Make magazine's Mark Frauenfelder didn't appreciate Eater founder Ben Leventhal's advice on how to ingratiate yourself to a restaurant.

Alex Balk didn't appreciate being the forgotten co-founder, except insofar as it allowed him to taunt Kurt Andersen.

Cablevision, the company, trolled Jeff Jarvis, the internet pundit. Successfully.

Time magazine's Karen Tumulty was in the White House, as an actual reporter, and immediately launched an investigation into the plants at the press conference. When Time Inc CEO Ann Moore said "trustworthy.... fact-based reporting" would save her company, this must have been what she was talking about.

Air America's Ana Marie Cox, meanwhile, spent her White House time responsibly looking for guy she makes great fun of every week.

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

Boingboing is cute, if you don't think about it too much, like a great many tech idealists.

"Copyfight" and the whole "damn the man DIY!" mindset is all well and good when you're young and poor, but these folks want to sell ad space and flog their other projects. There's a healthy balance, but their defensiveness, the "de-voweling" and general attitude of "we can't be corrupted, not by all this revenue!" is very tired. Yes, they're sellouts. Trying to claim they aren't just makes them look silly.

Again, look at the pretty, read the RSS and just don't think about it too much.

When Frauenfelder appeared in an Apple TV spot a few years ago, his fans loved seeing their fringe-culture hero take over the boob tube. But today ads are jammed full of Internet hipsters. Boing Boing's "band manager," John Battelle, has turned old-fashioned host endorsements into an online art form at Federated Media, his advertising agency. He's holding a conference right now in San Francisco's Presidio, telling eager brand managers that endorsers like Mark Frauenfelder make them part of a conversation with Internet consumers.

Battelle builds sites whose ads feature authors on whose blogs he also sells ads. It's a reputational Ponzi scheme far more complex than a George Foreman grill. Maybe that's why I flinch when Frauenfelder's face pops up on my screen with an Adobe logo and a button that says Grab Widget. Mark, if I want a widget, I'll open your magazine and make one myself.

• Blogger Mark Frauenfelder averted disaster by not editing comment spam and thus sending false messages to spies. (No, that wasn't supposed to make sense. Read the post.) [Boing Boing]
• Someone was being investigated for the same hobby that Internet-Ur-god Vint Cerf, HP co-founder David Packard, and Intel founder Gordon Moore spent their time on — home chemistry. [Wired]
• Apple fanboys realized that Steve may have a new pair of shoes, but dude, he's not getting a Dell. [Ars Technica]
• Craig Newmark's face got imperceptibly smugger. [Just guessing]
• Pictured: Steve Ballmer's head shrank. [Telecoms Korea]

Don't mind that old fart ConFonz — this weekend's Maker Faire was a two-day rockfest of hackers and crackers sprawled across the San Mateo Fairgrounds. This was a fair with sponsorships from Lego and Digg, this was a festival with an official scooter. MAKE Magazine pulled its best and brightest — MAKE blogger Phil Torrone, editor and BoingBoing blogger Mark Frauenfelder — into a campus of hangars and lawns, where the crafty boys and girls smashed, launched, and hacked the hell out of everything in sight. I showed up to write, and Laughing Squid's Scott Beale showed up to shoot.

MAKE Magazine ed-in-chief Mark Frauenfelder goes to 11.

At one booth, a transhumanist-turned-spime showed off his implanted RFID chip ("I never lose myself any more!") and taught visitors how to put the chips into hardware — or themselves. At another, a geometrical sculptor showed off 3D-printed art. If Bruce Sterling showed up, he'd have cried tears of joy.

Steve Wozniak had a grand old time at the Faire. All afternoon, the Apple co-founder played four-man Segway polo in full regalia (helmets? why?). Players also included Victor Miller, the writer of Friday the 13th now working on "All My Children." One hacker told me, "When I saw these guys, I just muttered 'Well that's lame' — by reflex. I didn't even mean to." She used a few more pejoratives, but let's be nice to Woz — he looks so cute in uniform.

After the jump, Woz gets dumped, Microsoft fails to impress, and hippies turn off TVs.

Vlogger Irina Slutsky (say it: "slute-ski") interviewed the Woz for Geek Entertainment TV (video coming soon); bystanders aren't sure if Irina knew who he was, or if she thought she was just talking to some Segway-riding nut. Given her previous work at the Red Herring, I'm betting she knew — she's just brilliantly irreverent.

Finally, Woz let children dump water on him for the benefit of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (probably to fight some big company like Apple). If you watch Eddie Codel's video here, wait for the end, where Woz savors the last drops of his dunking.

Mark spots CNET journalist Daniel Terdiman and sets phaser to "kill."

"Are you ready to synth? Ah said, Aaaaare you ready to synth? Let's rock, San Mateo!"

I ran into Mitch Altman, inventor of the TV-B-Gone. His shirt was tie-dye; so was his hair. We headed to the Microsoft hall to check out their prototype mini-tablets.

