had a surplus of testosterone in his system, which is nothing that would ever conceivably happen.



Actress Olivia Mumm is eagerly awaiting delivery of her slave from another country. Aren't we all, ho ho ho.



Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets - or send us more Twitter usernames.

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<![CDATA[Josh Harris' Sunday Styles Treatment: The Ultimate Tech Cautionary Tale]]> Josh Harris—the Silicon Valley O.G. who washed up when the 1.0 tech bubble burst—had his second life profiled by the Sunday Styles. Harris is the ultimate Where Are They Now? of the tech scene. And where is he?

Living in a pool house in L.A., playing poker at a race track. Allen Salkin—the Seymour Hersh of the Styles section—files this weekend on Harris, who's doing some kind of strange press round for Ondi Timoner's documentary about him, We Live In Public. The last guy to file on Harris? Jayson Blair.

Harris was maybe the first chronic oversharer. The guy who founded Jupiter Communications and Pseudo Programs once webcammed his entire life and broadcast it for web-savvy voyeurs to see. He could be considered a pioneer in a culture that gave rise to Julia Allison—who, of course, appears in the doc—as well as Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and pretty much any other form of communication that shoves someone's life down your throat.

Maybe suspiciously, Salkin's plugged Harris before, when writing about a group of New York writers who abstain from oversharing at their salons (but still tell their story to the New York Times). He's dipping back into the same well for his profile on Harris. Commence quoting of tech luminary Jason Calicanis, whose pool house Harris is now possibly housed in:

"He is one of the 10 most important people in the history of the Internet," said Jason Calacanis, an entrepreneur of digital media who once chronicled New York's tech scene in his publication, The Silicon Alley Reporter. "He may not be the most famous."

But Salkin eventually gets to the good stuff, chronicling how far Harris, who once threw parties at his SoHo loft in which there was "sushi served off naked women, boxing, hip-hop artists including Eminem, and Mr. Harris sometimes dressed as his alter ego, a shrieky clown in smeared makeup named Luvvy, based on the wife of Thurston J. Howell III, a character from "Gilligan's Island."

You know someone's has both made it and simultaneously sealed their fate once they start dressing up as Pennywise impersonating Lovey. And so it was. Harris:

  • Had only $741 to his name when Salkin interviewed him.

  • Sold the apple farm he tried to escape to from Manhattan in 2006.

  • Had to ensure part of the buyout deal for his second company, the marginally successful Operator 11, involved a provision that'd pay off his $150K AmEx bill.

  • Went to Ethiopia to start another entertainment channel (which was well documented). Instead, he ended up smoking lots of weed (which wasn't).

  • Just this year, when Timoner won a Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, she had Harris fly out for the festival Q & A's. He only came pending oatmeal and the promise of a visit to a dentist. He never came back from Park City with Timoner.

  • Is also delusional. Salkin experienced Harris' insanity first hand when Harris explained that he thinks the F.B.I. went after him for being connected to 9/11.

The denouement is that Harris is trying to start a new startup, and Jason Calacanis wants to help. The startup is called The Wired City. Any New York Times sentence that begins with the word "basically" should prepare readers for a concept that, if not boiled down to less than a sentence, is otherwise absurd. And it is:

Basically, it would have a large group of people living in a sort of three-dimensional real-world Facebook, where "friends" could participate in one another's every move.

He explained that if two people were Wired City participants having lunch at a restaurant talking about clowns, friends watching remotely could send video that would, perhaps, be broadcast on the table showing a clip from "Shakes the Clown" followed by menu recommendations. The cleverest friends would be rewarded.

It's hard to be completely cynical about an idea like The Wired City—as history's proven, crazier ideas have taken off—but Harris' manic self-destruction is ultimately going to be the large roadblock here. Salkin—who could've made a great trend piece out of this, too—lets a few salient points escape him, as he's wont to do.

Timoner's last documentary, Dig!, which detailed the almost-rise and tragic fall of The Brian Jonestown Massacre (a band led by a singer with another really, really bad Icarus complex), basically tells the same story. Guy reaches apex of fame and decides to throw it all away in a fit of self-indulgence. The Brian Jonestown Massacre isn't the band it could be, but they still play shows and make money, boosted by the spectacle put on display in Dig!, which lead singer Anton Newcomb quietly, smartly capitalized on. If Harris is smart, and can reign in the crazy, he might be able to hose some angel investors into doing the same, thereby giving him a second chance.

