Scoble — chubby, bespectacled, and awkward, the unlikeliest of all video personalities — main job for the magazine was to produce a seemingly infinite series of video profiles of startups. Scoble's unwatchable videos mostly consisted of him lapping up tech blather from CEOs of doomed startup ventures about how they would be reinventing some paradigm or another. But as bad as they were, he fell from old-media grace for two main reasons.

First, he picked the wrong backers. The Fast Company Web guy who hired him, Ed Sussman, was loathed by his counterparts at the print magazine and got fired last year. And the videos were sponsored by Seagate, the hard-drive maker. After the company fired CEO Bill Watkins, with whom Scoble had a mutual lovefest, it was only a matter of time before the gravy train ended.

Second, there was Scoble's dangerous overuse of the Web startups he covered. FriendFeed and Twitter provided a steady IV drip of attention, so vital for soothing the damaged ego of a geek who never got over his awkward youth. But Scoble's paid work suffered while he volunteered to provide obsessive entertainment for his fellow Internet addicts.

He and Fast Company are saving face by continuing his column (heavily rewritten or wholly composed, no doubt, by an editor there). And he is, naturally, promising that he's meeting with a lot of companies to plan some exciting new startup. This is what one says in Silicon Valley when one is facing unemployment — the equivalent of talking up one's burgeoning freelance career in New York, or waxing enthusiastic about a script in Hollywood.

What really happened here: Scoble got invited by the pretty girl to the old-media prom. And he just got dumped. How will his ego ever recover?

Has a real media job. Lazar has already achieved something beyond the reach of most fameballs: Steady employment with a large, traditional media business. She hosts Open House LA and First Look LA on KNBC, the Los Angeles-based NBC station. (She's also a host on the Reelz channel, whatever that is.)

Has lived in LA since 2004. Lazar is something of a personality in the self-proclaimed L.A. tech/blogging scene. (In this photo, she attempts to interview Perez Hilton.)

Dov Charney's stepsister. Lazar, described as a "hot peppy Jewish girl from Montreal" by one YouTube user, went to the same Canadian school as Charney, now the CEO of American Apparel, but 14 years apart. When she interviewed her scandal-plagued stepbrother last August, she did not mention his history of sexual-harassment lawsuits, or, in fact, any relationship to Charney at all. That's family loyalty for you! Also not disclosed in the video: Her habit of picking up free clothes from American Apparel. (TV stars get tons of free clothing from airtime-hungry designers, but not usually from their stepbrother's firm.)

Went to Emerson College. Bachelor's degree in TV/video.

Participated in the 2005 Ujena Bikini Jam.

Flirted with TechCrunch's Michael Arrington. Lazar showed up at a TechCrunch party last July. The doughy blogger accosted her and asked her why she was there. That encounter begat a working relationship where she tried making a few video clips for him. The talks never went anywhere, as she's on contract with NBC through February.

Began dating Rose near the end of November. No professional interest here: "Rose just wants to bang hot chicks off his Twitter list," says one informant who has observed their relationship closely. He does have a large online following, thanks to the popularity of Digg, his news-discussion site, and Diggnation, a companion online-video series where he drinks and discusses Digg headlines on camera. Could Lazar be hoping to leverage Rose's crowd?

Drew controversy at the Sundance Festival. Arrington — perhaps miffed that his play for Lazar went nowhere? — complained that Lazar had cheated to win 24 Hours at Sundance, a competition organized by Rose and Kutcher — and also claimed she'd been bragging about dating one of the organizers. Assuming Demi Moore has nothing to worry about, that would be Rose.

Went to Barack Obama's inauguration with Julia Allison. Allison, the Time Out dating columnist who briefly pursued Rose and remained obsessed for months afterward, claims she's over him. Curious, then, that she cozied up to Lazar in Washington, D.C., offering Lazar her spare ticket to the inaugural. Aubrey Sabala, a Digg marketing manager, may have helped make the introduction hobnobbed with the two in D.C. That's especially curious because I've noticed how extraordinarly protective Digg employees have become about their founder's love life lately. Introducing his girlfriend to the famously indiscreet Allison hardly seems like the way to further that goal. Then again, perhaps that's why Sabala dived between them in the last photo below. Update: Allison, in an expletive-laced IM conversation, informed me that Meghan Asha, her Silicon Valley heiress sidekick, met Lazar at Sundance and subsequently introduced the two.

