Like Mullenweg, Karp was a Web entrepreneur as a teenager and is now in his early 20s, creating software through which other people can make money. But while Texas-born Mullenweb has started a series of fights with his tech-industry colleagues, former Bronx Science student Karp has been cuddling his way around Manhattan and Brooklyn.

This sociability has helped Karp exploit Gotham's chattering classes: Tumblr has an estimated one-fifteenth the users of Wordpress.com, but generates about five time as much content, thanks to social networking tools that let its Brooklyn-centric userbase easily quote and snark upon one another's posts. This edge shows up in the sites' public daily posting statistics (Tumblr, then Wordpress):

Meanwhile, Karp, in full bragging mode today, tells us Tumblr averages "five interactions (answers, likes, reblogs, etc.) with each post on average versus 1.5 for Wordpress." That doesn't mean Tumblr is worth $15 million — it has yet to launch its "really sexy" plan to generate actual revenue — but it is an interesting stat, and a testament to the social networking features the snuggly young entrepreneur has built into his site. It's also a pretty solid indication Karp will soon have some additional "interactions" fairly soon, with surly young Mullenweg.

(Top pic: Mullenweg, right, by Jared Greeno; Karp by Zadi Diaz)

The Local, a new Times blog, has two reporters and an editor covering two neighborhoods in Brooklyn and three New Jersey towns. Jim Schachter, the Times's editor for "digital initiatives," tells the Nieman Journalism Lab that the site will never make money on its own:

If every single person who lives in Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Maplewood, Millburn, and South Orange came to these sites every day and made one impression, that would be about 120,000 impressions a day. It is barely enough to create a ripple in a pond and not enough to be profitable.... If you, for each site, have one full-time New York Times reporter and half of a editor, I don't think there is any way that this could ever pencil out as profitable.

But that's not the point, Schachter says: The Times is trialing the sites in order to build a software platform for other community sites, which local bloggers, possibly unaffiliated with the Times, will run. (It's worth noting that the New York Times Co. is an investor in Automattic, the San Francisco-based maker of WordPress, which Times blogs like The Local run on.)

That explains why the Times is targeting the exact same towns that Patch, a local-blogging startup backed by Google sales executive Tim Armstrong, chose for its debut. Impossibly vain Maplewood bloggers think that the interest reflects the unique qualities of their hometown. Nonsense. The Times wants to squeeze out a startup before it gets established on its home turf.

Both Patch and the Times are really aiming to be a platform for blogging — because, honestly, who wants to pay writers these days?

Of course, the hyperlocal hypercompetition will likely end up killing everyone, leading people to give up on making money from the "placeblogosphere," as Schachter neologizes it, for good. The only person who wins: Noisome media pundit Jeff Jarvis, who is simultaneously advising the Times and Patch.

The company, founded by white male Matt Mullenweg, has just increased its white maleness with the acquisition of PollDaddy, a two-white-males Irish firm.

Are we being too harsh on Automattic? Should we give it credit for not being 100 percent white and male? After all, Google prides itself that 32 percent of its employees are women; that it views that level as an achievement shows how imbalanced Silicon Valley's scales of equity are. Still, look at the Automattic company photograph, taken at a staff retreat in Breckenridge, Colo. If I were a woman or a minority working at this company, I'd hide in the corner, too.

They claim that they tested the NetWorker theme, but then rebuilt it from scratch ... they failed to remove the credits in the CSS file that name the theme “NetWorker” or to change the theme folder which is named “NetWorker-10″(Networker version 1.0).

Previously, a Web producer had to intervene if you wanted to drop a link in your article.

It's how almost all newspapers are. They have publishing systems tied to the creation of the print product, with the web operations appended like some sort of added bedroom for the unexpected kid had late in life. Total Rube Goldberg stuff. A single publishing system that works for both platforms wasn't available until November of last year, and it's still pretty buggy (think first iPod) and around $40M.

A former Times insider says that the CCI upgrade was made not for links, though, but to enable later press deadlines. Whatever the reason for the software buy, the upgrade from the print-first culture inculcated by J-school professors and senior editors will likely take a lot longer to install.

• 0:40: WordPress.com has 140 million unique visitors a month, generating 600 million to 700 million pageviews.
• 2:30:
Mullenweg is bearish on advertising on social networks: "I like our position because it's around content. It's not around photos, or people trying to connect with each other."
• 3:30: And yet, he hasn't really thought about how his company's going to make money: "Monetization is something we think about, but I don't think we've had any brilliant ideas."

