Yesterday's Gillmor Gang topic: the Palm Pre. Things started out nice enough when LaPorte - who owns and operates netcast network TWiT.tv, on which the show is featured - was discussing how much he enjoyed his new toy. Arrington, sounding a little bitter about not having one, asks LaPorte whether or not he got his for free. LaPorte notes that yeah, he did, but that he wasn't the only one! Arrington notes it to be on the record, and that's when LaPorte really gets pissed, especially over the implication that the fact that he got the thing for free would ever influence his review over a highly coveted tech product! Arrington chuckles back: "What're you gonna do about it?" That's when LaPorte lets loose, and promptly shuts the show down:

Glorious, no? The program, as you can tell, actually did get shut down. Arrington later went on TechCrunch to issue an apology to LaPorte, explaining that he didn't at all intend to provoke him, and that he was just joshin' him:

I've had a lot of interactions with [LaPorte] and they've always been positive. Or at least I thought so. I wasn't watching the video live during the show and I really thought Leo was joking until the very end (as did Steve Gillmor and Loren Feldman, who were chuckling in the video). My "what are you going to do about it" comment doesn't sound so great in hindsight. But I really did just think he was joking around.

It gets better, though: Arrington noted at the end of his apology post on TechCrunch that comments were going to be moderated. LaPorte kindly comments on Arrington's post with a mutual apology for the snapping:

Thanks for the post, Mike. Apology accepted. Now that I know what was going on in your mind, I apologize to you.

There seems to be something about the Gillmor Gang that just engenders over the top passion. I'm embarrassed by my overreaction. Peace.

But it ain't over, yet, because the commenters are pissed about being moderated by Arrington! Arrington, who has received numerous death threats before over his site, responds thusly:

Many comments are complaining about comment moderation. This isn't about free speech. It's about dozens of death threats and hundreds of others saying pretty horrible things about one of of us. You may think that your comment needs to get heard and that calling for someone to die shouldn't be taken seriously. But multiply that by hundreds and maybe you'll get a sense of this. I was rude. I made the problem worse by saying things because I thought he was play-mad. and then i apologized. i may be a lot of things but i don't think i deserve to die over this. please. stop. i can't deal with the death threats after what happened last year and then this year in europe. leo won. you guys won. i surrender. just stop. please. stop.

Quite simply, Arrington was being "cute," and this thing just blew up in their faces. Really, the problem is that these guys never played a game of two-hand-touch in their lives. No harm, no foul!

And who the hell is making death threats to Michael Arrington over this? Jesus. Arrington then notes in the comments that this "ruined [his] entire weekend. for fuck's sake." And why wouldn't it?

Lesson learned: gadget nerds are terrifying! I'm going back to writing about Sesame Street and hipsters. Goodbye. Freaks.

N.B. One commenter on TechCrunch noted that Arrington has been "Keyboard Catted." Which made me laugh very loudly. Gadget nerds: terrifying. But hysterical: The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had planned to have 1,000 employees by last December. A tipster at the company told us that despite pleas from executives as the economy melted down, Zuckerberg kept hiring — and the only reason he missed his headcount goal was that potential hires were balking at coming on board.

Now Facebook has posted a recruiting video touting the amazing number of photos being uploaded to the site (some 40 billion images in total). It's a slick, PR-friendly video. "What engineeer wouldn't want to work here?" gushes Silicon Alley Insider's Dan Frommer.

Anyone smart enough to draw Facebook's interest, actually. Engineers of that caliber are perfectly capable of doing the math themselves on Facebook's storage requirements withou a video to help them along. If Facebook has to go to such efforts to make itself look cool, then it isn't by definition. No wonder Facebook employees are bitching about the company in internal surveys while Twitter poaches its top prospects.

. . .

• Love Bunnies - The world's first Facebook sex toy! (lovehoney.co.uk)
• Love Bunnies from Love Honey (lovebunni.es)
• Love Bunnies @ Facebook (facebook.com; login required)

"So have you seen that nine-minute video of the guy fucking a giant Cheeto that's made out of a bunch of little Cheetos?"

"OMG, yes! What was that all about?"

"I don't know. The internet is weird."

Yeah, we don't get it either. But to be fair, he's not really fucking the Cheeto so much as he's making sweet, sweet love to it. It's kind of romantic, actually. Even if it is completely and totally out-of-this-world insane.

. . .

· I LOVE YOU CHEETOS (YouTube, via uniquedaily.com)

Facebook employees all seem to have the party line down pat: What draws people to work there, most told Meyers, is "the environment": the youthful culture and the swift pace of rolling out code. But one, at least, is honest: He says he's at Facebook because it's pre-IPO. (Someone's been reading Valleywag.)

Even people at eBay, the stolid auctions giant, are getting into the Facebook action. Jimmy Ho, an eBayer in attendance, says the company's working on a Facebook app to introduce "social shopping." The as-yet-unreleased app, he told Meyers, will let you sign up for a "shopping buddy." Great. If we wanted to hang out in the mall with our friends, would we be shopping online?

