Internet microcelebrity Julia Allison gazed into the abyss.

Rich Barton, CEO of real-estate startup Zillow, let his iPhone app go to his head.

VH1 pop-culture commentator John Aboud sartorialized.

New Yorker writer Susan Orlean finally turned into a crazy cat lady, as we'd all kind of expected.

MSNBC anchor Tamron Hall feigned objectivity.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets — or send us more Twitter usernames.

A search of King County property records showed that since the June 2007 sale of his previous residence, Barton hasn't purchased property under his or his wife's name. Is he renting? Zillow's Amy Bohutinsky says Barton does own his own home, which a Seattle-based tech reporter says is in the city's Madison Park neighborhood. He may well have bought it under a trust.

If so, it's the first time he's chosen to do so in years of owning Seattle-area real estate. It's telling that Barton, an ex-Microsoft executive who got rich through the software giant's spinoff of travel site Expedia, has suddenly become interested in keeping his home address private. Could it have anything to do with his new business of telling everybody what their neighbors' homes are worth?

Barton, who famously founded travel Web site Expedia as a Microsoft property before it split off and sold to IAC, has apparently been telling investors that the company will make $40 million in revenue by the end of the year — even though the best estimates within the company peg the amount at more like $8 million, according to a source. Meanwhile, the company maintains a lavishly appointed office on the 46th floor of the Wells Fargo Center in Seattle's central business district, and has raised a total of around $87 million in three rounds of venture capital funding.

Trulia, which offers similar price estimates for properties, is neck-and-neck with Zillow in terms of visitors according to Compete. However, Trulia has only raised $33 million and is headquartered in a relatively humble office building at the foot of San Francisco's Portrero Hill. Granted, savvy visitors probably check both sites because the numbers provided can often be wildly inaccurate. Sort of like Barton's revenue estimates.

Start

• Superpowers fighting to claim the melting, oil-rich Arctic will want the moon next; we need the rule of law.
• New unsticky "Clean Gum" won't mar sidewalks.
• Satellite photos caught an empty Burma during a communications blackout.
• Faceslam: Facebook snub. Crowd farming: Stadium foot traffic as power plant.
• Forty rocketeers made an X-Wing, but it exploded.
• Chipuya Town is a Japanese mobile MMORPG.
• Matter/antimatter mix powers superlaser.
• Athlete's foot medicine contains no surprises.
• Mr. Know-it-all: Surgical masks do little against Chinese pollution. eBay bidding just for good feedback violates TOS. Shark cartilage doesn't fight cancer.
• Russia's covering Chernobyl with a steel shelter.
• Fire hoses spray mist on ignitable gases.
• Lace running shoes more comfortably: One normal cross, then up to the next eyelet, then cross again.
• Memorize numbers by giving each digit a mnemonic, then think of those mnemonics appearing along a walk around your block.
• Google buys companies that dominate, are first to a space, or could be a threat if Microsoft buys them.
• Self-absorbed geeks = "microcelebrities."
• Preteens are the best competitive texters.
• If The Golden Compass makes bank we'll see two sequels.
• Scotsmen have reinvented ancient Scottish ale.
• Infoporn: Silly Santa math.

Play (highlights)

• Stripper-blogger Diablo Cody wrote the sweet new comedy Juno.
• Comic book Persepolis became a 9-out-of-10 film.
• F4CC motorcycle could go over 200 mph but the tires would melt.

The Angry Mogul

• CD sales fell 10 percent in 2006. The future is digital.
• Universal Music CEO Doug Morris made Yahoo and YouTube pay to run music videos. He made Microsoft pay UMG a dollar per Zune. He's pissed at piracy. But he's letting Amazon sell DRM-free MP3s.
• Why DRM-free? To break Apple's monopoly. iTunes represents 20 percent of all U.S. music sales.
• UMG's digital revenue comes from iTunes and cell companies (ringtones).
• UMG will sell a subscription service (with DRM) called Total Music, urging Microsoft to add it to Zunes.

The Ultrabuilder

• The secret behind future "supertall" buildings is the buttressed core, a Y-shaped floor plan with a strong central support.
• Structural engineer Bill Baker is the go-to man for supertalls.
• Baker designed the butressed core to maximize window access and usable space in skyscrapers like the over-2600-foot Burj Dubai; it makes buildings taller, faster to build, and potentially more profitable.

