Tumblr founder David Karp ate dinner with some really famous people, but he's not one to brag, so you didn't hear it from him.

Celebrity healer Deepak Chopra really feels he made a connection with the entire Twitter Family, whoever that is.

Internet pundit Andrew Keen is not-so-quietly judging you.

Macho cyclist Lance Armstrong presumed to lecture the males of Twitter on how to be men. It was almost as though he had a surplus of testosterone in his system, which is nothing that would ever conceivably happen.

Actress Olivia Mumm is eagerly awaiting delivery of her slave from another country. Aren't we all, ho ho ho.

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

Living in a pool house in L.A., playing poker at a race track. Allen Salkin—the Seymour Hersh of the Styles section—files this weekend on Harris, who's doing some kind of strange press round for Ondi Timoner's documentary about him, We Live In Public. The last guy to file on Harris? Jayson Blair.

Harris was maybe the first chronic oversharer. The guy who founded Jupiter Communications and Pseudo Programs once webcammed his entire life and broadcast it for web-savvy voyeurs to see. He could be considered a pioneer in a culture that gave rise to Julia Allison—who, of course, appears in the doc—as well as Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and pretty much any other form of communication that shoves someone's life down your throat.

Maybe suspiciously, Salkin's plugged Harris before, when writing about a group of New York writers who abstain from oversharing at their salons (but still tell their story to the New York Times). He's dipping back into the same well for his profile on Harris. Commence quoting of tech luminary Jason Calicanis, whose pool house Harris is now possibly housed in:

"He is one of the 10 most important people in the history of the Internet," said Jason Calacanis, an entrepreneur of digital media who once chronicled New York's tech scene in his publication, The Silicon Alley Reporter. "He may not be the most famous."

But Salkin eventually gets to the good stuff, chronicling how far Harris, who once threw parties at his SoHo loft in which there was "sushi served off naked women, boxing, hip-hop artists including Eminem, and Mr. Harris sometimes dressed as his alter ego, a shrieky clown in smeared makeup named Luvvy, based on the wife of Thurston J. Howell III, a character from "Gilligan's Island."

You know someone's has both made it and simultaneously sealed their fate once they start dressing up as Pennywise impersonating Lovey. And so it was. Harris:

• Had only $741 to his name when Salkin interviewed him.
  
  
• Sold the apple farm he tried to escape to from Manhattan in 2006.
  
  
• Had to ensure part of the buyout deal for his second company, the marginally successful Operator 11, involved a provision that'd pay off his $150K AmEx bill.
  
  
• Went to Ethiopia to start another entertainment channel (which was well documented). Instead, he ended up smoking lots of weed (which wasn't).
  
  
• Just this year, when Timoner won a Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, she had Harris fly out for the festival Q & A's. He only came pending oatmeal and the promise of a visit to a dentist. He never came back from Park City with Timoner.
  
  
• Is also delusional. Salkin experienced Harris' insanity first hand when Harris explained that he thinks the F.B.I. went after him for being connected to 9/11.

The denouement is that Harris is trying to start a new startup, and Jason Calacanis wants to help. The startup is called The Wired City. Any New York Times sentence that begins with the word "basically" should prepare readers for a concept that, if not boiled down to less than a sentence, is otherwise absurd. And it is:

Basically, it would have a large group of people living in a sort of three-dimensional real-world Facebook, where "friends" could participate in one another's every move.

He explained that if two people were Wired City participants having lunch at a restaurant talking about clowns, friends watching remotely could send video that would, perhaps, be broadcast on the table showing a clip from "Shakes the Clown" followed by menu recommendations. The cleverest friends would be rewarded.

It's hard to be completely cynical about an idea like The Wired City—as history's proven, crazier ideas have taken off—but Harris' manic self-destruction is ultimately going to be the large roadblock here. Salkin—who could've made a great trend piece out of this, too—lets a few salient points escape him, as he's wont to do.

Timoner's last documentary, Dig!, which detailed the almost-rise and tragic fall of The Brian Jonestown Massacre (a band led by a singer with another really, really bad Icarus complex), basically tells the same story. Guy reaches apex of fame and decides to throw it all away in a fit of self-indulgence. The Brian Jonestown Massacre isn't the band it could be, but they still play shows and make money, boosted by the spectacle put on display in Dig!, which lead singer Anton Newcomb quietly, smartly capitalized on. If Harris is smart, and can reign in the crazy, he might be able to hose some angel investors into doing the same, thereby giving him a second chance.