(Video by Sarah Meyers and Enric for Valleywag)

Ostensibly, MySpace was trying to highlight its MySpace TV video channels with this release. One slight hitch: The "Hott4Hill" video is also posted on YouTube, where it's gotten 600,000 views. And on MySpace TV? 1,400. Ouch. Even "Hott4Hill", on her MySpace profile, embeds a YouTube video, not the MySpace version.

Having concluded there wasn't much more to see on MySpace, I turned my attention to Facebook, whose users, I discovered, hungered for HIllary in a different way. The most popular HIllary group? "Hillary Clinton: Stop Running for President and Make Me a Sandwich."

And from this exercise, what knowledge did I acquire? MySpace's users are not quite as clueless as the site's PR team, since at least they know that YouTube is a better video site. And Facebook's users are a bunch of lazy college smartasses. In other words, I learned absolutely nothing. And now, so have you.

Content
A media network needs media. Not just anything that fills camera time, of course; a media outlet needs good stuff, delivered in a format its main consumers will like. For instance, a news blog needs constantly updated stories in text, pictures and/or video, whereas a deep documentary series needs longer episodes more carefully crafted.

Obviously, PodTech has shows, including some great ones, like the entertaining food show Freshtopia (an independent show licensed by the network). But the interesting shows stick out oddly among the sea of dull interviews that make up most of the PodTech lineup. Of the twenty-four shows on the front page, twenty were about business and technology.

So PodTech is a Silicon Valley business network. Boring, I know, but maybe useful for businesspeople. But all but seven of the shows on the front page last over 5 minutes, with several clocking in at 10 to 20. One show consists of a 40-minute audio feed of entrepreneur Jason Calacanis talking to other startup leaders. Robert Scoble, PodTech's most prominent show host who runs many of the network's interviews, confessed at a public talk with TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington that his editing time is shorter than his runtime: Scoble doesn't even watch the entire show as he edits it.

Hours of poorly edited content, hardly worth watching and hardly ever worth linking, are as bad as no content at all.

Audience
As noted, it's not enough to slap something up there. Shows have to be targeted at an audience. But who is fascinated by interviews with tech execs, but has the time to watch and listen to un-annotated shows?

PodTech's main offerings are useful to someone doing due diligence on a startup, but that's about it. The huge geek audience already has better shows to watch. For instance, there's Leo Laporte's more entertaining This Week in Tech network or the PodShow network's slicker business and technology channels.

Deals
No media outlet is an island. (Damn, that is just not catchy.) It needs advertisers, partners, and distributors. Even an online video site needs some outside sites to help it catch on. (Of course it's best if that deal comes for free.) So what deals has PodTech made?

Well, there is an impressive list of advertisers. (Will they stick around? Check the section below, "Momentum.")

And in addition, there's a new partnership with Jerry Zucker, creator of Airplane and Naked Gun. Zucker has launched a Podtech-powered comedy network called National Banana. Unfortunately, it's nothing like Turner's Super Deluxe; it's not nearly as promising as Will Ferrell's Funny or Die. In fact, it's just three almost-funny videos. I know groups of guys in the middle of nowhere who have more than this to show on day 1. This isn't a partnership; this is PodTech name-dropping a washed-up Jeff Zucker.

A plan
This may be less necessary than you'd think. But that's only true for networks with content, audience, and deals. If the company's going to survive without something real to offer, it'd better have a scheme for passing it off and selling the whole works like a pump-and-dump.

PodTech doesn't seem to have a plan. Sure, the Zucker deal could be a stab at raising value, but if they'd really thought that one out, PodTech would have made sure he launched more than his weaksauce three-video page, right? (Hell, there isn't even a comments section on that thing.)

I've also heard the story of one show "bought" by PodTech: Last year the network hired the two creators of Geek Entertainment TV, promising to buy their show. But in the ten months since, PodTech has only worked out a temporary licensing deal, took one of the creators to a new show, and laid off the other part-time. How did a deal this simple get this screwed up?

Momentum
This is simple: a media network has to grow. Content, audience, and deals have expiration dates. Traffic should rise, the plan should become the trajectory.

PodTech, however, hasn't gone anywhere. The traffic according to Alexa (PodTech doesn't even show up on the ranks of the industry standard, Comscore) is quietly dying, not that it started that high in the first place.

So what?
PodTech's dead. There's nothing good to watch, no traffic, no pickup, no significant deals, no standout talent, and nothing really there. So another startup will go tits up unless the owner foists it upon some unsuspecting buyer. The story of PodTech's creative bankruptcy and business unsavvy is also a template for how not to run a media network and a warning to those who think that all it takes is some cameras, a boring interviewer, and a site to stick the shows on.

Nick Douglas writes for Valleywag, Prezzish, and Look Shiny. In full disclosure, he'd like to start a media company, but that's as likely as all the other stuff he says he'll do in his byline.