How serious are they? This is Rose we're talking about, who's not known for his long-term relationships. And the two live and work in different cities. Sean Percival, an L.A. tech personality, says it's over already.

(Photos via Twitpic, Nonsociety, TheChimp.net, LAist, and AnchorBabes)

Our source tells us Laporte gets about 700 to 1,000 simultaneous viewers when TWiT streams over Ustream.tv. TWiT's Ustream profile page says the show has been viewed 647,249 times so far this year, suggesting Stickam plans to pay Laporte a $51 CPM. For a moment, a I felt a jealous twinge typing those numbers. But that passed as soon as I discovered a list of TWiT's regular guests on Wikipedia. They include: "John C. Dvorak, Roger Chang, Patrick Norton, Alex Lindsay, Wil Harris, Jason Calacanis, Veronica Belmont, Molly Wood, and Tom Merritt."

I'm also a fan of her character Addy May — the refreshingly blunt Southern gal dishes advice, and shows what a trained performer with improvisational moxie and deft comedy timing can do. Plus she's cute, she loves L.A., she's a South By Southwest veteran and I'll bet she has a soft spot for bulldogs. I hear if she doesn't get the gig, Jason Calacanis can expect a late night visit from the Ninja. Don't say I didn't warn him. (Photo by James Smith)

In his post, Baron gripes about Calacanis's "aggressive marketing tactics" to promote Mahalo Daily, the site's videoblog with former CNET host Veronica Belmont. But in a reply to Baron's attacks, Calacanis guesses the antipathy stems from Calacanis's public attempt to hire Amanda Cogdon after she quit Rocketboom.

Yeah, it could be that. Or it could be that in Mahalo Daily's launch trailer, Calacanis and Belmont parodied "Rocketboom" on Mahalo Daily and Calacanis said, "Hm. Been thinking about it. Rocketboom just isn't that funny."

There's only one way to resolve this, of course. No, not a catfight between Belmont and Rocketboom anchor Joanne Colan, pervs. Instead: Bulldog love!

Not because Belmont is untalented. Far from it. We won't weigh in on whether she's "Rojas-level." (She is dating Ryan Block, Rojas's successor as the editor of Engadget.) Let's explore the Rojas analogy for a moment. At Engadget, Rojas never needed Calacanis; he succeeded out of sheer creative energy and a fierce desire to prove himself. Judging by Calacanis's hammy performance on her trailer video, if Belmont succeeds on Mahalo, it won't be because of Calacanis. It will be in spite of him.

Calacanis realizes that if search isn't putting butts in Aeron seats, he can always try to boost geeky traffic with popular entertainment. He lays this strategy bare by orchestrating the amusing Belmont through an unamusing series of popular video show parodies: Ze Frank, Rocketboom, Ask a Ninja, Tay Zonday, Diggnation, and Lonelygirl15. The only problem? Calacanis's hamhanded directorial approach destroys Belmont's charm. (On the bright side, there is a bulldog!) The parade of references to one-hit wonders of online video past is telling. All of them had buzz that quickly sputtered. Fortunately, talent will out. Mahalo may end up a flash in the pan, but Belmont's star, we suspect, is only beginning to rise.

The show's publicists gave the Los Angeles Times exclusive dibs on the TV-centric story. (A few goofs in the LAT's first post: Boing Boing began as a printed magazine, not a "webzine" — there was no World Wide Web in 1989 — and didn't go online until 1998. Editor David Pescovitz is based in San Francisco, not Paris. Cory Doctorow is in London rather than Tokyo. And here we thought old media factchecked.) But what Net geeks want to know is: Why does Ted Turner's TBS own the boingboing.tv domain? The show's URL will be tv.boingboing.net.

(Photo by Jacob Applebaum)

There's the fact that it's an old joke. That it's mostly humorous because Congdon is usually incapable of humor. That I laughed because she is defying her image as a vacuous, uninteresting shill attempting to make her way in the world of "legitimate journalism." That lightning doesn't strike twice. On second thought, who knows what the future will hold for Amanda Congdon? All I know is that if it looks anything like this, I'm wishing the videoblogger all the luck in the world.