The fates of Mark Zuckerburg - the Facebook Boy Wonder whose life is getting the Aaron Sorkin treatment - Twitter's Evan Stone and Biz Williams, Tumblr's David Karp, and a bunch of other young, hot tech entrepreneurs have yet to be completely written. If they've got any sense about them, they're gonna pay close attention to Harris, whose tragic genius now amounts to insane, conspiratorial Styles Section kickers:

Walking past his old Pseudo offices at Houston and Broadway, Mr. Harris, who said he has never been in love, adjusted his dark sunglasses.

"It's a funny thing being in fear for your life," he said. "It's kind of addictive."

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<![CDATA[The Blog-War Revenge of Brooklyn's Hipsters]]> Matt Mullenweg should be proud; his giant WordPress.com has reportedly earned him millions. But his blog-platform rival, Tumblr founder David Karp, just surpassed him in one key metric. Mullenweg can blame Brooklyn one-upsmanship.

Like Mullenweg, Karp was a Web entrepreneur as a teenager and is now in his early 20s, creating software through which other people can make money. But while Texas-born Mullenweb has started a series of fights with his tech-industry colleagues, former Bronx Science student Karp has been cuddling his way around Manhattan and Brooklyn.

This sociability has helped Karp exploit Gotham's chattering classes: Tumblr has an estimated one-fifteenth the users of Wordpress.com, but generates about five time as much content, thanks to social networking tools that let its Brooklyn-centric userbase easily quote and snark upon one another's posts. This edge shows up in the sites' public daily posting statistics (Tumblr, then Wordpress):





Meanwhile, Karp, in full bragging mode today, tells us Tumblr averages "five interactions (answers, likes, reblogs, etc.) with each post on average versus 1.5 for Wordpress." That doesn't mean Tumblr is worth $15 million — it has yet to launch its "really sexy" plan to generate actual revenue — but it is an interesting stat, and a testament to the social networking features the snuggly young entrepreneur has built into his site. It's also a pretty solid indication Karp will soon have some additional "interactions" fairly soon, with surly young Mullenweg.

(Top pic: Mullenweg, right, by Jared Greeno; Karp by Zadi Diaz)

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<![CDATA[The Voodoo Curse of Julia Allison's Dog on Tech Companies]]> The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Theory: the closer internet persona(e) (non grata) Julia Allison gets to your internet startup, the more it's bound to falter. The breaking moment comes when her dog shits on your carpet.

Just as in relationships, when a significant other's dog empties itself on your carpet, you've broken a threshold, a deed that will never be undone. And we imagine Julia Allison's cupcake-eating dog, Lilly, has shit on a lot of carpets.

This probably happened to Vimeo founder and retreated-fameball Jakob Lodwick shortly before he was ousted from the company.

We've all heard about the troubles of Facebook lately (Spam! Departures!, Gadfly speculation on the non-monetizable nature of the company!) since her and Randi Zuckerberg became besties and started smoking in the bathroom and whatnot.

This probably didn't happen to social-network-as-video-game OMGPOP founder Charles Forman, because we haven't heard anything about that company other than people pouring money into it sometime both before and after the couple broke up (Forman more or less claimed tinnitus, not dogshitting, as the breaking point).

But Tumblr founder David Karp, while never in a relationship with Allison, has, at the least, always been cozy with her. From deep inside the Tumblr headquarters, proof that this thing has reached a breaking point: The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

Yeah: that's Allison, cleaning up Lilly's satanic curse from the floor of the Tumblr offices. Allison has referred to Lilly as a business partner; we don't doubt the dog's cunning skill in strategic shittery as a mark of both territory and omen. Open memo to David Karp and the rest of Tumblr: fumigate the place. Smudge it with sage. Rain dance the hell out of it. And Dennis Crowley of iPhone social networking app Foursquare: put that thing down NOW.