The fates of Mark Zuckerburg - the Facebook Boy Wonder whose life is getting the Aaron Sorkin treatment - Twitter's Evan Stone and Biz Williams, Tumblr's David Karp, and a bunch of other young, hot tech entrepreneurs have yet to be completely written. If they've got any sense about them, they're gonna pay close attention to Harris, whose tragic genius now amounts to insane, conspiratorial Styles Section kickers:

Walking past his old Pseudo offices at Houston and Broadway, Mr. Harris, who said he has never been in love, adjusted his dark sunglasses.

"It's a funny thing being in fear for your life," he said. "It's kind of addictive."

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 image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.How 'bout Guest of a Guest blogger Rachelle Hruska, who wins a title of "THE QUEEN BEE" from Meltzer. Meltzer got this one correct, but anyone could've: Hruska has the social-scene-y blogging game on an insidiously smart lockdown. Remember Park Avenue Peerage, Socialite Rank, etc? Nobody does, because the Omaha-born former hedge funder blew them out of the water with a special Kool-Aid-esque formula that everyone in everyone's managed to take a sip of: cover the highbrow, the exclusive, the velvet rope-y shit. Mix it with coverage of "Normals" (i.e. New York Media/Tech neophytes who have more inherent accessibility than the Other Half, who want to be capital-c, Cool, too). Perfect example: the GoaG Hamptons Launch party this very website reported on last week. Sure, there were other people there besides the usual New York Media suspects, but who cares? The ones that mattered were the ones that will most likely disseminate her message to others: bloggers. We award Hruska the Distinguishment of Subversive Evil Genius. Rachelle's the exception to the group, because she actually makes money doing what she does, supposedly. Also, she's exhibited intelligence, and doesn't make herself the star of the show.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Speaking of which, now we get to the good stuff: Mary Rambin, Julia Allison's NonSociety ex-pat (ex-pet?) whom Meltzer awarded The Soloist. Chortle-worthy comparisons to a black, homeless, schizophrenic cello genius aside, Meltzer used the term "unsettling" to describe some of the things readers ("fans") of Rambin's blog have discovered about her, including when she "shamed readers who won free products and then failed to send her thank-you notes." Hysterical, and kudos to Meltzer for doing her research. My only contention with this is that Rambin's presence on the web is marginal at best, and it's going to get exponentially smaller when she moves back to L.A. (where, like the rest of the country, nobody gives a shit about media people) which she's apparently doing. Rambin gets The Ringo Starr Silver Ribbon, as in: no matter how many Beatles you outlive, you're always going to be Ringo*.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.I have no idea what an Ashley Simko is, but apparently she stepped on Kanye West's shoes, once, according to Meltzer. Also, she's friends with the Guest of a Guest crew and - oh, wait. She works in graphic design. That's why we have no idea who she is. Here's her blog, I don't get it. As far as being a fameball goes, Meltzer's wrong, Simko doesn't make the cut. Congratulations, Simko! You made it out alive. You're awarded The Free Pass Out Of New York's Social Alcatraz. Go forth: design beautiful things, live quietly!

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Meltzer also named Paper writer Paul Johnson-Calderon to the list, but didn't name the only reason anyone's ever heard of him besides being an assistant to Lauren Davis at Vogue, once: he was the subject of one of my favorite Page Six items ever run, after he stole some hostess' purse from LES $23/drink nightclub The Eldridge. Petty larceny? So 90s! And hip! That same item had some ex-boyfriend of someone and socialgay Kristian Laliberte both saying he'd jacked shit from them, too (a BlackBerry and a watch), so either Meltzer's friends with the guy, or just got so sick of writing about these people, she just phoned that one in. Johnson-Calderon is hereby awarded The Honorable Position of Class Treasurer..

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Moving along, we have my favorite: the delectable, oft-bespectacled, bow-tied little creature known as Adrien Field. All of 20 years-old, nobody has any idea what earth he doth sprang from (supposedly, "South Jersey," which: so funny), nor do we know how powerful he is, but I think Field is just a viral marketing campaign for Terminator Salvation, wherein Sam Worthington's character wakes up in mud screaming and he's this incredible warrior that may or may not be a motherfuckin' Terminator. Woah.

