The ruckus has been stirred up by a sudden rise in the number of people who list themselves as fans of "Julia Allison" on Facebook. Allison has confessed to what happened: After Allison had a meeting with Randi Zuckerberg, the sister of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg who is now actively promoting the site's celebrity pages, Facebook listed Allison's page on a list of suggested pages for new users.

That accounted for most of the jump. But Allison also admitted that she had Facebook "convert" 2,500 people who had requested her friendship on Facebook into fans. That's where she got herself in trouble.

Allison declared herself a "brilliant businesswoman" after her egoblogging startup, NonSociety, cleared five figures last year. She hopes to make more by accumulating a fan base and then shamelessly marketing products to them. In theory, she ought to be familiar with the strict laws around endorsements.

New York, California, and a number of other states have strict laws regulating what's called "commercial appropriation" — simply put, the right to control whether one's name and likeness is used in an advertisement to give the appearance of an endorsement.

Legal pundits have long been alarmed by the way Facebook skirts these rules. When users sign up to be fans of a product or celebrity on the site, the privacy argument goes, they didn't necessarily consent to broadcast that fact to all their friends in a way that's similar to an advertisement. Daniel Solove, a law professor has called this feature of Facebook a "privacy debacle" and argued that simply expressing appreciation for a product or person wasn't the same as signing up to appear in ads. But at least this involves users who willingly signed up to be fans. What of people who found themselves yoked into fandom without giving any kind of consent at all?

That's what happened to 2,500 users who aimed to be friends with Allison, but instead ended up in ads for her described as "fans." Facebook can't fall back on its old defense that they volunteered for the endorsement. They could well file a class-action lawsuit against Allison and Facebook. Nothing in Facebook's terms of service seems to cover such a conversion, which Allison now admits Facebook did as a favor for her.

There may be no separation in Allison's mind between friendship and a commercial relationship, no line between the self and the product. But there is a distinction in the law.

The back story on the friendship between Allison and Randi Zuckerberg: At the SXSW Interactive conference in 2007, Allison had posed next to Mark Zuckerberg at a party. Lest a photo of Allison and Mark start circulating, Randi dived into the shot, sticking out her tongue. When Allison and Randi met later, Randi apologized for judging Allison, and they became fast friends. Allison went to Randi's bachelorette party, they appeared in music videos together and threw a joint, bicoastal birthday party.

The lesson here: Sometimes first judgments are right. And sometimes guilt can be a dangerous thing.

(Photo via Guest of a Guest)

Earlier today, "Julia Allison" was the No. 1 search term on Google Trends, which measures fast-rising searches. (It's down to No. 3 at the moment, behind "scott podsednik" and "lil kim wardrobe malfunction".)Why are large numbers of people who have never heard Allison's name before trying to Google the relentless egoblogger who, despite her best efforts to cultivate fame without achievement, remains little-known outside of New York media circles?

It has to be her Saturday-night romance with Chicago Bears quarterback Jay Cutler. Reports of her standing between Cutler's beefy thighs at a nightclub have brought her to the attention of a whole new audience: football fans. How frustrating this must be for someone who drunkenly insists that she's a "brilliant businesswoman." Now she's best known as a football player's Saturday night girl.

For extra credit: See how many of Allison's microcelebrity pals you can identify in the comments!

(Video by Mike Byhoff and Nicole Keller)

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)

This is what college-aged kids are lacking: internet fame. Luckily Parsons New School has a real live class that will guide them down the path to becoming the next Julia Allison. Whee! This is what all those New School protesters were fighting for. The right to get commented upon. Current made this little newsy video about the class, gleaning some insights from esteemed professor Jamiedubs.com, who, btw, urges you: "Mad props if you register a Current account and vote us up on their site. Further props for retweets, reblogs, re-edits, remixes, reposts, crossposts, sideposts, you name it. That's what we're all about baby."

May this post offer them spiritual fulfillment. Mmm, smell it. Spiritual fulfillment!

Yesterday, someone spat on Arrington at a conference in Munich. For the self-crowned king of startups — which is worth a Twitter follower list that numbers in the thousands and a bobblehead doll made in your likeness — that was an unforgivable act of lèse-majesté. So, he wants to abdicate. "In the past I've been grabbed, pulled, shoved and otherwise abused at events," he writes, "but never spat on. I think this is where I'm going to draw a line."

Arrington has encouraged a fantasy among his followers: Get written up in TechCrunch, and your startup will get funding and you will become rich. Arrington himself rather expected the same would happen to him — that one of his VC buddies would plow millions into TechCrunch, or one of the dealmakers he lionized would snap up TechCrunch for a large media company. His hoped-for exit never happened — and likely never will, now that the Web 2.0 bubble which TechCrunch was founded to chronicle has evaporated.