Ode to Joystick

• Video Games Live directs live orchestra and choir videogame music performances.
• Creator Tommy Tallarico and conductor Jack Wall arrange the score and direct local musicians at symphony halls.
• VGL and competitor Play! are barely profitable, but they bring a new 20s/30s crowd to symphony halls.

Getting a Grip

• Making robots interact with a human environment, even finding and picking up a stapler, is tough.
• Solution: Make them learn. AI, for real this time, honest!
• RoboCub is a humanoid bot being taught to mimic and learn from human motions it sees.

Features
What Went Wrong

• Iraq went wrong because we concentrated on the hardware, not the social landscape.
• Since the '90s, everyone (including Wired) got excited about war in the information age.
• Under Bush, Rumsfeld made an Office of Force Transformation to give the armed forces a $230-billion networked makeover.
• That hasn't helped against our tech-primitive enemies in Iraq.
• Oh, our technology worked great for invasion, but it's rubbish at securing peace. For that, we actually need troops.
• For example, 150 troops are in charge of security for the 50,000-person Iraqi city of Tarmiyah.
• Their leading officer recruits local watchmen to help.
• US forces have sophisticated command centers on a network (CPOF), but the system was designed for "short, decisive battles" against armies, not extended missions against insurgents.
• Many forces can't get online enough to make CPOF useful.
• Meanwhile, insurgents just use the Internet and TV, and they already know the local culture.
• Psyops agent Joe Colabuno wins over informants by knowing the culture, name-dropping sheikhs and debating using the Koran. He makes posters spoofing insurgents to sway public perception.
• General Patraeus still believes in network-centric warfare, but as the man behind the surge, he believes in adequate troops too.
• The co-conceiver of networked warfare says: Combat operations are like football; stability operations are like soccer. The network model needs to adapt.
• The Army is adapting, spending $41 million on "Human Terrain Teams" of "150 social scientists, software geeks, and experts on local culture." They're credited for more local support and less combat in certain areas.
• HTTs will become more integral, but we don't know if they'll be armed or given command authority.

Back to the Futurama

• Five years after Fox canceled it, David Cohen and Matt Groening's Futurama returns on Comedy Central.
• The new shows — four features split into 16 22-minute episodes — are also being released on four DVDs starting November 27.
• Fox shuffled the show during its four seasons, and ratings dropped.
• Added to those four years, reruns and DVD sales earned over $100 million, estimates a writer.
• Creators are David X. Cohen and Matt Groening.
• Groening, Simpsons creator, still draws a weekly comic strip called Life in Hell. He has never seen any Star Trek.
• Cohen is a Trekkie, invented "Worst. Episode. Ever," and loves sci-fi.
• Futurama is about pandering to the elite audience. Cohen checks the web to see fans discover hidden jokes; then he makes the jokes harder.

Your DNA Decoded

• A thousand-dollar test tells you what diseases your genes predispose you to, as well as other factors.
• In the future, we'll use genetic information to plan our lives, and we could live an extra ten years.
• 23andMe, founded by Anne Wojcicki, wife of Google cofounder Sergey Brin, will give people their genetic info and build a database for research. Google invested $3.9 million.
• FedEx 23andMe a ten-minute wad of spit, and view your results online in under a month.
• There's still much to learn about which combinations of genes cause what conditions.
• It cost the Human Genome Project $3 billion to map an entire genome in 2003; it's about $250,000 now.
• Disease isn't solved yet; half of heart disease cases aren't explained by known risk factors.

Chat: Rich Barton, Zillow

• The housing crunch makes Zillow's algorithmic house appraisal more useful.
• Selling houses is no longer binary: homeowners can name a "make me move" price.

The Bone Factory

• Many medical skeletons are illegally shipped overseas. India has long been the biggest exporter.
• The country banned exporting human remains in 1985, but the black market thrives.
• India banned exports after a bone trader with 1500 child skeletons was suspected of kidnapping and killing the children.
• Skeletons are vital for medical schools.
• Example process: Corpses are taken from funeral pyres or graves, anchored in a river where they're eaten to mush and bone, scrubbed, sunbleached, and sanitized.