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<![CDATA[New York Times Writer Learns about 'Internets' at SXSW]]> In the '90s, the Web cognoscenti joked about doing crack. But New York Times columnist David Carr actually did crack! Which might explain his befuddlement in this clip from the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin.

Watch as microcelebrity NBC contractor Rex Sorgatz attempts to explain Foursquare, a friend-finding interactive game launched by former Google employee Dennis Crowley at the South By Southwest event, an annual excuse for a nonstop party thinly disguised as a conference on all things Web. Carr may be perplexed, but he comes to the right conclusion: Foursquare is a toy for "kids on the Internets."

"Internets," plural! Carr's cool like that!

Sorgatz and Crowley are just two of the familiar microcelebrities who make cameo appearances in Carr's writeup of SXSW. There's Tumblr founder David Karp, bragging about being a slacker:

I didn't even come last year, but this year we dropped the whole team in, I guess as a way of saying that we mean business. We're mostly having fun, doing a few meetings and enjoying seeing old friends. It would probably be a better use of my time to be back home staying up till 4 in the morning and just crushing it to come up with one more application, but this is more fun.

Declaring how much fun one is having and how much work one is avoiding is a strange way of showing one means business, but that's Karp for you.

And look, two Valleywag alumni:

All this can become insular, and fast. On Monday Nick Douglas and Melissa Gira Grant, two veteran bloggers, hosted a session called the "Sex Lives of the Microfamous." The two were involved once, and broke up on Tumblr, or so the story goes.

Actually, I could have sworn those two crazy kids broke up on Valleywag, but what do I know? I'm not quite as old as Carr, but I'm old enough to view faddish kiddie startups like Tumblr and Foursquare with skepticism.

(Video by Richard Blakeley)

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<![CDATA[South By Southwest Is a Pointless Party]]> Why does the tech world get a throwdown in Austin when the banks have had to cancel their bashes? The news out of South By Southwest shows that Web hipsters are every bit as bankrupt.

Intellectually, that is, as opposed to financially. Most people attending South By Southwest Interactive admit that they're there for the chance to hang out in Austin with the same Internet buddies they hang out with in San Francisco and Brooklyn. Without the parties, what's the point? That's always been the case with South By Southwest. It's just that with the economy prostrate and the social-networking bubble thoroughly popped, there's not even money to skim from the froth.

There's still enough money to pay for tickets to Austin, of course. But in good times and bad, SXSW has always suffered from a lack of purpose. The music and film festival which gave birth to it has real songs and real movies to talk about. The attendees of SXSW Interactive have nothing to look at but each other, and nothing to listen to but their own kind. Surely that explains why it ends up being a group grope of self-congratulation over little at all.

Ah yes, the bubbly parties. Facebook threw a party celebrating the launch of a tool for linking Facebook friends to iPhone apps, completing the circle of two recent technological fads. And Dennis Crowley's Foursquare — which may be based on code he sold to Google, his former employer — facilitated so-called "flash parties" at bars for those who couldn't get on the official party invite lists, or didn't care to wait in line. Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, launched Wefollow.com, a directory of users for Twitter, to help navigate the mess of messages broadcast on the service.

In other words, the best and brightest of Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley are working on iterations of existing software for the most frivolous of purposes. There's not even a fundamental innovation in this round of tweaks meant to help you waste time more efficiently. (Gawker Media, the publisher of Gawker and Valleywag, threw a party of its own — but at least my colleagues were open about their intentions, which seemed to involve getting a bunch of geeks liquored up.)

It all reminds me of Camp Cyprus — the group of 20 Web cognoscenti, a gaggle of Facebookers and startuppers and wantrepreneurs who flew to a rich kid's dad's vacation home on the Mediterranean last fall and created a video of them cavorting in swimsuits to celebrate their own brilliance to the tune of Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'." It was an incredibly tone-deaf gesture at a time when Wall Street was imploding and people were losing their jobs.

Except the economy hasn't gotten any better. And South By Southwest Interactive has more than 10,000 attendees. So doesn't that make its excesses 500 times worse?