Instead, he's stuck with a dream deferred, and a nightmare realized. Over the summer, Arrington attracted a mentally unbalanced stalker who made violent threats, and he went into hiding at his parents' home in Washington state. He ended up paying $2,000 a day for private security on TechCrunch's office, which is also his home. Is there a better example of the costs of being famous, and how few benefits attach?

The only answer is to go into hiding, which Arrington is doing. But only after he attends the World Economic Forum in Davos.

(Photo by meattle)

The Summit Series, an event for Internet entrepreneurs under the age of 36, is gearing up for a third get-together, this time in Aspen.

Rowland, the founder of Hilary Magazine and New Faces, a modeling agency, was one of the few women who went to the last Summit Series, a phenomenally ill-timed November junket in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, for some 60 Internet-industry second-raters who partied and drank in the midst of an economic meltdown. (One attendee, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, came straight from laying off 8 percent of his workforce.)

The event was supposed to be off the record, with no names released, no photos posted, and no mention made of the event's existence. But Rowland, a very attractive blonde with a decidedly unattractive penchant for name-dropping, issued a press release and posted photos of the event for her vast number of Facebook friends. The summit's stated mission was the exchange of ideas and the promotion of charitable works. Perhaps that happened! But if so, Rowland's photographs did not document it:

Among the people Rowland exposed: Drop.io founder Sam Lessin, the son of a Wall Street banker who took 19 of his closest friends to his dad's vacation home in Cyprus, where they filmed a video of their frolics. The clip leaked and the event, promptly dubbed "Camp Cyprus," became an infamous example of the Web 2.0 set's irrational exuberance. In other words, Summit Series Mexico was only the second money-wasting event Lessin, whose startup is hardly setting the world on fire, got caught attending.

And that's the problem that the Summit Series' organizers are now facing. Rowland has proven that they can't keep the event private, and the likes of Lessin surely don't want to be caught out as wastrels a third time. Elliott Bisnow, the event's founder, is also trying to cajole invitees to the four-day Aspen event to pay $3,000; past events were free save for airfare. (Here's the full text of his emails, including an amusing followup to beg for ticket purchases.)

I suppose Bisnow could disinvite Rowland. But there will always be someone willing to barter privacy for a little taste of fame. Isn't that what the Internet was made for? With all her experience, Rowland should know that better than anyone.

Judson Laipply's pop-choreography clip "Evolution of Dance" hasn't made a dime from his stardom. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, no one in the crowd could place him. His nine-figure viewcount has proven to be nothing more than the transitory flitter of eyeballs.

So he's been pursuing a career as an inspirational speaker, while Avril Lavigne dethroned him as YouTube's top attraction. A new version of "Evolution of Dance" is coming Monday, backed by awkwardly named self-help site PeopleJam. Laipply hopes to make a small amount of money after paying $80,000 for the music rights, he tells the Wall Street Journal

A depressing tale for anyone who sees YouTube as a vehicle for fame and fortune. If a genuine talent like Laipply, at the top of the charts, can't break through to the mainstream, what hope is there for the ability-free masses taking their turns in front of the webcam?

Lifecasting's the extreme sport of oversharing. With cheap webcams and broadband available, it was only logical that the attention-seekers among us — most people under the age of 30, in other words — would start broadcasting themselves online, 24/7. It's not for everyone — Julia Allison, the New York dating columnist, claims to lifecast, but her sporadic videos don't even come close to the full-time lifecaster's output.

What's less explicable is why anyone, on either side of the camera, thought they could make money off the practice. A cottage industry of startups — Ustream.tv, Justin.tv, Kyte, Mogulus, and so on — sprang up around the naive belief that where there's a screen, there's an audience to sell. Even Yahoo got into the business. The hype fueled lifecasters' dreams of becoming famous and website operators' hopes to profit off their fantasies. Some lifecasters — like Justine Ezarik, also known as iJustine — even thought they'd parlay online notoriety into a business of their own selling product placements in their so-called lives.

None of that panned out. Advertisers only value authenticity when it's carefully scripted; the actual surprise of live broadcasts — violence, profanity, and sheer weirdness — is not a value proposition for them. And while lifecasting services have signed up millions of users, most attract an audience that numbers in the tens. No surprise, then, that Yahoo Live, the fading Internet giant's try at the market, is shutting down today.

A farewell video made by a Yahoo Live user, with clips cobbled together from various feeds, shows the problem. It's nearly impossible to police live broadcasts, leaving sites vulnerable to outbreaks of sex and nudity — or worse. And some will pay any price for fame. One Justin.tv lifecaster overdosed on camera last month — and some of his viewers laughed cruelly as he died.

If site operators do manage to keep things clean, users feel nannied to death — and are left boring each other silly. The most common activity on Yahoo Live? Spinning around in one's desk chair, over and over. Here's the best illustration — only slightly NSFW — of why lifecasting will persist as a mind-numbing timewaster long after it proves not to be a path to glory:

Internet fame is not Internet fame unless it can be quantified. Goldman has 1,166 friends on Facebook. 88,390 people subscribe to his blog. And he just turned 81. (If, in fact, he exists at all.)

How did I learn about Goldman? An email from Amir Ahmad, a "relationship marketing and social media strategist" from an outfit called MindValley Labs. MindValley cofounder Mike Reining wrote up how he parlayed a YouTube video by Goldman into $3,400 in sales of Goldman's home meditation product. And Reining, of course, is selling his ability to sell whatever you're selling. On the Internet! From the comfort of your home! (The pity of it all: Ahmad's pitch was so nakedly brazen that it succeeded in getting me to write about Goldman.)

This is the future: Why become a celebrity and then wait until your career starts to wane before you start to cash out with infomercials? Why not just go straight to the hard sell? This is the future Google is building for us, with its search results, keyword ads, and countless videos: We will all have something to offer. And you will know us by our sales.

Since the debate, Texas Joe's website has reportedly garnered hundreds of thousands of pageviews, 300 requests for T-shirts, thousands of phone calls, and even a $800,000 offer for the domain name itself. Joe should get in touch with Julia Allison right now to extend the snooze button on his 15 minutes, but at least I know who I'm going to dress up as for Halloween.

At one point, Weev says that he's the hacker known as Memphis Two. "Weev says he has access to hundreds of thousands of Social Security numbers," Matt Schwartz writes in the Times piece. "About a month later, he sent me mine." Now Schwartz knows how Six Apart cofounders Ben and Mena Trott feel.

Their Social Security numbers, as well as those of other Six Apart executives and investors, were leaked on the Internet last year. At the time, a tipster told us he believed that Memphis Two, working in conjunction with a Six Apart employee, was responsible. While working on an unrelated story, I received a call from someone who identified themselves as Weev; the caller ID indicated the call came from Technorati, a startup located one block from Six Apart's headquarters. How can such a small world contain such a large hate?

(Photo by Robbie Cooper/New York Times)

"Good news! Julia is moving to Silicon Valley for the winter!" — Valleywag intern Alaska Miller, reporting live from the TechCrunch party on notorious nontrepreneur Julia Allison's plans to move to the Bay Area from New York later this year. By "good news," I assume he means the fact that we have all fall to prepare.

"The wish for fame" is central to the disorder, says Dr. Ian Gold, who, along with his brother Joel, are turning their study of five Truman Show sufferers into the first paper on the subject. Fame-seeking, they say, "is a form of grandiosity, and the fear of threats such as surveillance can bring about paranoia," but in 2008? The idea that everywhere you go, a camera isn't far behind doesn't just make you a little bit crazy: Between San Francisco's Flickrazzi and CCTV, you might also be right. And that explains, in part, the rise of lifecasters like iJustine. If you're going to end up on camera anyway, why not make sure it's your own? Silicon Valley has always been in the business of monetizing fantasy. (Photo of lifecaster iJustine by Miss Karen)

Getting on the cover was nice and all, sure, but what Julia really wants is to write:

Actually, the true goal was never “fame” at all. I wanted two things: 1) editors to publish my work, 2) people to read my work.

Fantastic idea, except for this: Can you recall a single piece of writing by Allison? No matter. Anderson can just hook up a competent reporter already in the Wired stable — we like Fred Vogelstein a lot — and have him write the articles for Allison. Slap her attention-getting byline on them, and done!

Or better yet, why not go with Allison's Plan B? At the end of her email to Anderson, she sighs that she could always go into marketing if the writing thing doesn't work out. Perfect. Chris, can you talk to the folks over on the business side and get Julia a job in Wired's marketing department? She already sounds like she's on it.

Step 1, get noticed. Julia discovered a niche, positioned herself at its choke point, and stayed there until people started to notice. Gawker. A complicated symbiosis was born. Allison could cross "become a cult figure" off her to-do list. Step 2, keep them hooked. Valleywag ran photos of Allison canoodling. "I can't do this anymore. It's ruining my life," she wrote. More than 17,000 readers on her site that day, a new record. Step 3, extend your brand. Newly reinvented as a tech-world ingenue, Allison began entertaining plans to launch her own business. Signed up two friends to act as cofounders of the site — nonsociety.com. Even if her new site is good for nothing more than providing continued fodder for the cannons that are pointed at her, that will be its own kind of success.

(Photo by Platon/Wired)

The story had been in the works for three or four months, said Cohn, long before Julia caught Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson's attention with a marshmallow lollypop. "All the more reason she's eager to be photographed with him!" Cohn explains. "She was very good at her courtship, but we were already interested in using her as a case study for self-promotion."

There you have it: Both parties can feel they've smartly played the other. Wired can sit pretty with the increased Web traffic, and Julia gets the pony she always dreamed of: a national magazine cover! Her starter startup NonSociety.com, the ostensible news peg here, has nothing to do with it. Julia's blog business is a fig leaf for her most reliable product release: Julia Allison.