Meltzer labeled him "The Youngster" and noted that's he's a correspondent for TMI Weekly, so he's basically a crony of Julia Allison and Mary Rambin. Implications of that aside, Meltzer notes that Field has a "men's style" blog that looks like the result of Agador from The Birdcage learning how to use the internet. Seriously (example here). Field can actually write, and he's astoundingly good at getting himself in front of cameras. If he can figure out a way to either (A) monetize himself or (B) keep himself out of the fameball spotlight while building a product, he might be able to survive, unlike the other Gungans, who will just become extinct when the Empire takes over the universe. Just kidding. We're all gonna die out, eventually, especially when people start reading books again. Field gets The Chris Crocker Memorial Award for his distinct style, emotional connection with his audience, and the bright future that Crocker never made it to.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Last, we have Jessica Schroeder, a born-and-bred Tumblr celebrity. Meltzer called her "The Hippie Hipster," but we all know any serious hippie does acid (right?), and Schroeder's your perfectly clean-cut, New York neophyte: a Midwestern import, who moved here to work in fashion and build herself as a brand. I hate this city. She takes pictures of her outfits, blogs about them, and subsequently got a few clips in fashion magazines. Her sartorial style appears to have quality, but her personal blog has seen her prone to personal misgivings about other girls on the internet, and is also shows her as an ardent and aggressive defender of thin women. She rose to fame on Tumblr, and has since been seen out on the town (on occasion) with Tumblr founder/boy wonder David Karp. Jessica wins "Best Dressed" because we're all out of other awards and her plan is so diabolically perfect, it's probably going to work, and Jessica Schroeder the Brand will kill at Target.

America, on behalf of the rest of New York and the last 7,000 characters, I apologize. Our final award of the evening goes to Marisa Meltzer, author of the piece, who you may remember from her linguistic beatdown at last week's N+1 90's panel. We appreciate that Meltzer is trying to document and create culture rather than wax poetic about it in a white room in The New Museum, but really: Marissa. You write for Slate and the Times. Unless this thing bought you nine dinners at Per Se, what the hell?! Meltzer is hereby designated Nu-Fameball Class of 2009 Advisor, or something. It's only fair we thank you appropriately. May we never write about anybody here again.

*This reminds me of a famous quote in which John Lennon was asked if Ringo Starr was the best drummer in the world. Lennon replied that he wasn't even the best drummer in The Beatles.

Just as in relationships, when a significant other's dog empties itself on your carpet, you've broken a threshold, a deed that will never be undone. And we imagine Julia Allison's cupcake-eating dog, Lilly, has shit on a lot of carpets.

This probably happened to Vimeo founder and retreated-fameball Jakob Lodwick shortly before he was ousted from the company.

We've all heard about the troubles of Facebook lately (Spam! Departures!, Gadfly speculation on the non-monetizable nature of the company!) since her and Randi Zuckerberg became besties and started smoking in the bathroom and whatnot.

This probably didn't happen to social-network-as-video-game OMGPOP founder Charles Forman, because we haven't heard anything about that company other than people pouring money into it sometime both before and after the couple broke up (Forman more or less claimed tinnitus, not dogshitting, as the breaking point).

But Tumblr founder David Karp, while never in a relationship with Allison, has, at the least, always been cozy with her. From deep inside the Tumblr headquarters, proof that this thing has reached a breaking point: The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

Yeah: that's Allison, cleaning up Lilly's satanic curse from the floor of the Tumblr offices. Allison has referred to Lilly as a business partner; we don't doubt the dog's cunning skill in strategic shittery as a mark of both territory and omen. Open memo to David Karp and the rest of Tumblr: fumigate the place. Smudge it with sage. Rain dance the hell out of it. And Dennis Crowley of iPhone social networking app Foursquare: put that thing down NOW.

None of the dudes she uses as her primary examples of bisexuality being cool again actually fuck other dudes. Sure her friend's boyfriend might make out drunkenly at bars:

A friend of mine dated a guy who called himself straight, but often wound up doing things that belied his bisexuality (like drunkenly making out with men in bars). While he never owned up to it, she found this side of him sexy. "He wasn't the typical macho straight guy. Even though he wasn't totally truthful with me, I got off on it."

Which, you know, is cute and all. But he's going home and boffing the girl. Kramer Bussel's real point seems to be that there's an effeminization going on—in a good way!—that has allowed us to laugh at Paul Rudd's sorta gayness and chuckle at "I'm Fucking Ben Affleck." Which does make sense, but to bring the idea of bisexuality into the mix here seems like a gross overstatement. That would imply that actual knocking of boots was taking place between two fellows, and that certainly ain't happening in any of Kramer Bussel's examples.

