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)

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!

The company, founded by white male Matt Mullenweg, has just increased its white maleness with the acquisition of PollDaddy, a two-white-males Irish firm.

Are we being too harsh on Automattic? Should we give it credit for not being 100 percent white and male? After all, Google prides itself that 32 percent of its employees are women; that it views that level as an achievement shows how imbalanced Silicon Valley's scales of equity are. Still, look at the Automattic company photograph, taken at a staff retreat in Breckenridge, Colo. If I were a woman or a minority working at this company, I'd hide in the corner, too.

• 0:55 Loic Le Meur is worried about the economy.
• 1:14 Brandee Barker hides behind a fern, says Facebook will never sell to Microsoft
• 2:30 BillShrink’s Peter Pham says a lot of startups are going to go under
• 2:36 Randi Zuckerberg wants you to register to vote
• 3:32 Steven Levy says the arrow points no where but up
• 5:43 Israeli superinvestor Yossi Vardi says that Lehman Brothers stock isn't worth as much as World of Warcraft shields.

1. Robert Scoble
2. Michael Arrington
3. Jack Dorsey
4. Biz Stone
5. Matt Cutts
6. Pete Cashmore
7. Dave Winer
8. Guy Kawasaki
9. Loïc Le Meur
10. Kevin Rose
11. Merlin Mann
12. Stowe Boyd
13. Jeff Atwood
14. Jeremiah Owyang
15. Veronica Belmont
16. Kara Swisher
17. Scott Beale
18. Marc Andreessen
19. Ryan Block
20. David Sifry
21. Emily Chang
22. Om Malik
23. Timothy Ferriss
24. Nick Douglas
25. John Battelle
26. David Cohn
27. Louis Gray
28. Tom Foremski
29. Tim O'Reilly
30. Ariel Waldman
31. Matt Mullenweg
32. Dean Takahashi
33. Philip Kaplan
34. JD Lasica
35. Sarah Lacy
36. Brian Solis
37. Charlene Li
38. Rafe Needleman
39. Dan Farber
40. Howard Rheingold
41. David McClure
42. Margaret Mason
43. Jason Goldman
44. Leah Culver
45. Chris Shipley
46. Jackson West
47. Liz Gannes
48. Owen Thomas
49. Adeo Ressi
50. Max Levchin

(Photo from Michael Arrington)

• 0:40: WordPress.com has 140 million unique visitors a month, generating 600 million to 700 million pageviews.
• 2:30:
Mullenweg is bearish on advertising on social networks: "I like our position because it's around content. It's not around photos, or people trying to connect with each other."
• 3:30: And yet, he hasn't really thought about how his company's going to make money: "Monetization is something we think about, but I don't think we've had any brilliant ideas."

Sabala, who started at Digg on February 6 as community manager and marketing director, is a SXSW veteran. (You can tell because she calls it "South By.") She was set on the idea of a party at the festival, but by Friday, she and the rest of Digg had decided it was a nonstarter. The next Monday, though, she gave it another try. A call to a Napa winery landed a sponsor for wine. A call to a contact at PureVolume secured the club for Tuesday night. With that, Sabala had a party that bridged SXSW Interactive's last day and the SXSW Music's first.

A few blocks away at Six Lounge, Revision3 was also bridging music and the Web, with a live debut of "Rock Band," Randi Jayne Zuckerberg and David Prager's homage to the guitar-wielding videogame at a party hosted by Rana Sobhany. Kevin Rose ruled Austin last night — he also cofounded Revision3.

Prager, Revision3's COO, told me Monday about the times he'd put money from his own bank account into Revision3's coffers to make sure it made payroll. Those lean days are long past for both of Rose's companies. Even as the stock markets waiver, Web startups seem flusher than ever. A Microsoft ad deal has buoyed Digg; the online-video boom is taking care of Revision3's paychecks.

Are we going to see this kind of party scene at next year's SXSW? Let's be clear: SXSW was a good time, not a boundless bacchanal. Nothing smacked of excess: A mild dose of star power is enough to intoxicate the deskbound Web designers who attend the festival. But I noticed that no one talked about the stock market once the whole week. SXSW was a comfortable bubble. As the Webheads fly back home, will they even feel it popping?

Strikeout! Mullenweg showed up at the last minute. One wonders: Was the recently minted millionaire dealing with fallout from his nasty Twitter fight with Six Apart's Anil Dash? Or was he just calling his broker? (Mullenweg later told me he just went to the wrong green room.)

Flickr's Cal Henderson says "fuck" a lot, which would seem to come with his job. "I'm Cal Henderson from Flickr, the kitten-sharing website" is how he introduces himself. He admits that one Flickr breakdown came about when he failed to use a basic Linux utility, df, to measure if he had enough storage available — a problem when you serve terabytes of photos. Still, it's a good problem to have. "A lot of people can ignore scale forever," he notes — because they never get enough users to bring their site down. "We serve 32,000 photos a second," says Henderson.

"One of the things I don't like about Web 2.0 is you as users want your data to be available, to stay up forever," says Digg architect Joe Stump. "As an engineer, I hate that."

Most of the panelists favor open-source software and cheap hardware. "Buying enterprise means they don't put their prices on the Web," says Mullenweg, the creator of blogging software WordPress. "It means you have to talk to someone with slick-backed hair for 30 minutes. It's uncomfortable."

If you can get over that, says Henderson, "the easiest way to solve scaling problems is to throw money at it. When you're a startup and you don't pay your engineers, then engineering is cheap and hardware is expensive. If you're paying for engineering time, that's expensive."

Stump takes a question from Pownce creator Leah Culver: "Where do you find your bottlenecks?" Stump's answer: "Bottlenecks never have to do with your [programming] language." Henderson instantly retorts: "Unless you're using Ruby." (Ruby is the language used by Twitter, among others, and some blame it for Twitter's outages.) Stump's comeback: "It's always your database or your file system."

StumbleUpon's Garrett Camp suggests testing new features on a small set of your audience, rather than everyone at once, so you test under real conditions but don't afflict buggy code on all of your users at once.

"When we look at the site, we ask, 'What don't we have to do right now?'" says Digg's Stump. Avoiding real-time updates helps avoid bottlenecks. Henderson says Flickr sometimes shows photo pages that are a minute old — again, to minimize load on the site.

That's a rare moment of agreement between Henderson and Stump. The two are back to sparring in minutes. Henderson's comeback to an obscure point Stump makes: "I don't want to work at Digg." Stump then ribs him: "So, Cal, you're moving over to Microsoft technology soon, right?" "Yes, we're moving over to .NET and SQL Server," is Henderson's deadpan response. That's the last zinger before the show wraps up.

Specifically, Mullenweg's money. Automattic recently raised $29.5 million in venture capital — bringing its total raised past Six Apart. The Automattic deal was unusual: Some of the money went directly to Mullenweg, and a handful of other employees, instead of to his company. Automattic's investors, in other words, partially bought him out. A failed bidder for Automattic has been going around saying that Mullenweg's personal take was around $20 million.

Why buy Mullenweg out? VCs normally like to keep founders' incentives in line with their own, so everyone's shooting for a big payday. One might think showering a founder with cash ahead of an IPO or acquisition might be a sign that he's valued. Actually, it's the opposite: Making Mullenweg rich before eveyrone else is his investors' way of saying they don't care if he takes a hike.

Mullenweg surely realizes this. As satisfying as it might be to check his bank account, it has to be frustrating to realize he's not deemed relevant to Automattic's future. And that, more than anything, is what must prompt him to lash out at his chief rival.

I took this up with Sarah Lacy, who was on hand — finally, someone else at work! — filming for Yahoo Tech Ticker. I asked her, do people come to SXSW and party because they're too busy when they're home to go out and socialize? "No," laughed Lacy. "They're partying at home, too." There goes that theory. Pictures from the party:

On January 4, he wrote in a Twitter, "Heading out to bank to initiate purchase, beginning of a life change." What kind of a purchase requires a bank visit? Usually one involving a wire transfer. I'm thinking a house, a very expensive car, perhaps an extravagant rock to put on longtime girlfriend Glenda Bautista's finger. One thing's for sure: Mullenweg looks very good in fancy suits. (Photo by Scott Beale/Laughing Squid)

... a bulldog chaser?

Thanks, Jason. Everything's better now. See y'all next week.

Several Valleywag readers have noted that Mullenweg has been going steady for a year with his girlfriend, who is both undeniably comely, and if friends' reports are accurate, likely to "string him up and gut him" if he were to stray. Harde, too, is known to take her professional image very seriously, and therefore, confidants believe, unlikely to put herself in a situation where one might perceive even a glimmer of something amiss. All of which makes the very rumor of a dalliance at The Lobby more eyebrow-raising.

Mullenweg commented below and also emailed Valleywag to deny that he was alone in the bar with Harde: "I was no 'closer" to Ms. Harde than to Garrett Camp or Erika Arone or Chris Sacca." (Our sources never said, nor did we report, that he and Harde were alone.)

If you ask Mullenweg, in other words, his answer to the question posed in this item's headline is an unequivocal "no." An eyewitness source, however, insists he saw Mullenweg "all over" Harde. At 1:30 a.m.

(Photo by True Ventures)