Washington Post dork Chris Cillizza admitted it.

CNET Newser Caroline McCarthy did not have to see a man about a horse.

Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback attempted to rent a car from a shoe store.

New Yorker Twitter controversialist Susan Orlean complained about an inanimate object, for a change.

Wired research editor Joanna Pearlstein rapped her job applicants' knuckles with a Twitter-shaped ruler.

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BusinessWeek writer Spencer Ante offshored.

Revision3 videoblogger Veronica Belmont revealed her musical tastes.

Domestic tyrant Martha Stewart apologized.

Gizmodo blogger Matt Buchanan pumped himself up.

CNET video host Natali Del Conte revealed her superhero fetish.

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Self-described "popologist" Lyneka Little took a ride on Ikea's wild side.

Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback, the man responsible for inflicting Kevin Rose's Diggnation on the world, apparently couldn't afford a rental car in L.A.

CNET News oversharer Caroline McCarthy filled us in on her food preferences.

Time columnist James Poniewozik watched CNN Fox News shoutyman Glenn Beck play Jenga on live TV.

Formerly important media person Bonnie Fuller made the Lance Armstrong collarbone-break story all about her.

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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:

She has participated in many a lip-dub video herself, including one with Julia Allison, the New York party attendee who parlayed a career of writing about nothing for magazines to appearing on the cover of magazines for doing nothing. Allison is not mentioned in her piece, but she is surely present within it; Zuckerberg mentions "Flagpole Sitta," a lip dub performed by the employees of Connected Ventures, the ex-startup of Allison's ex-boyfriend Jakob Lodwick.

Allison dispatched, Zuckerberg moves to targets closer to home, taking on the Camp Cyprus 20, the Internet 20somethings who filmed themselves singing along to "Don't Stop Believin'" at a seaside vacation home in Cyprus right as Wall Street imploded. What she does not mention: That the first person we see in the video is her Facebook coworker Dave Morin; Facebook engineers and designers appear later. Zuckerberg slams them all equally: "You hate them for having so much fun — damn that unbridled, financially secure joy!"

Next target: Revision3, the San Francisco online-video startup best known for recording Diggnation, a podcast by Digg founder Kevin Rose. "They probably won't be recording any more lip dubs any time soon, we hear they laid off a third of their staff this week," Zuckerberg writes. Ouch! She could have added that after reading her article, Revision3 also won't be lending out its production facilities for any more of Zuckerberg's music videos, as it did for "Dontcha," a spoof about the iPhone.

Ah, the smell of burnt bridges. Zuckerberg, in person, comes across as shy and self-effacing. The only hint of bile I ever detected was in a previous video, "Valleyfreude," where she mocks Friendster, an also-ran social network crushed by Facebook, and scoffs at Yahoo for offering Facebook a mere $1 billion in an acquisition offer her brother turned down.

But Randi Zuckerberg has always had her eyes on a bigger stage than the Valley. Even her job at Facebook, running the site's election-related features, has been helpful in this regard, landing her on ABC and other news broadcasts to talk about online get-out-the-vote efforts. Now she's moonlighting for Tina Brown, in the hopes of getting her hooks into New York media circles.

The Daily Beast, an unwieldy, overstaffed website, is an unlikely candidate to emerge from next year's economic wreckage. But that won't matter to Zuckerberg: She's already perfected the art of stepping over those she can safely discard. Watch out, Facebookers: Do you think she'll forget how you made her take "Valleyfreude" offline?

It's obvious what's in it for the magazines which write about them. Rose makes a compelling story, even if Inc. had to resort to ridiculous hyperbole:

Rose has managed to put himself at the center of an ever-expanding new-media empire. In addition to Revision3 and Digg, he recently launched an Internet messaging service called Pownce. Thanks to Rose's star power and a well-designed website, Pownce quickly attracted more than 150,000 people, who use it to share music, videos, and links with their friends. This means Rose owns an online newspaper, an online television network, and an online communications platform.

Ladies and gentlemen, geeks of the world, please welcome Kevin Rose. He is the first vertically integrated Internet celebrity — part Steve Jobs, part Howard Stern — and the next media mogul.

Wait a second: Revision3, Rose's "online television network," is mostly a vehicle for distributing videos where Rose chugs beer with Albrecht and discusses Digg headlines. It just laid off several employees and canceled five shows. Pownce is barely known outside of San Francisco — and its insidery core of users know that it's secretly a great way to swap copyrighted music and video files without getting threatening letters from the RIAA. And Digg?

Well, Digg just raised $28.7 million in venture capital, after several rounds of acquisition talks with Current, News Corp., and Google went nowhere. Digg needs to get big — which means Rose needs to change his image.

He's always been the beer-drinking slacker who started Digg on a whim, and never wanted to run a big company. That story no longer works. Instead of believing in the wisdom of crowds, Rose needs to run from it. His tech-geek fan base isn't large enough to take Digg into the territory where an IPO is plausible.

