Jut ask the fellow at right in the picture above, snapped by Web developer Sean Percival on Oct. 31. It's an impressively faithful likeness of Rose's unintentional BusinessWeek pose. Rose, for his part, has a sense of humor about the costume, which is impressive, given that his unprofitable company is still waiting for its long-promised payday, and that his cover picture is now apparently a cultural icon of an absurd tech-bubble thinking.

(Right pic above by Sean Percival)

We'll bet Tony Hawk taught you to "ride his halfpipe," Kevin Rose. But did he also teach to adjust his riser?

Yahoo's Marco van Hylckama Vlieg gave himself an impromptu performance review.

No matter what Levi Johnston tried to do with his tongue, Air America's Verena von Pfetten could not hate him.

Podcaster Scott Simpson wouldn't put it past Richard Branson. Neither would we.

Animal obsessive Susan Orlean saw a bald eagle and, better still, it did not try and kill her or drop dead under her lethal gaze!

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

Dropping off their Twittering this summer are such familiar Twitterti as music writer Touré; Air America snarker Ana Marie Cox; New York Times Oscar obsessive David Carr; Times "conceptual scoop" artist Jennifer 8. Lee; celebrity journalism diva Bonnie Fuller; Yahoo vlogger Sarah Lacy and Digg perpetrator Kevin Rose. See the chart above, assembled with help from tweetstats.com (until we melted their servers by asking for numbers on Times Twitterer-in-Chief Brian Stelter).

Summer vacations could well be playing a role; Carr went on a bike trip to Colombia this month, Rose was inspecting tea in remote parts of China. But that would seem the ideal time to use Twitter, which lets you talk to all your friends back home at once, without much time commitment, and even to share pictures and videos with services like TwitPic. Maybe media and tech types have Twitter firmly slotted into the "work" category and don't want to touch it much on break.

There are some outliers: Salon's Joan Walsh, whose been on a cable-news punditry tear, has spiked her Twittering; the New Yorker's Susan Orlean has been manically chronicling her animal obsession in recent weeks; and Kurt Andersen got a burst of posts out of his trip to the White House. Everyone else should hop to and follow their examples; what else can America export to save its useless circle-jerk of an economy, if not narcissistic navel-gazing media?

PBS' Mark Glaser watched helplessly as a thief ruined his Amazon recommendations for the next 18 months.

Digg's Kevin Rose tried to bait Steve Jobs into a swordfight.

Six Apart blogging pimp Anil Dash opened up a second, linguistic line of attack against the mainstream media.

Revision 3's Patrick Norton was officially called a frightening gadget freak by the Feds.

Celebrity gossip Bonnie Fuller gleefully took credit for one of the most obvious casting decisions in reality-TV history.

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

Digg founder Kevin Rose is sorry he forgot you don't have a magical VIP Web browser like he does.

Chris O'Brien of the San Jose Mercury News noticed a Yahoo profanity policy was kind of fucking hypocritical!

Oliver Knox's vacation to Paris began with some quality American customer service. Being an AFP man, he reported it.

Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin found the Ugly American, in Guatemala.

Writer Tricia Romano quietly cursed the blogger who revealed her happy secret.

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

Sure, start scoffing. But Digg's past acquisition talks with Current and News Corp. failed in part because they looked at Digg as a media play, and community-generated sites like Digg aren't particularly attractive to advertisers. More recently, Digg and Google got close to an acquisition. That deal fell apart, according to a source familiar with the talks, because Google wanted to closely probe the quality of Digg's engineering staff early on in the deal, and Digg did not relent until talks were well along. (Digg CEO Jay Adelson refused to comment on the company's talks with Google.) The lesson: Digg's not a media company, and not a technology company. It's something else altogether.

Who makes money off of online community? The surprising answer is Amazon. One study suggests that Amazon.com makes $2.7 billion — billion! — a year in incremental sales because of its user-written reviews. Amazon uses the simple mechanism of asking shoppers if a review was helpful to rank its reviews.