A few people had the sense to avoid this particular trainwreck. Ev Williams, the CEO of Twitter, gave it a pass — even though the tech crowd at SXSW did so much to popularize his status-updating service. That the likes of Rose and Crowley are the stars of this year's South By speaks to how far it has fallen.

I first attended South By Southwest a decade ago, when the dotcom boom had 12 months left to run. Mark Cuban, then the head of Broadcast.com, gave a keynote speech about Internet video; he sold his Web-video startup, Broadcast.com, to Yahoo a month later for $5.7 billion. Under Yahoo's ownership, Broadcast.com went on to not be YouTube.

The difference between then and now: Thanks to the delusions of public-market investors, there was actually money to be made from what Internet insiders admitted were inanities. Now there's no money and no hope of making it. There's just the frivolity left.

Videographer Richard Blakeley quizzed bloggers on the highlights and lowlights of this year's South By Southwest.

Scenes from South By Southwest: (photos by Scott Kidder and James Del)

Tumblr founder David Karp has a new Tumblrette, Stephanie Wei! Update: Okay, we've gotten this whole who's-David-Karp-dating thing straight. Stephanie Wei was recently spotted with Karp at a birthday party for Briana Swanson. A tipster explains:

Karp is most definitely dating Stephanie Wei though, to the annoyance of many. Her friends were calling and emailing me asking if he was gay or not a couple of weeks ago, and now they complain that she's always with him.

Karp's sex life sure is confusing!
Pop17's Sarah Austin shows off her intellectual property.

Former Valleywag editor Nick Douglas puckers up to Laughing Squid's Scott Beale.

Lifehacker editor Adam Pash demonstrates how to open a beer bottle with a piece of paper.

Wine Library TV's Gary Vaynerchuk and "friend," which is caption-writer code for "we don't know who this is" very important person Becca Camp.

Facebook employees pop champagne with sparklers, just in case you missed the point that they were drinking champagne.

CollegeHumor's Ricky Van Veen and Tumblr's David Karp attempt to locate South By Southwest's point.

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<![CDATA[New Tumblr Stumble Renews Censorship Scandal]]> There's an old saying: Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity. The latest exemplar: Tumblr CEO David Karp, who keeps getting charged with squelching his users' freedom of speech.

Poor Karp! The founder of the ultracutesy blogging platform, favored by Internet microcelebrity Julia Allison and the bored hipsters of Brooklyn and San Francisco, just got done cleaning up one censorship mess.

The latest accuser: The anonymous blogger behind Out of Print, a Tumblr devoted to criticizing Tumblr. He says that his blog posts have stopped displaying comments — a critical feature on Tumblr, which is built around users' "reblogs," an automated way of quoting a blog entry one likes, and other comments. The more popular a Tumblr it is, the more reblogs it generally gathers — so the Out of Print blogger claims that the disappearance of his comments is proof that he's being silenced by Karp's censorious regime. He thinks it has something to do with an incident where he hacked part of Karp's personal blog to include a taunting message about Tumblr's lack of security.

The charge only carries weight because Karp recently confessed to deleting a set of Tumblr blogs which included critics of Allison, an acquaintance of Karp's who often appeared at his side at parties over the last year. Not very credibly, Karp denied that any personal relationships were at play in his decision.

But the microscope on Karp's missteps is largely his own fault, since he's gone to such lengths to tout Tumblr as a kinder, gentler place to blog, free of the anonymous attacks and general snideness that pervade the Internet. Since Tumblr is, itself, actually on the Internet, that's proven impossible. Karp's quixotic niceness campaign has only made him and Tumblr bigger targets.

No one's calling Karp stupid. Everyone generally agrees he's scary-smart. So instead of malice or stupidity, couldn't we put down Karp's seeming censoriousness to youth, naïveté, and general scatterbrainedness? Otherwise, we'd have to believe Karp is carrying out absurdly petty yet nearly undetectible campaigns against his online critics. Why would he bother to subtly delete comments instead of an entire blog, as he's done in the past?

Far more likely: This is another bug in Tumblr's rickety technological infrastructure. If only Karp could squelch those.

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<![CDATA[Tumblr CEO Acts His Age on Censorship Dilemma]]> David Karp, the 22-year-old CEO of blogging startup Tumblr, has decided he doesn't want to be in the business of censorship after all. Now everyone's free to make fun of his friend Julia Allison.