So let's call it... um... bicontexuality. Or something. This is dumb.

Still it's always fun to bark up your own ass and invent new theories so you have something to speculate about on a slow Tuesday morning. So, carry on I guess.

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)

Intellectually, that is, as opposed to financially. Most people attending South By Southwest Interactive admit that they're there for the chance to hang out in Austin with the same Internet buddies they hang out with in San Francisco and Brooklyn. Without the parties, what's the point? That's always been the case with South By Southwest. It's just that with the economy prostrate and the social-networking bubble thoroughly popped, there's not even money to skim from the froth.

There's still enough money to pay for tickets to Austin, of course. But in good times and bad, SXSW has always suffered from a lack of purpose. The music and film festival which gave birth to it has real songs and real movies to talk about. The attendees of SXSW Interactive have nothing to look at but each other, and nothing to listen to but their own kind. Surely that explains why it ends up being a group grope of self-congratulation over little at all.

Ah yes, the bubbly parties. Facebook threw a party celebrating the launch of a tool for linking Facebook friends to iPhone apps, completing the circle of two recent technological fads. And Dennis Crowley's Foursquare — which may be based on code he sold to Google, his former employer — facilitated so-called "flash parties" at bars for those who couldn't get on the official party invite lists, or didn't care to wait in line. Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, launched Wefollow.com, a directory of users for Twitter, to help navigate the mess of messages broadcast on the service.

In other words, the best and brightest of Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley are working on iterations of existing software for the most frivolous of purposes. There's not even a fundamental innovation in this round of tweaks meant to help you waste time more efficiently. (Gawker Media, the publisher of Gawker and Valleywag, threw a party of its own — but at least my colleagues were open about their intentions, which seemed to involve getting a bunch of geeks liquored up.)

It all reminds me of Camp Cyprus — the group of 20 Web cognoscenti, a gaggle of Facebookers and startuppers and wantrepreneurs who flew to a rich kid's dad's vacation home on the Mediterranean last fall and created a video of them cavorting in swimsuits to celebrate their own brilliance to the tune of Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'." It was an incredibly tone-deaf gesture at a time when Wall Street was imploding and people were losing their jobs.

Except the economy hasn't gotten any better. And South By Southwest Interactive has more than 10,000 attendees. So doesn't that make its excesses 500 times worse?

A few people had the sense to avoid this particular trainwreck. Ev Williams, the CEO of Twitter, gave it a pass — even though the tech crowd at SXSW did so much to popularize his status-updating service. That the likes of Rose and Crowley are the stars of this year's South By speaks to how far it has fallen.

I first attended South By Southwest a decade ago, when the dotcom boom had 12 months left to run. Mark Cuban, then the head of Broadcast.com, gave a keynote speech about Internet video; he sold his Web-video startup, Broadcast.com, to Yahoo a month later for $5.7 billion. Under Yahoo's ownership, Broadcast.com went on to not be YouTube.

The difference between then and now: Thanks to the delusions of public-market investors, there was actually money to be made from what Internet insiders admitted were inanities. Now there's no money and no hope of making it. There's just the frivolity left.

Videographer Richard Blakeley quizzed bloggers on the highlights and lowlights of this year's South By Southwest.

Scenes from South By Southwest: (photos by Scott Kidder and James Del)

Tumblr founder David Karp has a new Tumblrette, Stephanie Wei! Update: Okay, we've gotten this whole who's-David-Karp-dating thing straight. Stephanie Wei was recently spotted with Karp at a birthday party for Briana Swanson. A tipster explains:

Karp is most definitely dating Stephanie Wei though, to the annoyance of many. Her friends were calling and emailing me asking if he was gay or not a couple of weeks ago, and now they complain that she's always with him.

Karp's sex life sure is confusing!
Pop17's Sarah Austin shows off her intellectual property.

Former Valleywag editor Nick Douglas puckers up to Laughing Squid's Scott Beale.

Lifehacker editor Adam Pash demonstrates how to open a beer bottle with a piece of paper.

Wine Library TV's Gary Vaynerchuk and "friend," which is caption-writer code for "we don't know who this is" very important person Becca Camp.

Facebook employees pop champagne with sparklers, just in case you missed the point that they were drinking champagne.

CollegeHumor's Ricky Van Veen and Tumblr's David Karp attempt to locate South By Southwest's point.