Specifically, Mullenweg's money. Automattic recently raised $29.5 million in venture capital — bringing its total raised past Six Apart. The Automattic deal was unusual: Some of the money went directly to Mullenweg, and a handful of other employees, instead of to his company. Automattic's investors, in other words, partially bought him out. A failed bidder for Automattic has been going around saying that Mullenweg's personal take was around $20 million.

Why buy Mullenweg out? VCs normally like to keep founders' incentives in line with their own, so everyone's shooting for a big payday. One might think showering a founder with cash ahead of an IPO or acquisition might be a sign that he's valued. Actually, it's the opposite: Making Mullenweg rich before eveyrone else is his investors' way of saying they don't care if he takes a hike.

Mullenweg surely realizes this. As satisfying as it might be to check his bank account, it has to be frustrating to realize he's not deemed relevant to Automattic's future. And that, more than anything, is what must prompt him to lash out at his chief rival.

She keeps a blog, and links her ad to it. She keeps talk about escort work and money off the blog —- the ad makes clear why she's there. As for client communications, email is easier to manage than phone calls, especially since she's still got a day job. Hushmail was the working girl's choice until some users' correspondences were turned over to the Feds a few months ago. Gmail plus Free Enigma for encryption is now more preferred. In 2008, with more whores than ever hanging out their shingles on WordPress, it's a wonder some enterprising former call girl hasn't started a social network solely for escorts and clients. Hmm, anyone want to discuss this over lunch? (Photo of South Bay escort Fatima, who may or may not have a blog, from Eros Guide)

Several Valleywag readers have noted that Mullenweg has been going steady for a year with his girlfriend, who is both undeniably comely, and if friends' reports are accurate, likely to "string him up and gut him" if he were to stray. Harde, too, is known to take her professional image very seriously, and therefore, confidants believe, unlikely to put herself in a situation where one might perceive even a glimmer of something amiss. All of which makes the very rumor of a dalliance at The Lobby more eyebrow-raising.

Mullenweg commented below and also emailed Valleywag to deny that he was alone in the bar with Harde: "I was no 'closer" to Ms. Harde than to Garrett Camp or Erika Arone or Chris Sacca." (Our sources never said, nor did we report, that he and Harde were alone.)

If you ask Mullenweg, in other words, his answer to the question posed in this item's headline is an unequivocal "no." An eyewitness source, however, insists he saw Mullenweg "all over" Harde. At 1:30 a.m.

(Photo by True Ventures)

Evite: Use Socializr or MyPunchbowl
The main problem with Evite is the uninformative email. "You are invited to Heather's Divorce Party," says Evite, with a personal message from the host but no actual information. To make a decision as a guest, I have to click over to Evite; that cramps my style if I'm trying to be at all productive with my inbox. Plus it's a pain when I'm en route to the party and need to double-check the address. If only I could just check my email on my phone, but no, all the info is trapped in Evite! The "send it to my phone" option is silly, as I probably won't remember to do that until I'm already away from my computer.

The site is also annoying to use: I can only export the event to iCal, RSVPing takes me to a useless page instead of back to the event, and the site is full of ads and unrelated links. Evite is the MySpace of invitations.

That's almost all fixed with Socializr and MyPunchbowl. Socializr sends a complete email with party time, location and information:

But the event page only lets guests export info to Outlook, not iCal, Google Calendar, or Yahoo Calendar. MyPunchbowl allows all of that, but although it leaves guests a pretty informative email, it leaves out the event location. (It's also cluttered with more "features" than I care about.) Because of that, I'm using Socializr for my next party.