Karp decided to ban five blogs, including two which primarily mocked Tumblr posts by Allison, a dating columnist turned Internet microcelebrity, on Monday — and then announced a new anti-"harassment" policy supporting his decision on Tuesday. Today, he revoked that policy, and reversed the ban. "This policy had nothing to do with any personal relationships," he wrote in his Tumblr. Bold and italics, so you know he really meant it!

Instead, he introduced a blocking feature users have long asked for. Here's why they want it: When someone "reblogs" a Tumblr post, a link to his or her blog appears on the reblogged post. Some Tumblr users, Allison included, find this annoying, especially when the Tumblr blogger does not agree completely with their worldview. This may have something to do with most Tumblr users having an emotional age similar to the chronological age of Tumblr's CEO. Tumblr's new "block" feature allows them to blithely ignore people who read and comment on things they publish on the Internet.

The "block" feature has a salutary bonus for Tumblr as a business: It avoids the need for Karp to get involved in his friends' hysterical fits over people reading and commenting on things they publish on the Internet. Instead, he can figure out how to make money for his investors.

He had previously hinted about announcing some kind of money-making scheme on Monday. (He sold some electronic valentines. So cute!) Instead of crowing about that, he was tied up figuring out a policy to protect the Julia Allisons of the world. His backers must be pleased he's finally rolled out a feature to block his friends' personal problems from his agenda.

(Photo via Flickr)

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<![CDATA[Julia Allison: I'm 'Thrilled' Tumblr Muzzled My Hecklers]]> PreviewScreenSnapz001.jpgAt least one blogger has condemned Tumblr for deleting her "reblogger" critics, writing "don't those cunts have the same freedom of blog rights that the rest of us?" But Julia Allison is "proud."

Allison, the archetype of internet fameballdom, spends her time "lifestreaming" her every move for NonSociety, the Web startup she formed with friends Meghan Asha and Mary Rambin. Cable network Bravo has a longstanding option, valid through the end of this month, to launch a reality show involving the trio, thus exposing their lives even more completely. (NonSociety had a deal for a pilot, presumably now complete. Pilots are only sometimes made into full series.)

Given her aggressive self-exposure, one might think Allison would anticipate and tolerate critics, even those as uncommonly prolific in criticizing her life as she herself is in broadcasting it. But no; she sees the attacks as dehumanizing, and is glad her ex-boyfriend's pretend boyfriend, Tumblr founder David Karp, was man enough to stand up for her, and all other victims of internet critics. As she told us in an email:

I haven't asked David to take down any sites in a long time, so I don't know where the impetus for this particular purge came from, but I'm thrilled that he has. I am absolutely in favor of ridding the Tumblr community - and the internet in general - of what one of my readers once called "mind cancer." That sort of nastiness is insidious and it will rot communities unless someone says, "This simply isn't an acceptable way to treat other human beings."


There is no reason the internet should remain in its current Hobbesian state of nature. Someone needs to begin the long process of setting basic standards of decency online, and I'm proud of David - as a businessman, but also as a friend - that he and his company have the balls to do so."

Of course, if the internet were less wild and "Hobbesian," and if people and companies got to set the standards by which their critics were judged, the likes of Bill O'Reilly or Scientology and even Time might have shut down blogs like Gawker long ago. And it's hard to imagine Allison — or another Allison — rocketing to fame in such a tame environment. (We'll let you know when we figure out if that's a good or a bad thing.)

(Picture via NonSociety)

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<![CDATA[Deblogging Julia]]> An anonymous critic of microcelebrity egoblogger Julia Allison has been silenced, all in the name of "freedom of expression." Welcome to the wacky world of Tumblr, New York's pinchy-cheeked hypercute blogging startup.

David Karp, the 22-year-old founder and CEO of Tumblr, has explained his company's deletion Monday of Reblogging Julia and other Tumblr blogs devoted to critiquing Allison. The rationale: "internal discussions" about a change to Tumblr's policies, which he only made public today, to include "harassment" as a reason to delete a blog.