Poor Karp! The founder of the ultracutesy blogging platform, favored by Internet microcelebrity Julia Allison and the bored hipsters of Brooklyn and San Francisco, just got done cleaning up one censorship mess.

The latest accuser: The anonymous blogger behind Out of Print, a Tumblr devoted to criticizing Tumblr. He says that his blog posts have stopped displaying comments — a critical feature on Tumblr, which is built around users' "reblogs," an automated way of quoting a blog entry one likes, and other comments. The more popular a Tumblr it is, the more reblogs it generally gathers — so the Out of Print blogger claims that the disappearance of his comments is proof that he's being silenced by Karp's censorious regime. He thinks it has something to do with an incident where he hacked part of Karp's personal blog to include a taunting message about Tumblr's lack of security.

The charge only carries weight because Karp recently confessed to deleting a set of Tumblr blogs which included critics of Allison, an acquaintance of Karp's who often appeared at his side at parties over the last year. Not very credibly, Karp denied that any personal relationships were at play in his decision.

But the microscope on Karp's missteps is largely his own fault, since he's gone to such lengths to tout Tumblr as a kinder, gentler place to blog, free of the anonymous attacks and general snideness that pervade the Internet. Since Tumblr is, itself, actually on the Internet, that's proven impossible. Karp's quixotic niceness campaign has only made him and Tumblr bigger targets.

No one's calling Karp stupid. Everyone generally agrees he's scary-smart. So instead of malice or stupidity, couldn't we put down Karp's seeming censoriousness to youth, naïveté, and general scatterbrainedness? Otherwise, we'd have to believe Karp is carrying out absurdly petty yet nearly undetectible campaigns against his online critics. Why would he bother to subtly delete comments instead of an entire blog, as he's done in the past?

Far more likely: This is another bug in Tumblr's rickety technological infrastructure. If only Karp could squelch those.

Karp decided to ban five blogs, including two which primarily mocked Tumblr posts by Allison, a dating columnist turned Internet microcelebrity, on Monday — and then announced a new anti-"harassment" policy supporting his decision on Tuesday. Today, he revoked that policy, and reversed the ban. "This policy had nothing to do with any personal relationships," he wrote in his Tumblr. Bold and italics, so you know he really meant it!

Instead, he introduced a blocking feature users have long asked for. Here's why they want it: When someone "reblogs" a Tumblr post, a link to his or her blog appears on the reblogged post. Some Tumblr users, Allison included, find this annoying, especially when the Tumblr blogger does not agree completely with their worldview. This may have something to do with most Tumblr users having an emotional age similar to the chronological age of Tumblr's CEO. Tumblr's new "block" feature allows them to blithely ignore people who read and comment on things they publish on the Internet.

The "block" feature has a salutary bonus for Tumblr as a business: It avoids the need for Karp to get involved in his friends' hysterical fits over people reading and commenting on things they publish on the Internet. Instead, he can figure out how to make money for his investors.

He had previously hinted about announcing some kind of money-making scheme on Monday. (He sold some electronic valentines. So cute!) Instead of crowing about that, he was tied up figuring out a policy to protect the Julia Allisons of the world. His backers must be pleased he's finally rolled out a feature to block his friends' personal problems from his agenda.

(Photo via Flickr)

Allison, the archetype of internet fameballdom, spends her time "lifestreaming" her every move for NonSociety, the Web startup she formed with friends Meghan Asha and Mary Rambin. Cable network Bravo has a longstanding option, valid through the end of this month, to launch a reality show involving the trio, thus exposing their lives even more completely. (NonSociety had a deal for a pilot, presumably now complete. Pilots are only sometimes made into full series.)

Given her aggressive self-exposure, one might think Allison would anticipate and tolerate critics, even those as uncommonly prolific in criticizing her life as she herself is in broadcasting it. But no; she sees the attacks as dehumanizing, and is glad her ex-boyfriend's pretend boyfriend, Tumblr founder David Karp, was man enough to stand up for her, and all other victims of internet critics. As she told us in an email:

I haven't asked David to take down any sites in a long time, so I don't know where the impetus for this particular purge came from, but I'm thrilled that he has. I am absolutely in favor of ridding the Tumblr community - and the internet in general - of what one of my readers once called "mind cancer." That sort of nastiness is insidious and it will rot communities unless someone says, "This simply isn't an acceptable way to treat other human beings."