Burnt by a goofy BusinessWeek cover that made him look like a joke, Rose has stayed away from print. But now he needs the mainstream media as much as they need him. Coverage in second-tier publications like 7x7 and Inc. lead to more, higher-profile stories.

Will editors in New York's high-rise offices ask pesky questions about Pownce and Revision3? No, they'll just read his clips, and think Rose really is the next Howard Stern. In that future path lies true stardom, not just Internet fame, and real riches, not just paper ones. But it means abandoning the ideals which led him to start Digg in the first place.

Yes, online advertising is headed for a slowdown — but signs of problems were present in the market well before Wall Street went into crisis. An explosion of usage had created a supply of space for ads that far outpaced marketers' demand. A recession will further temper demand. Berger, and countless like him at ad-supported enterprises, would have ended up on the street regardless. (Which is a pity, since I've met Berger, and he strikes me as personable, clever, and eminently employable elsewhere.)

Revision3, best known as the home of Digg founder Kevin Rose's beer-chugging Diggnation podcast, has always been the kind of lovably goofy startup one hopes does well despite itself. Anyone who suffered through "Internet Superstar" knew the show was going down. It failed on the merits, not because of distant economic forces beyond anyone's control.

To paraphrase Tolstoy: Successful startups are all alike. But every unsuccessful startup is unsuccessful in its own way.

And so with all the startups whose managers have jumped on the firebus. If they had run their businesses efficiently, they wouldn't have needed to fire anyone. They are laying people off now not because of an economic imperative, but because they have a convenient excuse to cover their mistakes.

Revision3 should always have concentrated on its main shows, and found cheap ways to experiment with new shows, as it's doing now. Helium.com should have figured out that there's not much money in user-generated content before laying off a third of its 110 employees. And Seesmic? Well, Seesmic should never have launched at all, good economy or bad.

I'm declaring the layoff window shut. Big companies lay people off because of economic conditions; startups lay people off because their managers have fundamentally misjudged some aspect of their business. Any startup CEO who lays people off, from here on out, should be held accountable for his own mistakes. Blaming the economy for your cuts? So mid-October 2008.

New York-based NNN and Los Angeles-based Smashface had publicly announced the split just last Friday. In light of the breakup, the Smashface team travelling to New York to make the announcement is an curious move. A new episode of Epic Fu is planned for release tomorrow.

What brought down Revision3's network wasn't the security hole, however. It was MediaDefender's response after Revision3 technicians noticed the breach and shut it down. MediaDefender's servers, in what that company told Louderback was an automated response, started trying to contact Revision3's servers through the now-closed hole. That turned into a flood of traffic that overwhelmed Revision3's network.

MediaDefender has worked for Sony Music, the Recording Industry Association of America, and the Motion Picture Association of America to shut down illegal file-sharing networks. But Revision3's use of file sharing for its own content was entirely legal; to the extent its servers pointed to any illegal files, it was only because of MediaDefender's hacking, Louderback tells me.

Revision3 has asked the FBI to investigate MediaDefender's alleged abuses. For years, the music and movie industries have been telling us that sharing files is criminal, and that blocking file-sharing networks is proper. For millions of file-sharing users, it would be quite satisfying to see the opposite proved in court.

Previously:

• A is for Adelson, who cofounded Digg
• B is for Botha, who sold YouTube big
• F is for Fitzpatrick, and "hookers and blow"
• L is for Levchin, who never goes slow
• P is for Parker, the Valley's bad boy

Sargent's interview with Ask a Ninja cocreator Kent Nichols went well until the Ninja himself joined the show via a video feed that didn't really work. "I can't even understand what he's saying," Nichols told the crowd after an inaudible Ninja monologue went flat. Another technical difficulty: cutting between the Ninja and the stage on screen, the audience got a nice look at the other open windows running on the computer running the show's A/V board.

Sargent's whole schtick is running his show as an amateur hour; he pretended to be fired from his last show, Infected. But how could Ad:tech's audience, hardly Sargent's Web-savvy, insidery target, know this? When Revision3 cofounder Kevin Rose took the stage as a guest, the lines between schtick and snafu continued to blur. Rose used to host a cable show on a now-defunct channel called TechTV. Sargent asked him if he'd ever want to go back to traditional media. Rose said no, of course, and explained that he preferred Internet TV to cable because its less structured and pre-planned.

Advertisers, though, kind of like a bit of structure. Never was it more clear why TV producers so carefully manage air time than when guest Tiki Bar TV creator Jeff MacPherson came on stage and told a five-minute story about not meeting Steve Jobs. Not meeting Steve Jobs? Could have been told in 30 seconds.

As the live taping wound down, Wine Library TV's Gary Vaynerchuk came on. And he almost saved Web television for the whole bunch, drawing cheers from the assembled ad buyers and sellers with a typical I-did-it-you-can-do-it-too rant. Sargent, ignoring the live audience, cut Vaynerchuk off and suddenly it seemed like Vaynerchuk didn't belong on stage. True. Vaynerchuk's video intro featured clips from guest appearances on shows hosted by people known by their first names — Conan and Ellen. Unlike online video, Vaynerchuk has made it to prime time.