Lifecasting's the extreme sport of oversharing. With cheap webcams and broadband available, it was only logical that the attention-seekers among us — most people under the age of 30, in other words — would start broadcasting themselves online, 24/7. It's not for everyone — Julia Allison, the New York dating columnist, claims to lifecast, but her sporadic videos don't even come close to the full-time lifecaster's output.

What's less explicable is why anyone, on either side of the camera, thought they could make money off the practice. A cottage industry of startups — Ustream.tv, Justin.tv, Kyte, Mogulus, and so on — sprang up around the naive belief that where there's a screen, there's an audience to sell. Even Yahoo got into the business. The hype fueled lifecasters' dreams of becoming famous and website operators' hopes to profit off their fantasies. Some lifecasters — like Justine Ezarik, also known as iJustine — even thought they'd parlay online notoriety into a business of their own selling product placements in their so-called lives.

None of that panned out. Advertisers only value authenticity when it's carefully scripted; the actual surprise of live broadcasts — violence, profanity, and sheer weirdness — is not a value proposition for them. And while lifecasting services have signed up millions of users, most attract an audience that numbers in the tens. No surprise, then, that Yahoo Live, the fading Internet giant's try at the market, is shutting down today.

A farewell video made by a Yahoo Live user, with clips cobbled together from various feeds, shows the problem. It's nearly impossible to police live broadcasts, leaving sites vulnerable to outbreaks of sex and nudity — or worse. And some will pay any price for fame. One Justin.tv lifecaster overdosed on camera last month — and some of his viewers laughed cruelly as he died.

If site operators do manage to keep things clean, users feel nannied to death — and are left boring each other silly. The most common activity on Yahoo Live? Spinning around in one's desk chair, over and over. Here's the best illustration — only slightly NSFW — of why lifecasting will persist as a mind-numbing timewaster long after it proves not to be a path to glory:

Ezarik is one of a new breed of completely self-constructed celebrities. Like my friend Julia Allison, whose online self-­promotion recently landed her on the cover of Wired, she is a Web 2.0 version of the American everygirls with bleached teeth and fake tans who have enjoyed reality-show notoriety for a decade. But Ezarik didn't wait around for a reality show to cast her: she trained the camera on herself, controlling every aspect of how she was portrayed. And while her shtick is that she's just putting quotidian stuff online, she's actually as invested as a reality-show producer in shaping and policing a brand.

So, yes, reality shows are now micro-targeted and self-produced, but still just as vapid as they were on network television. Justine has fans, Justine has stalkers, Justine has a manager, but overall Justine likes the attention she gets from "lifecasting." Fair enough. The takeaway:

Attention's a touchy subject right now. As we trust cultural arbiters less and less to tell us who deserves attention, calling those who seek it—especially women—attention whores has become a dismissive, silencing insult. But here's the thing: understanding that your blog is less a shrine to your awesomeness and more a location where a like-minded community can form—and genuinely being okay with that—is actually pretty rare, even among Internet personalities.

We're genuinely okay with that. Now you, our like-minded community, can comment on this random video below if you so choose. [Technology Review]

Sam Altman, Loopt's CEO and chief popped-collars officer, apologized — "Sorry, everyone. My bad". This morning, Loopt had kept the offending friend-adding feature turned off, and promised a new release that would make sifting the real friends you want to track obsessively from the chaff you just keep on your contacts' list just so caller ID can help you avoid their calls. Those Loopt pre-launch test cases must have assumed we were all way tighter than that.

(Photos by misbehave/Graham Ballantyne)

(Photos by iJustine)

This time Ezarik isn't lip-synching to Randi Jayne "Yes, Mark of Facebook's sister" Zuckerberg's vocals. "I wrote, sang, shot and edited this one," she tells us. Ezarik is trying to showcase the range of skills needed to break away from the low-tech, unscripted, and unpromising format of lifecasting.

She bemoans how lifecasting is changing, as if people wanting the lifecaster to do foolish things, "begging for money and girls taking off their clothes for the cam" is a new development. Jennifer Ringley should have disproved that a decade ago.

Unfortunately for Ezarik, who got her start in lifecasting, that's always been and also will be the nature of the business. Perhaps it's really her career that she wishes would get crushed under the wheels of a truck; her viewers' eyes, poked out with a fork. In every jest, there's a grain of truth. And in every lifecast, something revealing.

While it looks like comely lifecaster Justine Ezarik, better known as iJustine, who's head over heels for her VC, she's merely lipsynching. The real siren of the piece is Randi Jayne (née Zuckerberg, and yes, she's the Facebook guy's sister) who sings the sultry lyrics. Jayne's fiancé is a VC with Shasta Ventures who served, she says, as her inspiration. Even if this clip, produced by Kevin Rose's Revision3, doesn't approach the level of popularity reached by "Valleyfreude" or the iPhone parody, it's sure to inspire at least one new Valley pickup line: "You can sit on my board anytime."

Ezarik quickly rose to the top of the lifecasting niche, and now she's cashing in. That she's going with an unknown just shows how her own brand has outgrown all the services she uses. But will her old flames stay infatuated while she pumps up the competition? And is iJustine a strong enough commodity on her own to support a dedicated site? As her male counterpart Justin Kan can attest, achieving fame is no small task, but staying on top is a whole lot harder.

Justine claims:

I never said I was leaving jtv.. so I'm not really sure where they got that info!

The Y Combinator guys may be acting starstruck, but maybe its MC Hammer who's playing the fanboy here. Y Combinator's coterie of entrpreneurs could easily return the favor by providing the rapper with real video services. Everyone, including MC Hammer, knows they can. Why would the startuppers reduce the Hammer to begging for volunteers — if not to subtly put him in his place?

(SnapLayout Demo Video by Dan Veltri)