Microsoft's booths looked too CES-ish. Mitch handed his TV-B-Gone (I have one, they're great, you should get one) to a friend, who started aiming it at Microsoft's widescreen displays. We giggled like kids — Mitch is patient for a guy who must do this a thousand times a week. I played with the tablets — they're pretty cool, but at the Maker Faire you just want to break these things open and play with the pieces.

The rest of Microsoft's building was fantastically dull — maybe MAKE needed a napping spot for attendees strung out on sensory overload. A kid shouted about the guy at the MSN Spaces photo booth: "That man looks scary!"

Below, kids play with a twist-and-tilt tabletop map viewer. It's topped with Formica, so you could stick your coffee on it while you work — until you tipped the whole table over, anyway.

Flickr's Heather Champ is unaware of doom from behind.

The Yahoo booth was equally non-Maker-Faire-y — the whole booth's a metaphor, with cardboard cut-out saws and hammers. And rumor is, they had the nerve to hire a booth babe.

Nearby, Flickr had a booth representing its digital photo sharing with...physical photos. Some attendees are confused. "They had a computer, and a printer. That's it." But the wall of photo prints sure looked gorgeous.

It's amazing what you can make with a Bic lighter and what used to be your child's favorite toy.

"Electric drilling is how I solve all my problems."

Phil Torrone and the Roombas (which would make a great band name), moments before they turn on their abusive owner and rip him to shreds.

Phil Torrone, writer of the MAKE blog, makes up quiz questions onstage for a giveaway. "What's the seventh digit, after the decimal, in pi?" Audience members shout answers — am I the only one who memorized it to 40 places? — and Phil goes online to check. "The wireless is down! I can't Google it!"

"Pi must be somewhere on that," shouts a hacker. "It's a computer!"

When Because We Can designer Jillian Northrup takes you to the moon, she's playing 50s cocktail lounge music the whole way there.

Tim O'Reilly (whose O'Reilly Media publishes MAKE) doesn't mind; this dunking booth is actually his home shower.

Of course, packing hundreds of badass hackers into a commercial fairground brings a little friction. One attendee, Twid, says he loved "the EFF with their holier-than-fucking-thou 'people who use DRM are idiots' stance, when to get into the Faire you had to have your backpack searched for outside food. 'WE STAND FOR YOUR RIGHTS. UNLESS YOU WANT A HOMEMADE CHEESEBURGER.'"

Final video: Phil Torrone gets distracted by a rocket launch.

Photos: Maker Faire Photos [Laughing Squid]
Other press: Maker Faire a geek's dream [Daniel Terdiman on CNET]
Maker Faire 2006 coverage! [MAKE blog]
Maker Faire videos (including a robotic giraffe) [Social Customer Manifesto]

Back then, Battelle was at the tech news outlet Industry Standard, claiming that he'd take over Calacanis's competing Silicon Alley Reporter. Calacanis threatened to use JohnBattelle.com to cover conflicts of interest when Battelle wrote about his investors' companies.

The two are still rivals, with members of Battelle's blog ad network FM Publishing competing with Calacanis's blog network. But that's not all the bad blood between the two media mini-moguls. Here's a guide to just one cluster of the thick web of techcest:

Diagram by Dan Lurie
JohnBattelle.com registration [Whois]

Everyone's famous on the Internet! And the webstars really shine in Scott Beale's Wednesday photos from O'Reilly ETech 2006. In this edition, Ted Rheingold of Dogster, 3/4 of the Boing Boing crew, and an episode of escalating violence.

Ed Batista, attention pimp.

Dogster's Ted Rheingold and ex-Technoratian Niall Kennedy give the white man's gang sign.

Simply Hired's Dave McClure, moments before shrieking "Your sun! It burns me!" and running back to his Gevil lair.

After the jump, it's all fun and games until someone loses an eye.

"Dear team: kicking into high-gear networking mode. Send more striped shirts."

Mark, Xeni, and Cory of Boing Boing rest between glamorous international spy missions.

Geek-hobo proliferation reminds O'Reilly what they left out: "Oh damn! We always forget the CHAIRS!"

"Hmmm, I just might have a 'project' I could fit this pipe into, IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN."

Ted didn't actually use his laptop — just sat there all day posing. It's tough being pretty.

"Sure, you could use these gadgets for their intended purposes, but where's the fun in that?"

Tech writer Annalee Newitz blasts away at MAKE Magazine's marshmallow shooter.

And she stood there for an hour, waiting for something to happen.

This would've been the perfect moment for Ted's "I play trumpet in a ska band" hat.

The marshmallow projectile beaned a bellhop and neatly severed the Internet connection. Only the latter got noticed.

MAKE Magazine pits Roombas in an armed fight to the death.

"House meeting, everyone. Okay, have we learned our lesson about shooting and fighting today? Now I want you all to make Annalee a nice 'Get Well' card."

ETech 2006 Photos [Laughing Squid]
Earlier: Geeking out: ETech 2006, Tuesday [Valleywag]
And: Geeking out: ETech 2006 [Valleywag]