Just a taste, here, of how Salon's Scott Rosenberg rolls, w/r/t Bay Area females. Line forms to the left, ladies.

Did Nicole Richie just call fracking Big Bird a "has been?" Yes, yes she did. But at least the reality TV starlet offered to basically hook BB up with a three-way, or drugs, or whatever, while she was at it.

A low-income donut worker trying to eat healthy played a starring role in Debbie Gibsons' personal irony opera.

Philip "Fuckedcompany" Kaplan is starting to feel self-conscious about his oral fixation.

The New Yorker's Susan Orlean is, presumably, frantically adding books on nirvana and emotional euphoria to her Amazon wish list. The war histories are right out.

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

Reached by phone, Kaplan insists he didn't create it for his own needs. (Good thing, as his lawyer fiancée might have words.) He was just indulging in a month-long Twitter programming binge which led him to create a Twitter typing test, a Twitter domain-name registration tool, and now, Twitter flirting.

Flirt140 lets Twitter users find others in a geographic area. You can specify that you're looking for men, women, or both. (How progressive!) Just one problem: Twitter, unlike, say, Facebook, doesn't collect information on users' sexual orientation. I asked Kaplan if he had invented Twitter gaydar. "No," he admitted. Flirt140 will register people's sexual preference and then display appropriate targets in searches as it collects more users. But for now, Twitterers looking for gender-suitable romance will have to take their chances. We sense a sitcom in the making.

Instead, he's starting a new site, Kaplan index, which promises to help people "get recognized for your skills in 2009," which, as TechCrunch's Michael Arrington notes, sounds like a boring jobs site.

Kaplan strongly considered relaunching FuckedCompany, even approaching former Valleywag editor Nick Douglas to run the site. "i really wanted it too," Douglas told me by IM. "A new shot at calling out the bad guys, this time with more grace and fewer civilian casualties. [I] wanted to prove I've learned a lot since my rocky tenure at Valleywag."

Too bad for Douglas, and a pity for fans, who must make do with pale imitiations. But understandable for Kaplan, who lived in New York when his site viciously savaged the Valley's failing startups after the dotcom bubble burst in 2000. He now lives in San Francisco and has founded a startup of his own, AdBrite, an online-advertising firm whose troubles would make good fodder for a revived FuckedCompany. He's engaged, too, to a do-gooding lawyer. A happy insider makes for a poor chronicler of disaster. But it's disappointing to see a one-time prince of derisive darkness turn to the light.

(Photo by Brian Solis/Bub.blicio.us)

Which startup laid off some folks recently, but had planned to make much deeper cuts? They went as far as having their outsourced HR firm send out final paperwork and checks to a number of employees — and then changed their mind. The CEO was so spacey he wasn't sure who got sent the paperwork. So he sent an email out to the entire company saying, "Please ignore any package and letter you might get from our HR firm - you're not fired." Ouch.

Kaplan, best known for founding FuckedCompany, the scathing tabloid tipsheet of the first dotcom bubble's bursting, proposed to his longtime girlfriend Ilona Turner. I'm guessing, from his Twitters, that he did the deed in Paris — how romantic! (She said yes.) He was in Paris to attend a money-wasting tech conference, though, which rather kills the romance of it.

Turner is not a techie; instead, she's a staff attorney at the National Center for Lesbian Rights. (Full disclosure: I met Turner at a fundraiser she, Kaplan, and I hosted to fight the passage of Proposition 8, California's gay marriage ban.)

Of course, for those who know Kaplan from his New York days, it's not surprising that he's not adhering to the Valley's strict social mores. Back when he ran FuckedCompany, he prided himself on his outsider status. He's more of an insider these days, as the founder of AdBrite, a turmoil-racked online-advertising startup. But in a world where people only date within a small circle — preferably people who can do them a favor — it's refreshing, shocking almost, to see that love can prosper even when it's not on the same payroll.

(Photo via Mobog)

Internet advertising rose 20 percent in the second quarter, but a disproportionate amount of those gains went to Google search, which is like a more profitable version of the Yellow Pages — companies have to pay each time customers look them up. Ad networks like AdBrite primarily sell display advertising, which might not seem nearly so crucial during tough economic time — and the text ads they do sell don't have Google's massive data-crunching algorithms behind them. (Photo by Brian Solis/Bub.blicio.us)

Our source speculates that Paul Levine and Jim Benton may be next to go. The tipster suggests that AdBrite CEO Iggy Fanlo is replacing Benton with a yet-to-be-hired SVP of sales.