There is no reason the internet should remain in its current Hobbesian state of nature. Someone needs to begin the long process of setting basic standards of decency online, and I'm proud of David - as a businessman, but also as a friend - that he and his company have the balls to do so."

Of course, if the internet were less wild and "Hobbesian," and if people and companies got to set the standards by which their critics were judged, the likes of Bill O'Reilly or Scientology and even Time might have shut down blogs like Gawker long ago. And it's hard to imagine Allison — or another Allison — rocketing to fame in such a tame environment. (We'll let you know when we figure out if that's a good or a bad thing.)

(Picture via NonSociety)

David Karp, the 22-year-old founder and CEO of Tumblr, has explained his company's deletion Monday of Reblogging Julia and other Tumblr blogs devoted to critiquing Allison. The rationale: "internal discussions" about a change to Tumblr's policies, which he only made public today, to include "harassment" as a reason to delete a blog.

In other words, Karp decided to implement selectively a policy before it was announced, rendering his policies laughable. Should users go by what's actually published on Tumblr, or should they try to read Karp's mind? The latter seems like quite a challenge, since the young man running Tumblr seems quite mixed up himself. He finishes the explanation:

I'm really sorry for the confusion. Your content and freedom of expression are the reasons we're building Tumblr.

Actually, given that Tumblr has recently raised a second round of financing, making his venture capitalists slightly richer should be the reason why Karp is building Tumblr. And that's where Allison fits in! Her NonSociety blog is meant to be a testbed for a new kind of group Tumblr, for which Karp's company will charge money.

There seems to be a hitch in development, though. Karp had previously hinted that Tumblr would announce a new revenue-generating feature on Monday. Monday came and went with no announcement, unless Karp had in mind a one-off send-a-valentine tool Tumblr debuted for Valentine's Day, which hardly seems like a sustainable revenue stream. For now, Allison is the best advertisement Karp has for the revenue potential of his service. And that just makes Tumblr's situation seem all the sadder.

(Photo by Julia Allison)

And a quick one, too, without the troubles of figuring out how to make money off of Internet hipsters' self-indulgent ramblings. Karp has toyed with charging users for extra features, but it's not clear that adding fees would draw much revenue. Nevertheless, Tumblr was able to raise $4.5 million in December, an investment which reportedly valued the company at $15 million.

An incredible amount for such a young startup with such fuzzy hopes of making money. But it's a bargain compared to Twitter, a startup similarly unburdened by the depressing reality of actual revenues. Which is why Yahoo might, just might, be willing to part with as much as $50 million for it. (In a sad recognition of how late Yahoo is to the whole Twitter phenomenon, its PR department set up a Twitter account today.)

We hear the talks are serious, led by Tapan Bhat, a fast-rising executive in charge of Yahoo's homepage and other key properties — but as with any acquisition talks, they could fall apart. Fred Wilson, a partner at Tumblr investor Union Square Ventures and a Yahoo spokeswoman did not respond to inquiries about the talks. In a text message, Karp, confirming his reputation for adorably juvenile sarcasm, wrote, "You got it backwards."

What could kill the deal: Already, Yahoos are grumbling at the idea of spending tens of millions of dollars on a revenue-free startup. The company's spending spree on Web 2.0 startups like Del.icio.us and Flickr has yielded few visible financial results. Some grumble that has more to do with Yahoo's mismanagement of the acquisitions, but the point is the same: Why should Yahoo spend more on startups, having failed to profit from the ones it already bought?

And there's also new CEO Carol Bartz, who is waging a pointless jihad on leakers. She may be angry enough that word of the talks has escaped Sunnyvale that she may kill the deal for that reason alone.

Update: Awww, Karp is adorably denying the rumor of Yahoo's interest in his company! Then again, he also claimed Tumblr was buying Yahoo, so who knows what to make of anything that comes out of his so-cute-you-could-pinch-'em cheeks? His lead programmer, Marco Arment, is also perkily insinuating that he would quit if Yahoo bought the company:

I hope they let me work on some of the many exciting projects at Yahoo! Who needs a high rank at a small company in New York? I want to move to California and get stuck in traffic every day on the way to my midlevel engineering job where I sit in a cubicle all day and can't make any product decisions while working on something nobody will ever see to manage regional ad clickthrough stats tracking.