The Secrets of Silicon Valley

• "Ted," founder of TheFunded.com (where startuppers rate venture capital firms), is Adeo Ressi.
• Ressi, a self-promoter, made millions with 90s dot-coms, then started an online gaming platform Game Trust, which was taken over by investors.
• Ressi started TheFunded in response, getting friends like Weblogs Inc. founder Jason Calacanis to tell stories.
• When firms started invading TheFunded, Ressi banned shills to keep ratings real.
• Angel investments are surpassing VC money; hedge funds offer a low-maintenance alternative. VCs have to emphasize "customer service."

Nick Douglas writes at Valleywag, Too Much Nick, and Look Shiny. He would, in fact, read that magazine if you paid him to.

The National Community Reinvestment Coalition has accused real-estate valuation site Zillow of publishing more inaccurate valuations for homes in black- and Latino-dominated neighborhoods, says the New York Times. Zillow denies the charges.

The brilliant bit is that Zillow's best defense is, "Our system is inaccurate all over," only slightly mitigated by their other defense, "These numbers aren't serious estimates."

Like most free-information sites — like Wikipedia, Google, or uppity tech blogs — Zillow secretly thrives on overconfident users. ("I'll tell my renters the property's worth more! I saw it on Zillow!") If this accusation hurts Zillow's credibility, it'll be because Zillow fought it off too well.

A Home Valuation Web Site Is Accused of Discrimination [NY Times]

The Zillow real estate site won me over from day one by mapping house prices for every zip code and address (even if it grossly underpriced the Japanese villa of Oracle's Larry Ellison). So when the developers made a heat map of San Francisco real estate rates, I asked them to stretch that map across the whole Valley. They answered with the giant map here — stretch the window to enlarge it, or view it full-size.

Check out the peninsula — what should we call that band of red streaking across Atherton? And the deep purple pool of San Jose proves what we all knew: No one really wants to be in San Jose.

Cool data on what's hot [Zillow blog]
Update after the jump.

UPDATE: Amy Bohutinsky at Zillow says:

Fyi — Ellison's Japanese-style home is the one in Atherton. Currently listed for $16M (recently lowered from $25M). http://www.apr.com/DesktopDefault.aspx?pageid=17&pagealias=Detail&Listin gID=40135130

Zestimate is $17.9M:
http://www.zillow.com/search/Search.htm?mode=search&zpid=15593718

But... In general we are always going to be less accurate at first glance for homes on the extreme high end. Couple of reasons for that:
1) Our Zestimate algorithm looks at recent sales of comparable homes to estimate what a home may be worth today. When you get that high, we're going to have many fewer homes to compare with.
2) Most homeowners like Larry probably have done some extensive renovations or additions since the last sale that we may not know about. So he would have to use the "My Zestimator" tool to factor these in for a more accurate value.

My coworkers who don't read VW (yet) nonetheless all hit on the same topic this morning:

"Did you see the Sun's new —-"
"Ponytail, yeah."

He gets that all the time, surely. But people have hit where it hurts (or would hurt if My Little Ponytail or any of his cohorts cared about some snarky blog).

Readers and commenters balked at his recommendation that GM use free cars as loss leaders for the OnStar service (what's wrong with that? Cars are exactly like software, right?).

Two commenters agreed that Schwartz is just a placeholder until the board sells Sun, so don't get too attached.

But the best news? According to a ZABA search, Schwartz (that's Jonathan I, age 40) lives in the heart of Noe Valley. And according to Zillow, his house is worth $2 mil:

Jonathan Schwartzes in CA [Zaba search]
700 Noe St., SF, CA [Zillow]
Earlier: Sun's Jon Schwartz wants to be indie [Valleywag]
And: Jon Schwartz is a Noe poser [Valleywag]

My understanding is that Zillow is out to disintermediate the broker and real estate salesperson, attempting to devalue the broker's Comparable Market Analysis by providing an instant valuation of sorts.

Oh, he's just pissed that Zillow includes all the uncool cities.

Update: Zillow is live. We'll have a treat for you soon.

Manhattan Swept Up In Zillow s Midnight Ride [NYO]
PropertyShark.com Plots Home Sale-Prices on Maps to Empower Brokers [Press release]