In other words, Karp decided to implement selectively a policy before it was announced, rendering his policies laughable. Should users go by what's actually published on Tumblr, or should they try to read Karp's mind? The latter seems like quite a challenge, since the young man running Tumblr seems quite mixed up himself. He finishes the explanation:

I'm really sorry for the confusion. Your content and freedom of expression are the reasons we're building Tumblr.

Actually, given that Tumblr has recently raised a second round of financing, making his venture capitalists slightly richer should be the reason why Karp is building Tumblr. And that's where Allison fits in! Her NonSociety blog is meant to be a testbed for a new kind of group Tumblr, for which Karp's company will charge money.

There seems to be a hitch in development, though. Karp had previously hinted that Tumblr would announce a new revenue-generating feature on Monday. Monday came and went with no announcement, unless Karp had in mind a one-off send-a-valentine tool Tumblr debuted for Valentine's Day, which hardly seems like a sustainable revenue stream. For now, Allison is the best advertisement Karp has for the revenue potential of his service. And that just makes Tumblr's situation seem all the sadder.

(Photo by Julia Allison)

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<![CDATA[Yahoo Might Buy Tumblr, New York's Cutest Startup]]> We hear Yahoo is in talks to buy Tumblr, a blogging startup run by 22-year-old David Karp for "low-to-mid eight figures" — which would translate to a small fortune for the New York entrepreneur.

And a quick one, too, without the troubles of figuring out how to make money off of Internet hipsters' self-indulgent ramblings. Karp has toyed with charging users for extra features, but it's not clear that adding fees would draw much revenue. Nevertheless, Tumblr was able to raise $4.5 million in December, an investment which reportedly valued the company at $15 million.

An incredible amount for such a young startup with such fuzzy hopes of making money. But it's a bargain compared to Twitter, a startup similarly unburdened by the depressing reality of actual revenues. Which is why Yahoo might, just might, be willing to part with as much as $50 million for it. (In a sad recognition of how late Yahoo is to the whole Twitter phenomenon, its PR department set up a Twitter account today.)

We hear the talks are serious, led by Tapan Bhat, a fast-rising executive in charge of Yahoo's homepage and other key properties — but as with any acquisition talks, they could fall apart. Fred Wilson, a partner at Tumblr investor Union Square Ventures and a Yahoo spokeswoman did not respond to inquiries about the talks. In a text message, Karp, confirming his reputation for adorably juvenile sarcasm, wrote, "You got it backwards."

What could kill the deal: Already, Yahoos are grumbling at the idea of spending tens of millions of dollars on a revenue-free startup. The company's spending spree on Web 2.0 startups like Del.icio.us and Flickr has yielded few visible financial results. Some grumble that has more to do with Yahoo's mismanagement of the acquisitions, but the point is the same: Why should Yahoo spend more on startups, having failed to profit from the ones it already bought?

And there's also new CEO Carol Bartz, who is waging a pointless jihad on leakers. She may be angry enough that word of the talks has escaped Sunnyvale that she may kill the deal for that reason alone.

Update: Awww, Karp is adorably denying the rumor of Yahoo's interest in his company! Then again, he also claimed Tumblr was buying Yahoo, so who knows what to make of anything that comes out of his so-cute-you-could-pinch-'em cheeks? His lead programmer, Marco Arment, is also perkily insinuating that he would quit if Yahoo bought the company:

I hope they let me work on some of the many exciting projects at Yahoo! Who needs a high rank at a small company in New York? I want to move to California and get stuck in traffic every day on the way to my midlevel engineering job where I sit in a cubicle all day and can't make any product decisions while working on something nobody will ever see to manage regional ad clickthrough stats tracking.
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<![CDATA[David Karp]]> This kid, David Karp, the Tumblr founder—he's now a confirmed (notional) multimillionaire! That means it's time for a field guide, in case you need to hit him up for money soon. Which you will.

Here is what we know so far, gleaned from a historical combing-through of the Gawker archives, America's number one source of Fameball historiography:

He's just like all young men, except (notionally) richer. Soon he will be forced to retreat to a mountaintop fortress to protect his microblogging fortune from the hungry hordes of urban paupers, Tumblr-img requests for him to donate money to them and shit. Sad. [Pic: Flickr]

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<![CDATA[Introducing New York's own Web 2.0 "playboys"]]> The golden boys of New York's start-up scene are just as flashbulb-driven as the women who dote on them, a new Details mag feature reveals. Mostly they followed Tumblr's enfant terrible, David Karp, and his heterosexual beard Charles Forman, who pimps "social gaming" at iminlikewithyou but is still better known as last season's Mr. Julia Allison. There's a guest appearance by Kevin Rose, which you can just tell is going to get messy. He's inserted towards the end as the wise old sage, warning these new guys away from male Internet fameballing:

Kevin Rose—"an old, old man," to quote Cashmore—never planned on going to the Mashable party. "I'm all partied out," he says. People magazine readers probably wouldn't know who Rose is, but among the Internet-savvy he's Brad Pitt. Rose, who dated Julia Allison a few years ago, is remarkably low-key compared with his younger counterparts. Drinking tea out of a mug covered with skulls and crossbones, he perks up when the talk turns to rock climbing (he's in a group called Geeks Love Climbing). He says he doesn't know what the term fameballer means. He also says he doesn't do things like wedge himself into nightclubs to have his picture taken with founder fetishists.

Those would be the women who this sort of scorn is usually reserved for: Julia Allison and her heiress apparents.

The Details profile is predictably overblown, but its core message is clear: There's a new generation of men in tech who no longer feel it's enough to just launch a product people want — unless that product is themselves.

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<![CDATA[Tumblr users need to grow a pair, not whine to David Karp]]> It's so familiar a tale: An online community, once obsequiously friendly, turns nasty as it gets bigger. But the loss of innocence is hitting users of blogging service Tumblr especially hard. Perhaps it's because the audience, once limited to young New York hipsters in the social circle of founder David Karp. The latest cri de coeur comes from Silicon Alley Insider's Eric Krangel, who complains that Karp hasn't done enough to stem the tide of "anonybloggers" who "follow" users on the site in order to mock them. "Following" sounds a bit creepy, unless you know that its Tumblr slang for 'reading." Where's the button for banning anyone who deviates from the party line, users have started to whine. Would it be too much to ask Tumblr's fragile millennials to grow up instead?

If you so desperately want an audience for what I'm sure is your boundless and inimitable wit, you're going to have to put up with the occasional heckler. Karp is a talented designer and developer, but there's no CSS or PHP code that will hack the incivility out of the human condition. Since nobody seems to be able to limit the intimate details of their personal lives to private channels of communication anymore, I recommend getting a therapist who will hold your deepest hopes and fears in confidence. I've found it can help.

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<![CDATA[New evidence suggests Tumblr users exist outside of Brooklyn]]> David Karp's Tumblr, the New York-based blogging startup, rolled out a site redesign yesterday. One of the new features is a Google Map showing where Tumblr users are located. We weren't surprised to see the highest Tumblr densities are in Brooklyn and San Francisco — "sisters in idiosyncracy" dubbed Sanfrooklyn by the New York Times. We were shocked, however, to learn that there are actual Tumblr users in the rest of America — like say Kalamazoo, Michigan, for example. The cartographic evidence:

Tumblr users in Kalamazoo, Michigan:

More in Des Moines, Iowa:

There's one in Muncie, Indiana!

Tumblr users exist where they used to make Goodyear tires in Akron, Ohio:

In East Sioux Falls, South Dakota, they must call the Tumblr-using Sioux Falls kids crybaby emos:

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<![CDATA[Tumblr — our very first Cute Startup Alert!]]> [Editor's note: You probably didn't read Sassy magazine's Cute Band Alert back in the '90s. But that girl in your campus lab, the one who made her own zines and wore slips as outerwear? She did. In homage, we give you Cute Startup Alert!] Tumblr is at the apex of blog cute right now. We blame founder David Karp and his short pants. There's something indierock about the way Karp avoided Silicon Valley to found his company in Manhattan and stock it with Williamsburg residents.