It's remarkably similar to Digg's option of "digging" or "burying" a news story. Where might that be useful? Amazon.com's Kindle e-book reader. In addition to selling digital books, Amazon already charges for some news feeds available for free on the Web. Magazine and newspaper editors are delusionally optimistic that they might be able to charge by the article on a device like the Kindle, through a scheme of micropayments.

Micropayments have been technically possible for more than a decade. The problem has always been consumer behavior: How do you know if an article is worth paying for? The time spent pondering that question isn't worth the nickel people hope to charge for it.

But what if you didn't have to ponder that question? What if you knew, through Digg's rating system, that a large number of people had read the story and given it a thumbs-up?

An Amazon-owned Digg wouldn't have to charge for access to its website or the stories it links to; indeed, that would be against its interests, since the rating activity on Digg requires free access to work. The Wall Street Journal even gives Digg users free access to its stories so they can read them and vote.

Instead, Digg would charge Kindle users for a new service which delivers a personalized newspaper to the device — a service far quicker and simpler than the cumbersome process of going to Digg.com and scrolling through endless lists of popular headlines. They'd only pay for the stories they read — which in turn would provide more valuable feedback on what Amazon can charge for. The payment would be essentially voluntary, since readers could always pull up publishers' websites and read the stories for free there — but they payment would be more for the simplicity and ease of use, rather than the content itself. (Arguably, that's why people pay for music on iTunes rather than download it from file-sharing networks.)

Is Amazon.com thinking about such a move? We haven't heard anything about talks between Amazon.com and Digg. But, intriguingly, we heard whispers that Amazon.com is talking to Twitter. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is a personal investor in Twitter. Presumably, the attraction would be the same: getting some kind of real-time pulse on what people are interested in.

But Digg's focus on headline voting and Amazon's push into news distribution make them seem like a better match. Will Bezos dig the idea?

(Photoillustration by Richard Blakeley)

Take last night, for example. The conference's official happy hour was packed, while the cocktail party hosted by Break Media, CollegeHumor, and other panelists from the "Comedy on Television and the Web" panel was far more relaxed. Attendees included CollegeHumor's Ricky Van Veen and The Office's BJ Novak. In between buying dozens of Kamikaze shots, Break Media CEO Keith Richman complimented Mahalo's Jason Calacanis's poker game. (Calacanis is a noted gambler, so much so that we sometimes wonder if he might have a problem.)

Break Media CEO Keith Richman, former Valleywag editor Nick Douglas, and New York writer and comedienne Caroline Waxler

We arrived at Digg's Second Annual Big Digg Shindig at Stubb's BBQ too late to see the live Diggnation taping — though we hear it was packed shoulder to shoulder — but just in time to see fanboys mob Diggnation host Kevin Rose and dispensable sidekick Alex Albrecht for autographs en masse.





NY Tech Meetup organizer, proven wantrepreneur, and host of The Interwebs Nate Westheimer

iLike's Ali Partovi and Hype Machine's Anthony Volodkin

Valleywag alumna and Boffery cofounder Melissa Gira Grant with Automattic's Matt Mullenweg

After a stop at an impromptu Next New Networks party, we headed to the Driskill Hotel. Microcelebrity egoblogger Julia Allison was flanked by fans who showed up after she sent a message on Twitter seeking reassurance of her self-importance. She has actual fans! Three of them!

Not that we blame Berners-Lee for these things ... okay, okay, we do. The 20 worst things about the World Wide Web:

• 1. Julia Allison
• 2. Twitter
• 3. Jason Calacanis
• 4. Wikipedia
• 5. Henry Blodget
• 6. Dave Winer
• 7. Blogs
• 8. Dead newspapers everywhere
• 9. Congressman Jared Polis
• 10. Robert Scoble
• 11. The Pets.com sock puppet, and Michael Ian Black's subsequent career
• 12. Digg
• 13. Perez Hilton
• 14. /b/
• 15. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales's love life
• 16. Oversharing
• 17. Mark Zuckerberg
• 18. Chris Crocker
• 19. Internet commenters
• 20. Kevin Rose

We realize they weren't in your original spec, Timbo, but you should have anticipated them. Really.

Politico's Patrick Gavin ogled the oglers.

Salon.com editor-in-chief Joan Walsh confirmed people's general opinion of her.

Geek overlord and Digg founder Kevin Rose prepared to rule Austin at SXSW, the geek spring-break festival.

Former AOL employee and Engadget alumnus Ryan Block gloated over the firing of incompetent AOL CEO Randy Falco.

Boing Boing blogger and intergalactic space princess Xeni Jardin reported in from Africa.

See something worth noting on Twitter? Please email us your favorite tweets — or send us more Twitter usernames.

Rose is a geek hero, famous first for his stint hosting a tech-focused TV show on Comcast's G4TV. Diggnation, an online video show where Rose and Albrecht drink beer and discuss popular headlines on Digg, Rose's social-news site, is the centerpiece of Revision3, Rose's online-video startup. Appearing on broadcast TV, though, is a high-water mark for this icon of geek culture.

While Rose has a burgeoning mini-media empire which has won him magazine covers, Albrecht has languished in relative obscurity — the "blond guy," as Fallon called him.

Which is why when we heard that Albrecht wanted out of his contract, we didn't dismiss the rumor out of hand. As lucrative as the Diggnation gig must be for what is, let's be honest, an excuse to drink in front of a camera, Albrecht could well be frustrated at being Rose's sidekick. (The job does have one perk, though: The ability to say scathing things about Rose and get away with it. Rose is a famously prolific dater whose brief entanglements have included egoblogger Julia Allison and L.A. TV personality Shira Lazar. Albrecht's comment at a party: Rose "has basically plowed through everybody.")

We asked Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback, who was also up late, what gives. "His agent hasn't complained to me," Louderback said. "Sounds like posturing." Posturing? You mean, the kind of crick one gets from perpetually playing second fiddle?

Here's the clip of Rose and Albrecht's appearance — watch closely, because if there's anything to this rumor, it might not be repeated:

Forman broke up with ubiquitous yet pointless media presence Julia Allison last summer, right around the time he raised a round of $1.5 million. Digg founder Kevin rose also briefly dated Allison last year, and then raised a ton of money. The conclusion: Severing ties with Allison is the most sure-fire way for a tech boy to get rich! This is good news for Eater editor and fellow Allison ex Ben Leventhal, who is surely due for more funding.

(Photo by Nick McGlynn)

Has a real media job. Lazar has already achieved something beyond the reach of most fameballs: Steady employment with a large, traditional media business. She hosts Open House LA and First Look LA on KNBC, the Los Angeles-based NBC station. (She's also a host on the Reelz channel, whatever that is.)

Has lived in LA since 2004. Lazar is something of a personality in the self-proclaimed L.A. tech/blogging scene. (In this photo, she attempts to interview Perez Hilton.)

Dov Charney's stepsister. Lazar, described as a "hot peppy Jewish girl from Montreal" by one YouTube user, went to the same Canadian school as Charney, now the CEO of American Apparel, but 14 years apart. When she interviewed her scandal-plagued stepbrother last August, she did not mention his history of sexual-harassment lawsuits, or, in fact, any relationship to Charney at all. That's family loyalty for you! Also not disclosed in the video: Her habit of picking up free clothes from American Apparel. (TV stars get tons of free clothing from airtime-hungry designers, but not usually from their stepbrother's firm.)

Went to Emerson College. Bachelor's degree in TV/video.

Participated in the 2005 Ujena Bikini Jam.

Flirted with TechCrunch's Michael Arrington. Lazar showed up at a TechCrunch party last July. The doughy blogger accosted her and asked her why she was there. That encounter begat a working relationship where she tried making a few video clips for him. The talks never went anywhere, as she's on contract with NBC through February.

Began dating Rose near the end of November. No professional interest here: "Rose just wants to bang hot chicks off his Twitter list," says one informant who has observed their relationship closely. He does have a large online following, thanks to the popularity of Digg, his news-discussion site, and Diggnation, a companion online-video series where he drinks and discusses Digg headlines on camera. Could Lazar be hoping to leverage Rose's crowd?

Drew controversy at the Sundance Festival. Arrington — perhaps miffed that his play for Lazar went nowhere? — complained that Lazar had cheated to win 24 Hours at Sundance, a competition organized by Rose and Kutcher — and also claimed she'd been bragging about dating one of the organizers. Assuming Demi Moore has nothing to worry about, that would be Rose.

Went to Barack Obama's inauguration with Julia Allison. Allison, the Time Out dating columnist who briefly pursued Rose and remained obsessed for months afterward, claims she's over him. Curious, then, that she cozied up to Lazar in Washington, D.C., offering Lazar her spare ticket to the inaugural. Aubrey Sabala, a Digg marketing manager, may have helped make the introduction hobnobbed with the two in D.C. That's especially curious because I've noticed how extraordinarly protective Digg employees have become about their founder's love life lately. Introducing his girlfriend to the famously indiscreet Allison hardly seems like the way to further that goal. Then again, perhaps that's why Sabala dived between them in the last photo below. Update: Allison, in an expletive-laced IM conversation, informed me that Meghan Asha, her Silicon Valley heiress sidekick, met Lazar at Sundance and subsequently introduced the two.

How serious are they? This is Rose we're talking about, who's not known for his long-term relationships. And the two live and work in different cities. Sean Percival, an L.A. tech personality, says it's over already.

(Photos via Twitpic, Nonsociety, TheChimp.net, LAist, and AnchorBabes)

Digg, as of last fall, was losing money at the rate of $5 million a year. Its payroll has grown since then; cutting 8 people is unlikely to save it much more than $800,000 a year. At best, the layoff might get Digg back to its 2008 pace of losses.

So the site badly needs to increase its revenues. And there's the problem.

Kevin Rose, the podcast host known for his aggressive dating habits and on-air drinking who founded Digg, always wanted to focus on Digg's features and community, and let someone else figure out how to make money. That someone was first Federated Media, an online ad agency which favors quirky, ethically questionable endorsement deals, and later Microsoft, which has been so desperate to get into the social-media business that it has favored startups like Digg and Facebook with long-term, multimillion-dollar advertising guarantees. Keep in mind, though, that Digg has been running a loss even with Microsoft's guaranteed payments.

Only now, Adelson discloses in his blog post announcing the layoffs, will Digg start hiring its own salespeople. If he thinks that he will hire a salesperson and just magically add revenue, he is badly deluded. Even a good salesperson typically takes a year to get profitable. If he starts hiring now, it's reasonable to assume his expenses will rise through 2010, without revenue to offset them.

And then there's the advertising market itself. Demand is weak, and likely to get weaker; the advertising recession, if it follows past patterns, will outlast the actual recession. And in recessionary times, marketers tend to spend their budgets on direct-response ads like Google search, where the link between dollars spent and sales generated is clear. Experimental branding plays, like putting ads on an insult-laced site for Linux-obsessed fanboys, go into deep freeze.

Adelson, a veteran of several Internet businesses who saw technology's last boom and bust cycle, does not strike me as naive. He must realize that the financial scenario he laid out is utter nonsense. He is surely not promising profitability by the end of 2009 to the investors who just put $28.7 million into the company.

His fantasy profit scenario must be a message of reassurance for Digg's users, lest they panic over the layoff news. Does he think they're stupid and can't do basic math? Apparently, yes. Don't tell Digg's advertisers that.

Those romantic dreams make up part of Rose's list of New Year's resolutions. Rose will likely reassure his Silicon Valley friends that he's kidding. They love to make fun of Hollywood celebrities like Aniston!

But I think he's punking them, and that he's actually serious in his ego-swollen ambition. San Francisco has grown too small for Rose, who, according to Alex Albrecht, his cohost on the Diggnation podcast, has exhausted the dating possibilities of the city. (Or, as Albrecht put it, he has "basically plowed through everybody.")

If Aniston, America's sweetheart, could be seduced by geekily emo singer John Mayer, doesn't Rose, the nerd everyman, stand a chance?