Here is what we know so far, gleaned from a historical combing-through of the Gawker archives, America's number one source of Fameball historiography:

• In early 08, Karp really started becoming a media "boy wonder" for inventing a slightly easier way to blog. This moniker was undeserved.
• He accused Sierra Mist of ripping off an ad idea from him, which he ripped off from Apocalypse Now.
• He likes to make beautiful music with Julia Allison.
• Karp is bestest friends with IminLikeWithYou's Charles Forman, but not in a homosexual way, regardless of how you may interpret their photographs together.
• He went out with CNET writer Caroline McCarthy. Later they broke up and became slightly passive-aggressive.
• He is a "Playboy of Tech," allegedly, whatever that means.
• And now his non-revenue-producing company is worth $15 million (ON PAPER)!

He's just like all young men, except (notionally) richer. Soon he will be forced to retreat to a mountaintop fortress to protect his microblogging fortune from the hungry hordes of urban paupers, Tumblr-img requests for him to donate money to them and shit. Sad. [Pic: Flickr]

Karp is founder of blogging service Tumblr, where McCarthy posted the pic, lending it kind of a "stop hitting yourself!" undertone. Forman is also an internet entrepreneur, having started I'm In Like With You.

McCarthy, meanwhile, writes about the whole social media scene — including I'm In Like With You and, from time to time, Tumblr. Sometimes she even provides her own pictures, although we're starting to wonder if CNET shouldn't reconsider that sort of flexibility.

UPDATE: She's pulled the post. It was "only funny around midnight."

Kevin Rose—"an old, old man," to quote Cashmore—never planned on going to the Mashable party. "I'm all partied out," he says. People magazine readers probably wouldn't know who Rose is, but among the Internet-savvy he's Brad Pitt. Rose, who dated Julia Allison a few years ago, is remarkably low-key compared with his younger counterparts. Drinking tea out of a mug covered with skulls and crossbones, he perks up when the talk turns to rock climbing (he's in a group called Geeks Love Climbing). He says he doesn't know what the term fameballer means. He also says he doesn't do things like wedge himself into nightclubs to have his picture taken with founder fetishists.

Those would be the women who this sort of scorn is usually reserved for: Julia Allison and her heiress apparents.

The Details profile is predictably overblown, but its core message is clear: There's a new generation of men in tech who no longer feel it's enough to just launch a product people want — unless that product is themselves.

"If a blog post is like an essay and a tweet is like a haiku, then a tumblelog is like stream-of-consciousness poetry," the article begins. That's right—and boy, is it a scary idea for literacy. (But it's also such a great embarrassing content-creator for our purposes. So, don't shit where ya eat.)

"Sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic, [Iminlikewithyou's] Forman produces a steady stream of non sequiturs. "I like people in cute T-shirts who look really angry," he says. Just as he's launching into a description of founder fetishism—that is, when a woman goes only for men who have started high-tech companies, his phone rings. His girlfriend, Julia Allison, is on the line. "She has it," he mouths. Then he says into the phone, "Of course I miss you. I always miss you."

...Exhausted and slower than the night before, Forman is at the crux of the Web 2.0 star's dilemma. Sustaining fame by making sure accounts of your exploits with industry players and Internet starlets circulate in the right places is a full-time job. But so is getting a company off the ground. Karp and Forman consider the two pursuits inextricable. As fameballers, they stay busy fine-tuning and maintaining their personae. But a persona is not a person. A persona doesn't get work done. And a persona can't engage in a meaningful relationship. About a week later, Forman announces that he and Allison have split. He also says the tinnitus is gone. "I mean, it could just be a coincidence," he says.

Hee. Oh, wait, here comes Forman's ex, dating columnist Julia Allison! (Note: this convo is not with me.)

It's so cute how people think they can, like, control the outcome of a profile. That's like assuming that other people aren't going to be smart enough to cut through your carefully crafted bullshit.

Playboys of Tech [Details]

If you so desperately want an audience for what I'm sure is your boundless and inimitable wit, you're going to have to put up with the occasional heckler. Karp is a talented designer and developer, but there's no CSS or PHP code that will hack the incivility out of the human condition. Since nobody seems to be able to limit the intimate details of their personal lives to private channels of communication anymore, I recommend getting a therapist who will hold your deepest hopes and fears in confidence. I've found it can help.

Tumblr users in Kalamazoo, Michigan:

More in Des Moines, Iowa:

There's one in Muncie, Indiana!

Tumblr users exist where they used to make Goodyear tires in Akron, Ohio:

In East Sioux Falls, South Dakota, they must call the Tumblr-using Sioux Falls kids crybaby emos: