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)

TechPresident's Micah Sifry leaked Obama Web guru Katie Stanton's complaint about government bureaucracy.

Boing Boing adventuress continued her travels in Africa.

Jake Tapper, ABC's resident hunk of red hot newsmeat, gave an incomprehensible update about President Obama's quest for culinary knowledge.

VentureBeat blogger Eric Eldon exemplified the South By Southwest work ethic.

As did Air America radio hostess and frequent alcohol seeker Ana Marie Cox.

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.

Foursquare bears an unmistakable resemblance to Dodgeball, a cell-phone-based friend-finding service Crowley launched in 2004 and sold to Google in 2005 for an estimated $40 million. Crowley worked at Google for two years afterwards. And his former employer may be getting ready to take legal action, if a tipster is right:

The GOOG has reason to believe that the recently launched location-based service startup Foursquare went live using server code that originally powered Dodgeball. A cease and desist order might be sent out to the service as early as this week. An engineer named Harry could also face some additional discipline.

Dodgeball worked by having users check in via text message when they arrived at a location like a bar or restaurant, and broadcast the user's whereabouts to friends — a precursor of Twitter, in some ways, but focused on people's whereabouts. Google ended up killing Dodgeball (a smart move) but launching a similar service called Google Latitude.

Foursquare's added twist: It turns hanging out with friends into an interactive game, with users racking up points for going out. It also has some au courant features, like an iPhone app and integration with Twitter — the kind of thing any Web app needs to be hip these days. But according to an engineer familiar with Foursquare, its back end appears to bear a strong resemblance to Dodgeball's.

Crowley quit Google in 2007, complaining that Google had stifled Dodgeball. One rumor floating around has it that he tried to buy it back from Google, without success. So it makes sense that he would want to relaunch it, and might feel entitled to use the code he wrote, since Google abandoned it.

It also makes sense that he would have help from the inside. The "Harry" the tipster mentioned is almost certainly Harry Heyman, a Google engineer. Heyman was caught by surprise by his employer's announcement of Dodgeball's shutdown. In January, Heyman wrote on his LiveJournal:

Don't fret too much about not having a tool like this to use when dodgeball gets turned off. Like you, I'm pretty unimpressed with most of the other current offerings, but I know of a couple soon-to-be-released things in the works. Keep an eye out, and we'll all find a new home that suits our needs just fine.

But that's the hitch: Google already paid Crowley for the code, and even though it's not being used, Google's lawyers would reasonably want to disabuse startup founders of the notion that they can sell their startup and have it too.

Crowley and Heyman have not yet responded to emails asking for their side of the story. A Google spokeman promised to look into the matter but has not yet offered comment.

Now would be the perfect time to strike, with Crowley at the South By Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas, surrounded by his friends and fans, many of whom have signed up for Foursquare.

Take last night, for example. The conference's official happy hour was packed, while the cocktail party hosted by Break Media, CollegeHumor, and other panelists from the "Comedy on Television and the Web" panel was far more relaxed. Attendees included CollegeHumor's Ricky Van Veen and The Office's BJ Novak. In between buying dozens of Kamikaze shots, Break Media CEO Keith Richman complimented Mahalo's Jason Calacanis's poker game. (Calacanis is a noted gambler, so much so that we sometimes wonder if he might have a problem.)

Break Media CEO Keith Richman, former Valleywag editor Nick Douglas, and New York writer and comedienne Caroline Waxler

We arrived at Digg's Second Annual Big Digg Shindig at Stubb's BBQ too late to see the live Diggnation taping — though we hear it was packed shoulder to shoulder — but just in time to see fanboys mob Diggnation host Kevin Rose and dispensable sidekick Alex Albrecht for autographs en masse.





NY Tech Meetup organizer, proven wantrepreneur, and host of The Interwebs Nate Westheimer

iLike's Ali Partovi and Hype Machine's Anthony Volodkin

Valleywag alumna and Boffery cofounder Melissa Gira Grant with Automattic's Matt Mullenweg

After a stop at an impromptu Next New Networks party, we headed to the Driskill Hotel. Microcelebrity egoblogger Julia Allison was flanked by fans who showed up after she sent a message on Twitter seeking reassurance of her self-importance. She has actual fans! Three of them!

VentureBeat blogger Eric Eldon, who lives in the hipster San Francisco neighborhood of the Lower Haight and rides a hipster bicycle to other hipster neighborhoods and wears hipster glasses and has a hipster job and is generally in denial about being a hipster, criticized hipsters and their cowboy-boot affectations, just in time for them all to pack up their cowboy boots and fly to Austin for SXSW.

Facebook platform manager Dave Morin, who lives in the San Francisco hipster neighborhood of North Beach and is in such denial about being a hipster he doesn't even realize he should be in denial about being a hipster, packed up his cowboy boots and flew to Austin for SXSW.

Cutie-pie CBS Internet correspondent Natali Del Conte got stalked in Texas by Luke Wilson and Paul Rudd.

Chris Lehmann, better known as Mr. Wonkette Emerita, grokked a fundamental truth about Del Conte and Morin's destination. (Psst, Chris: SXSW has hotels, a complete lack of boot-ruining playa dust, and better food. But other than that, you're on to something there.)

Hipster-mongering Details editor Daniel Peres doesn't read Gawker unless told to, Columbia J-school student James Sims, who we suspect is himself a hipster, wrily noted.

See something worth noting on Twitter? Please email us your favorite tweets — or send us more Twitter usernames.

I mean, yes, okay, technically there are thousands of people employed in the Internet industry whose employers, despite the recession, have paid for plane tickets and hotel rooms and passes to a conference called "South By Southwest Interactive," or "SXSWi," or "South By," if you're painfully hip, which starts this Friday.

And technically all these PHP coders and social media marketers and wantrepreneurs and pretty girls with webcams and Hollywood interactive business-development types will be physically present at the site of said conference. But no one actually goes to the conference.

They do go to the convention center where the conference is held, only because there are so many tweets on Twitter during SXSW that it is impossible to make plans electronically, so they are forced to meet up in person to discuss which parties they plan to attend. Plus, they talk about Twitter. And then they go to the parties and drink and talk about Twitter.

Then they wake up the next day still drunk and go to whichever 10 a.m. panel offers free breakfast tacos, which are exceptionally tasty in Austin and good for curing hangovers and make excellent subject matter for Twitter.

Also, Wired editor Chris Anderson will give a keynote, presumably about his book, Free, which lays out an already outdated theory about how everything will be free, except that it won't because everyone is broke, even Google.

This is why I'm not going this year.

But we have found one redeeming thing about South By Southwest. One!

It is a rap song, "South By Girls," by former Facebook interaction designer Eston Bond, who is something of a perfect parody of a South By Southwest attendee. (Under 25? Check. Web designer? Check. Lives in Palo Alto but kind of wishes he lived in San Francisco? Check. Disturbing love of guns? Check.) There are lyrics — with footnotes, because this is a nerdcore rap.

If you use his rap song to create an especially amusing video, you might win a gift card for an iPhone, a prize we only mention for its pointlessness. Anyone who would listen to this song and be inspired to create a video already owns three iPhones. But Bond managed to rhyme "Zivity" and "productivity," so we forgive him.

Here's the song, with Bond's gold-Treo-bedecked visage and some photos from last year's SXSW as visual backup:

(Video by Ryan Tate)

Honestly, as painful as it was, I think it's ultimately a net positive for me. All most people hear is the vocal minority. I went to four parties Sunday night, was mobbed, and no one said a bad word. I haven't even gotten a single negative email. No one sees the hundreds of notes that have poured in supporting me, saying they were there and embarrassed, or the messages I've received from other Valley CEOs telling me they enjoyed the keynote and that we all get attacked at some point in our careers. It's just part of the job. Can't take the good without the bad.

Mark Zuckerberg meets the black internet widow.

[www.flickr.com]

Sabala, who started at Digg on February 6 as community manager and marketing director, is a SXSW veteran. (You can tell because she calls it "South By.") She was set on the idea of a party at the festival, but by Friday, she and the rest of Digg had decided it was a nonstarter. The next Monday, though, she gave it another try. A call to a Napa winery landed a sponsor for wine. A call to a contact at PureVolume secured the club for Tuesday night. With that, Sabala had a party that bridged SXSW Interactive's last day and the SXSW Music's first.

A few blocks away at Six Lounge, Revision3 was also bridging music and the Web, with a live debut of "Rock Band," Randi Jayne Zuckerberg and David Prager's homage to the guitar-wielding videogame at a party hosted by Rana Sobhany. Kevin Rose ruled Austin last night — he also cofounded Revision3.

Prager, Revision3's COO, told me Monday about the times he'd put money from his own bank account into Revision3's coffers to make sure it made payroll. Those lean days are long past for both of Rose's companies. Even as the stock markets waiver, Web startups seem flusher than ever. A Microsoft ad deal has buoyed Digg; the online-video boom is taking care of Revision3's paychecks.

Are we going to see this kind of party scene at next year's SXSW? Let's be clear: SXSW was a good time, not a boundless bacchanal. Nothing smacked of excess: A mild dose of star power is enough to intoxicate the deskbound Web designers who attend the festival. But I noticed that no one talked about the stock market once the whole week. SXSW was a comfortable bubble. As the Webheads fly back home, will they even feel it popping?

1. Choose a diner near your hotel. After 2 a.m., your options are Magnolia's Cafe, Katz's Deli, IHOP, or Denny's.
   
2. Practice your pickup line. Last night our host offered us a milkshake — innocent in itself, yet suggestive enough to prime us for the follow-on invite up to his room.
   
3. Charge your cell in advance. Once we figured out sex was on the menu, we rang up a fifth to bring in. We would have gotten more, but the room didn't have enough outlets for all our iPhones.

Drunkr 

You know how you're at the Tumblr party, drunkenly caning the free whisky like there's no tomorrow and then a sexygeekboy sits down and starts chatting to you, and before you know it your legs are touching and then he's whispering in your ear that he has an early morning flight and "do you want to leave now and make a night of it?" and you're grinning and saying "yes", and then you stumble back to yours and fuck each other furiously, and you're wondering how the hell this drop-dead gorgeous man ended up in your bed, and then he writes down his email before leaving for the airport, and you curl up in bed with a huge smile on your face, waking a few hours later to Google his name and discover that he's not just any sexygeekboy but one that also happens to be famous on the internet?

Yeah, that

[girlwithaonetrackmind.blogspot.com]