BusinessWeek's Spencer Ante got ahold of Digg's financial statements. They are frightful, even for a startup. Last year, the company took in $4.8 million and spent $7.6 million, for a loss of $2.8 million. In the first nine months of this year, losses grew almost as fast as revenues: Digg took in $6.4 million and spent $10.4 million, resulting in a $4 million loss. At an annual clip, that's more than $5 million out the door a year.

Keep in mind that Digg has a lucrative three-year advertising deal with Microsoft, that pays the site a guaranteed rate for its inventory. Without that arrangement, struck last year — driven, most believe, by Microsoft executives' desperation to get in on the Web 2.0 craze — Digg's losses would likely be far worse.

Now it all makes sense: Digg CEO Jay Adelson's repeated attempts to sell the company to News Corp., Current Media, and Google, at a valuation of $300 million or more, came to naught because there's no real business there. Those sales talks, while they were still under discussion, prompted entirely unfounded speculation that founder Kevin Rose was personally worth $60 million on paper. Instead, Digg took $28.7 million in venture capital at a valuation of almost half what the company hoped to sell for.

To be fair, that will last the company years, even at its current rate of red-ink spilling. But it's worth thinking about Digg's numbers amidst the litany of complaints about the ink-on-newsprint business: newspapers coast to coast are seeing devastating declines in advertising revenue. The New York Times has mortgaged its headquarters. The Tribune Company has declared bankruptcy. And yet, even in their decline, newspapers remain prodigious generators of cash. This moribund industry generated $13.7 billion in profit in 2007.

The same cannot be said of Digg, a site conceived by television host Kevin Rose as a replacement for the editors who pick headlines for readers. On Digg, readers vote headlines up by "digging" them, or down by "burying" them.

For now, Digg is safe, insulated from the marketplace as a well-funded private company. But if Adelson no longer plans to sell the company, he will have to take it public. And when the day comes that investors can vote the company's shares up or down, unless he can engineer a dramatic improvement in its finances, he and Rose will know what it feels like to be buried.

Culver is shutting down Pownce, a Twitter knockoff which served as her vehicle for entrepreneurial achievement. Pownce's origins are notable in the way they show that connections rule the funding of startups in Silicon Valley, an industry whose capitalists relentlessly brag about their devotion to meritocracy.

Pownce allowed users to send each other short messages and, most importantly, share files; bootlegging MP3s was a popular if unacknowledged use. But it was more notable for its main backer: Kevin Rose, the languid-eyed founder of social-news site Digg, funded Pownce at a time when one of his employees, Daniel Burka, was dating Culver.

Rose's Web fame lent Pownce Internet-insider buzz; Burka applied his design skills to the site. (Both men moonlighted on the project while working at Digg.) Culver broke up with Burka before the site launched, taking up with Brad Fitzpatrick, the founder of LiveJournal, an online diary site which had been purchased by blog-software maker Six Apart.

That relationship didn't last, either. But it brought Culver attention in the right circles. Six Apart is now purchasing Pownce's technology and hiring Culver. This kind of deal, known as an asset acquisition, is typically the least lucrative kind of startup sale, suggesting Culver, Rose, and others involved in Pownce didn't make much money. But at least she got a job where she can prove herself as a programmer, or not, out of the spotlight.

If she's sincere about avoiding fame, Culver will have to reform more than her work life. Granted, San Francisco's pool of straight men is on the small side. But besides Burka and Fitzpatrick, Culver also dated Cal Henderson, an engineering director at Flickr; MG Siegler, a writer at tech blog VentureBeat; and Nick Douglas, a former editor at Valleywag and Gawker. If she doesn't want to be famous, Culver might want to take a look at her relentless technosexuality, which more than hints at the acquisition of influence rather than intimacy as its goal.

Is it sexist to point this out? Perhaps, but not nearly as sexist as touting technical skills while sleeping your way to the top.

In late 2006, Gore's Current made an offer for Digg which valued the social-news startup at $100 milion or more. Wonder if Rose and Gore discussed business at all in this interview. As VentureBeat recently pointed out, Digg's traffic is flat, and it hasn't significantly increased its valuation since Rose and Gore's 2006 chat.