YouTube: Use Vimeo
Seriously, why put anything on YouTube when Vimeo exists? Of all the alternative video sites — Veoh, Blip.tv, Revver — Vimeo is the best option for the average video maker (people with professional shows should also consider Blip.tv or VideoEgg). Here are YouTube's failures and how Vimeo beats them:

• Crap video quality: Remember the '90s, when online video was tiny and grainy? And then connections got faster and video was decently pretty again? And then YouTube made it all grainy again, with dissonant sound? Vimeo has better video quality, especially in its new HD format, which has 12 times the resolution of YouTube. (Those with pre-Intel Macs will have to watch the non-HD versions.) Viewers can also download the original video file.
• Ugly site: And ugly embeds. Not with Vimeo, which has a freshly updated embedded-video style that matches its slick, uncluttered web site.
• Horrible commenters: YouTube comments are spam and illiterate evaluations: "dis sux" or "lol." The video creator can either take hours to pick through all of them deleting bad comments, or ban comments altogether. Vimeo comments are not only readable, they're nearly all encouraging. Is the fantastic community only there because the site's so small? Who cares, it's not going to explode any time soon. It'll just steal the best creative users from YouTube.

An example of Vimeo's beauty:

Blogger: Use WordPress.com, Vox, or Tumblr
In its first few years, Blogger rocked; then like most Google acquisitions, it languished, until now it's a hive of spam blogs. Blogger isn't particularly heinous to use, it's just quite limiting. Now there are plenty of friendly blog interfaces for those of us who just want a simple blog with no mucking about in HTML.

WordPress.com is the most flexible, useful for people who want the power of WordPress without installing the whole thing on a server, or whatever people do to make their own WordPress blog (I've had a few, but I always needed someone else to set them up). There's room for HTML and custom CSS and stuff, so you can upgrade it. I Can Has Cheezburger is built on WordPress.com.

Vox is the new Blogger, as far as simplicity and friendliness. Pretty much no learning curve. It's designed to be the blog your mom can use. Lots of Vox blogs are happy and sunny; this one is also Warm 'n Fuzzy.

My favorite is Tumblr (which powers my personal site). This one's less about "dear diary" blogging and more "here's some stuff I found." The small input boxes encourage brevity, which is what your blog could use, isn't it?

Twitter: Use Pownce
I haven't stopped using Twitter. But I used to use it to ask questions when I needed a whole bunch of ideas ("Anyone know some songs about transvestites?"). Now I use Pownce, which lets people reply within a thread. It's like a comment thread without a blog post at the top, or a quick and easy mini-forum. It's also a more rewarding place to pimp your boring blog posts link to entertaining webpages.

Digg: Use StumbleUpon
What if you could get Digg-like traffic without suffering the wrath of Digg commenters? Try StumbleUpon, which asks for "reviews" instead of a stream of comments, forcing users to actually think before posting about a site. That gives StumbleUpon the same community advantage Vimeo has over YouTube.

Get your site "Stumbled" and you could get several thousand pageviews — not always as much as Digg, but without the "this sucks u suck LOOSER" commentary.

MapQuest: Use Google Maps
You already know Google Maps is the best, but apparently most folks still use MapQuest, despite its awkward input forms and such. But, well, those folks aren't you. So I guess we've got a little extra time here before the article runs out. Go spend it at Vimeo.

Nick Douglas writes at Valleywag, Too Much Nick, and Look Shiny. Seriously, Vimeo is like licking chocolate off the Venus de Milo.

To cash in on next year's bubble, you'll need to raise your profile and slash time spent not selling out. SVUG's four-week archive already holds three links to start with. We've rewritten them shorter below, to get you out of the office in time for the last weekend of 2006. Pop each site open in a new window and sign up at all three now. Your resolution for 2007: Instead of the gym, hit each one daily.

• Google Reader — If you don't use RSS to speed-read your favorite websites, this is the way to start. The Reader displays all articles from each site on one super-fast page. Plus it looks like you're checking mail instead of goofing off. SVUG #12 lists four insider feeds to read.
• linkedIn — Fill out the easy job-hunter's form on the network where members hit on you professionally, not personally. See SVUG #3 for quick-start instructions.
• WordPress — Yes, you're getting a blog, but only so hiring managers can find and contact you. You'll seem more Webby than other prospects, without actually wasting time online. SVUG #7 explains how not to get fired for blogging.

Speaking of which, SVUG's resolution for 2007 is to not talk about blogging. So here's a final bullet dump of everything I know about how to make it work for you as a Valley tech professional:

• Whatever software you use, stick to the defaults and focus on posting, not customizing.


• Unless you're blogging anonymously, use your full name in your blog's title or subtitle.


• Too busy to write? Post a news link about your neighborhood or business sector every few days. I've creaked by that way for years.


• When in doubt, avoid personal commentary. Follow each link with a non-committal "Heh," or "Indeed."