Facebook is the target of new phishing scams, which attempt to trick users to logging into FBaction.net and FBstarter.com, thereby handing over their passwords. (If you got taken in, don't feel bad — so did notorious social media fameball Rex Sorgatz!) Here's a screenshot of the scam in action, via The Next Web:

But wait, isn't that exactly what Facebook is trying to do on sites like Digg and The Insider and Gawker? Its Facebook Connect program is designed to let people use their Facebook logins on other websites. And the only way Facebook will ever make money is by getting users to share every last moment of their life. If the Facebookers were really doing their jobs, their users wouldn't have any private information left for phishers to steal.

Watch as microcelebrity NBC contractor Rex Sorgatz attempts to explain Foursquare, a friend-finding interactive game launched by former Google employee Dennis Crowley at the South By Southwest event, an annual excuse for a nonstop party thinly disguised as a conference on all things Web. Carr may be perplexed, but he comes to the right conclusion: Foursquare is a toy for "kids on the Internets."

"Internets," plural! Carr's cool like that!

Sorgatz and Crowley are just two of the familiar microcelebrities who make cameo appearances in Carr's writeup of SXSW. There's Tumblr founder David Karp, bragging about being a slacker:

I didn't even come last year, but this year we dropped the whole team in, I guess as a way of saying that we mean business. We're mostly having fun, doing a few meetings and enjoying seeing old friends. It would probably be a better use of my time to be back home staying up till 4 in the morning and just crushing it to come up with one more application, but this is more fun.

Declaring how much fun one is having and how much work one is avoiding is a strange way of showing one means business, but that's Karp for you.

And look, two Valleywag alumni:

All this can become insular, and fast. On Monday Nick Douglas and Melissa Gira Grant, two veteran bloggers, hosted a session called the "Sex Lives of the Microfamous." The two were involved once, and broke up on Tumblr, or so the story goes.

Actually, I could have sworn those two crazy kids broke up on Valleywag, but what do I know? I'm not quite as old as Carr, but I'm old enough to view faddish kiddie startups like Tumblr and Foursquare with skepticism.

(Video by Richard Blakeley)

It's not really that riveting or particularly clever, but that's not the point: fake sex diaries are how you know you've made it as a micro-celeb (for a couple minutes.) Fake anything (Steve Jobs, Nick Denton) being created in your name is simply one of the Internet's strange customs.

[Fake Sex Diaries]

The blogger's latest project—for Condé Nast's Men's Style website—is a directory mainly of women who've achieved some modicum of fame or notoriety on the web. The verdict on Gawker alumna Emily Gould—"That she actually isn't much of a writer has, so far, mostly escaped attention"—is rather bold for Sorgatz, himself such a recent arrival to the Manhattan media world.

But Sorgatz is far too modest in leaving himself out of the micro-celebrity rankings. Since arriving less than a year ago in New York, the dorky Fimoculous founder has cut an unlikely swathe through the geek-loving women of the city. (Yes, that's the Huffington Post's Rachel Sklar in the photograph above.)

In a feature for New York magazine on this "new class" of celebrity—only really new in the paucity of fans, if the truth were told—Sorgatz outlined eight steps to microfame. One key move is to associate with other bloggers. "From anonymous blog comments to frothy bar conversations, confidantes are needed to tout your reputation at every opportunity... The posse—or as media theoreticians call it, the network—creates influence that grows exponentially with its size."

That's advice that Sorgatz himself lives by. His latest romance—with the delightful Sklar—is on display on the media writer's Facebook page, where she's posted photographs of a recent weekend at Lockhart Steele's blogger-only shared house in the Hamptons. How did the geeky Sorgatz become such a seducer? "I wish I knew!" says a jealous rival. "I've seen him in action and it amazes me. Maybe they are wowed by his charm, media sound bites and shiny shoes? He's a good talker. I'm sure he plays up his dual outsider/insider angle too." Of course, there's a simpler explanation: he's micro-famous.

But such public exposure has its price as Sorgatz, an authority on internet culture, should know all too well. Leonora Epstein, one of Sklar's predecessors, has written up an account of her hook-ups with a man called Phil—whose fondness for shiny objects, spiky hairdos and the color red suggests she's referring instead to Sorgatz. The liaison ended when Phil, about to leave for a week in the Hamptons without Leonora, left his packing list on the desk. "Tent. Video camera. Condoms." That embarrassing list is now her screen saver.

"The lines between empowerment and self-promotion, between sharing and oversharing, between community and cliques, can be blurry," wrote Sorgatz for New York, presciently. "Nano-celebrity is there for the taking, if you really want it." Yes, but only if you really want it.

Rachel Sklar: Rex at the sea thinking "Oh my God how am I going to last an entire weekend with this girl?" Me thinking "When are we going to eat again?"

Before Boing Boing blogged the segment yesterday, the last popular Wired story to float around the web was Rex Sorgatz's analysis of Wired's first issue, long before Condé Nast took it over, turned it mainstream, and put Anderson in charge. One ad featured a fully nude baby peeing into the air; articles were hard to read. And the thing was really geeky. "These people actually had opinions about routers and ethernet cables!" says Rex.

Now they have opinions about Lonelygirl15. The magazine has been Tina Browned. They review Transformers; they print an infographic about how to hit on girls with your iPhone. Which is fine with me (especially since I wrote that last one), but it's entertainment, and it's about as groundbreaking as Maxim.

So yeah, it's neat to see Wired's editor play with unmanned planes. But until I see him invent a new model, the dude ain't geeky enough.

While NBC would jump at the chance to fully own MSNBC.com, NBC knows MSNBC.com's value depends on traffic from Microsoft sites. NBC would likely not buy MSNBC.com without guaranteeing access to Microsoft's online audiences.

A more likely scenario would have NBC and Microsoft renegotiating the MSNBC.com joint venture to make MSNBC.com the exclusive provider of news to Microsoft-branded sites, rather than all sites it owns — which would exempt Yahoo News and other Yahoo-labeled sites. One source points out that Microsoft seems plenty comfortable owning competing brands, like MSN and Live.

The other flaw in our theory, according to insiders, is our claim that former MSNBC.com president and current Yahoo media czar Scott Moore remains respected and admired by "many" at Microsoft. "I'd like to meet just one of those many!" former MSNBC.com executive producer Rex Sorgatz commented on our post. And Sorgatz isn't the only skeptic. Other insiders dispute the characterization as well, claiming Moore burned his bridges on his way out of Microsoft.