This strikes us more than the usual amount of startup churn; when there's money to be made, Valley executives make a habit of sticking around for the payday. There's talk of an AdBrite IPO, but the enthusiasm for online ad networks on Madison Avenue and Wall Street is cooling fast.

(Photo by Brian Solis/Bub.blicio.us)

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)

From: Iggy Fanlo To: AdBrite Subject: work hours

I hesitated sending this email for quite some time and had hoped that through your direct managers I would see some improvement. Having said that, I continue to see too few folks here at 9 AM; and too few folks here at 6 PM. I don't care if you are a morning person or a night person; if you want to work 10-8 pm or 8-6 pm, but I fully expect each one of you to put in 9-10 hours per working day. This is still a startup and we need more passion, time and energy from each of our employees than a large company would require. If we succeed, the rewards, both psychic and financial, will be great. But for that, we ask you to give more than the typical 9-5 job.

I respect each and every one of you as professionals, and I would be VERY sad if I/we ever had to keep track of working hours for our employees, but I need each of you to think about your commitment and whether it is strong enough. Again, I want to repeat; for the vast majority of you, this is just an FYI and you should be content in the knowledge that I care about you and don't want you struggling alone long into the night. Those that work hard deserve more from their peers. It's my job to make sure that we fight as a team; we are only as strong as our weakest link.

Ignacio "Iggy" Fanlo
AdBrite
CEO
iggy@adbrite.com

Rumors reaching Valleywag from adult-industry sources indicate that Lehman Brothers was weighing a large investment in AdBrite — as much as 10 percent of the company — but decided to pass. That's a heavy blow for both AdBrite and its lead VC investor, Sequoia Capital, which frequently partners with Lehman. The reason for Lehman's cold feet? Apparently, AdBrite's involvement in the porn business was larger than bankers there had been led to believe — a fact that may have been uncovered during AdBrite's recent audit.

AdBrite is not keen to let people know it's in the admittedly lucrative business of selling ads for pornographic websites. But for some time, AdBrite has had a partnership with AVN, a powerful trade publication covering the porn industry, to sell ads for AVN's websites and many others, through a site called AVNAds.com. Philip Kaplan characterized the AVNAds relationship as a "technology-licensing agreement," though it's clearly more than that; until this morning, AVNAds listed AdBrite's fax number on its contact information, and ads were served on the adbrite.com domain.

This morning, however, AVN has broken off the relationship and redirected the AVNAds.com domain to a new, hastily built, barely functional website. The ads on the host of porn sites contracting with AVNAds, however, continue to be displayed from AdBrite's servers. From what I've heard, there's a legal tug of war over the relationship. And last month's meltdown at 365 Main, the datacenter hosting AdBrite's servers, doesn't seem to have helped matters. The press release announcing the new AVNAds website stresses that the new venture will serve ads from multiple datacenters. AVN's new online-ad network promises to be up and running by September 30.

In the meantime, though, it seems that Kaplan has a Plan B to keep AdBrite in the porn business under the name "BlackLabel Ads." Until Friday, when I called an AdBrite executive for comment, BlackLabelAds.com displayed a site identical to AVNAds.com except in name. The list of sites on BlackLabelAds.com, and the structure of the site, was identical to AVNAds.com; it even shared the same fax number as AdBrite and AVNAds.com. Today, though the site remains mostly hidden, the logo remains on AdBrite's servers. (The BlackLabel site currently redirects to AVNAds.com, but I believe that's simply because AdBrite execs were hoping to hide the existence of BlackLabelAds.com and were caught offguard by today's move by AVN.)

So here's how the battlefront stands: AdBrite has the actual ads served today on the AVN network; AVN has the AVNAds.com domain itself. The question will be — assuming AdBrite's not going to just give up on the adult-ads business altogether — is whether AdBrite can tell customers about BlackLabelAds faster than AVN can sign them up on the new AVNAds website. Like everything to do with the adult-entertainment business, this battle promises to be messy, dirty, and thoroughly entertaining. And it's all just one more back-and-forth tussle in the war between the two valleys of porn.