You won't find Tumblr in your sysadmin's RSS feeds. Tumblr bloggers follow one another on the site's internal Dashboard system. By design, the site limits bloggers to a few formats, gracefully styling their most self-aggrandizing prose into tasty niblets. It's like the beauty of a three-chord postpunk love song packaged as a middle-school love note: "Do you want to / Follow me? / Yes/No"

New York's chattering classes — the new old media kids, the new new media kids, and the even newer kids who want to be the new new kids — have gleefully hopped aboard Tumblr. Karp's ladylove, CNET reporter Caroline McCarthy, is there. So are a raft of current and former Gawker editors and their hangers-on, drunklinking one another late into the night, thanks to Tumblr's one-click reblogging tool.

"In one particular social circle," Karp explained recently, "we've collected a lot of New York users. It's a clique like any other where you'll see a lot of negativity." True, and what cuddly, darling negativity it is.

(Photo by Rex Sorgatz)

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<![CDATA[Cashmore's Kazakhstani wedding pics]]> Mashable founder Pete Cashmore makes a living throwing parties. Tumblr founder David Karp seems to get by on going to them, if only to make people say, "Why who's that fellow dressed so much like, Chuck Bass, and how can I join any website he's created?" This must explain why the two make such good dancing partners. But won't Iminlikewithyou founder Charles Forman get jealous? Write your own caption for this post and we'll use the best one as its new title. Friday's winner is bloggerman with "And in the end the stock you take is equal to the mess you make."

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<![CDATA[CNET Writer's Cozy Sourcing]]> Jhrnrxfgua6Oacz1Njndmipn 500-1CNET News.com writer Caroline McCarthy published a nice scoop today on how social networking site I'm In Like With You raised $1.5 million from venture funding firm Spark Capital. Silicon Alley Insider has been chasing the story for weeks! How did McCarthy pull the exclusive out from under their nose? Who's to say! But, um, it's probably worth noting that McCarthy is dating David Karp, founder of blog network Tumblr and an intimate, bed-cuddling, entire-body-carrying friend of I'm In Like With You founder Charles Forman. Karp's company also shares Spark Capital as a venture funding backer. So, basically, McCarthy had sources close to her boyfriend to draw on. (Pictured, the happy threesome of Forman, Karp and McCarthy, as photographed by Richard Blakeley.) Should McCarthy's CNET blog post have carried a disclaimer? She doesn't think so:

The boring truth is that I've known Charles for way longer than I've known David (and no, not "known" in that way!) Because of that, and since the two companies have no formal partnership, I think I'm OK. Otherwise, yeah, that would've been iffy.

Ah, no "formal partnership." Sort of like Karp and Forman!

[Silicon Alley Insider]

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<![CDATA[What would Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan's love child look like?]]> One in a while a Web application comes along that's so damn useful, even we'd invest in it. Facebook? Nah. MakeMeBabies, the site that lets you create ruddy-cheeked mashups from any two photos? Its diapers will be filled with nothing but spun gold. Here's what the site came up with from photos of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and girlfriend Priscilla Chan. After the jump, we give a few other notable couples the same treatment. Please do add your own in the comments with our image-upload feature — best and worst fake babies will win an as-yet-undetermined prize of nominal value!

What would have happened had Rachel Marsden was left with more than just a few articles of clothing after those steamy days with Wikipedia founder Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales? Nothing good.

I have to admit, out of all the babies, Marissa Mayer and Zack Bogue's faux-offspring is the least horrifically ugly.

"IT Girl" Julia Allison is ostensibly dating Iminlikewithyou founder Charles Forman. But with that lack of resemblance, could Allison be covering for another lover?

Because Forman and Tumblr founder David Karp are very, very close. Looks like Allison is just the beard and Karp is the Forman baby's daddy.

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<![CDATA[Tumblr: the documentary]]> Who uses David Karp's microblogging site Tumblr? To us, they are trustafarians and their hangers-on — men with beards and thick glasses, girls with rainbow leggings and bangs. They are Sanfrooklyn's creative types and those who dress like them. Or — according to David Seger's Tumblr: the documentary, embedded below — they are "the dumbest babies of them all." We take exception to this as a Tumblista ourself, though we can't deny a sad correlation between our self-worth and the number of those who follow us.

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