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 legendarily secretive Cheney said he was motivated to write a book because he's got lots of wacky stories to tell, stories that even liberals should read so that they could educate their stupid selves.

In a telephone interview Tuesday with The Associated Press, the 68-year-old Cheney noted that he had never written a book about his years in government, which dates back to the 1960s.

"I'm persuaded there are a lot of interesting stories that ought to be told," Cheney said. "I want my grandkids, 20 or 30 years from now, to be able to read it and understand what I did, and why I did it."

Cheney said his book will reflect his conservative outlook, but that he has no plans to write "a screed" and sees no reason why liberals shouldn't want to read it, "because it covers some of very interesting and important events in our recent history.

"I would hope it has an appeal to anyone who has an interest in these developments," Cheney said.

Financial details were not disclosed but it is believed that Cheney got an advance of around $2 million. And to think that he didn't even have to start a Tumblr to get it. Or did he?

Cheney Writes a Memoir [Breitbart]
Pic via Mario Piperni

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.

According to their staff site, Tumblarity, which magically distills your post count, followers, reblogs and other meaningless things, is a precursor to a forthcoming Tumblr directory, an obvious feature that would seem to indicate Tumblr is growing up if "growing up" means implementing functionality that would have been incredibly easy to do a long time ago. Also, only a grown up would create a term as sharp as Tumblarity. What was wrong with Populumbrity? Tumbtrelescence?

While providing users with a single metric for tracking their activity that encourages them to post popular things and thereby grow the site is an obvious asset for TumblrCorp's shareholders ("Our site that makes zero money has grown 5% this month"), it seems misguided to actually link this ranking to a term as loaded as popularity. Some users might worry about these rankings turning what is supposed to be a repository of interesting content into a school cafeteria where everyone is jockeying for a spot at the cool table, but I think that's only applicable if you went to a Science & Math High School where all the students were equally excited about the Where the Wild Things Are movie. Or maybe it's like the Max in Saved By The Bell in that what you think is cool will seem incredibly dated and horrible very soon and also you are impressed by a waiter who does magic tricks.

The bigger fear is that this will turn off non-power users. Does a casual user want to be reminded every time they log in with a big fat "Tumblarity: 5" they they are a big stupid idiot whom no one likes and maybe why don't they quit if they are going suck so bad? Probably not, and I can't imagine that user will want to come back. Now Tumblr has lost the zero advertising revenue that user generates! Oh wait. Maybe the business model is to drive people away? So smart, Tumblr. Your thinking is so far outside the box that it's practically in another box, a box that's impossible for money to get inside of.

[Tumblr Staff Announcement]

Long before Web 2.0, long before MySpace, Twitter, Tumblr, and the like, entrepreneurs were trying to exploit the human urge to communicate. Amazon.com acquired PlanetAll, an online address book and calendar service, in 1998 for $87 million. That same year, AOL bough ICQ, a rival instant-messaging service, for $407 million. Long before Del.icio.us, there was HotLinks, a Web bookmarks service founded by Jonathan Abrams, who would go on to found, yes, Friendster; it was sold for a pittance. And before Ning, there was online community-builder eGroups, swallowed up by Yahoo. And whatever happened to the original SixDegrees.com? Bought for $125 million in 2000, then shuttered the next year amidst the bust.

Did any of those acquisitions benefit the acquirer? In some cases investors made out. But the brands and services are forgotten, neglected by their owners and abandoned by fickle Internet users.

The point is that the ideas of the Web 2.0 craze aren't new. They've merely been rehashed with slicker technology. The only thing that has really changed is the emergence of a new wave of investors with short memories, willing to take a gamble on companies with the appearance of fast growth and popularity.

Wilson is the exception: Someone who ought to know better, but hasn't learned his lesson. Or learned the wrong one. GeoCities was a fluke, driven by the crazed equity markets of the late 1990s, and the madness caused by six dueling portals all eager to establish themselves as the leading Internet destination, and willing to pay anything for pageviews. What does it mean that Yahoo was willing to pay $3.5 billion for GeoCities, but not $3 billion a few years later for Google?

Yahoo is now closing GeoCities, which prompted Wilson to reminisce about his old venture capital firm Flatiron Partners' hundredfold return:

I learned a lot from that deal. I learned that the Internet is all about people expressing themselves on pages they own and control. I learned that a business deal made over dinner and a handshake can turn into hundreds of millions of dollars, I learned that good partners are worth every penny of returns you give up to get them, and I learned that selling too soon is not too painful as long as you don't sell too much. And most of all I learned that you can make 100 times your investment every once in a while. And when you do, it's something special.

GeoCities, which offered people a crude kind of Web presence at a time when most people found building websites too technically intimidating, certainly offers lessons. But perhaps not the ones Wilson has in mind.

Websites which allow us to idle away time with our friends will always attract a large share of our online attention. The lesson of GeoCities is that they're only lucrative as long as there's a greater fool around.

Facebook Photo Unpost Ever regret drunkenly uploading that picture to Facebook? We know a couple of people who could have used this.

Twitter Undershare: Is there something you need to tell the entire Internet about? Actually, there probably isn't. But something about the message-broadcasting service seems to beg people to share too much, 140 characters at a time. You can delete posts, but they still end up sent to people's cell phones and indexed in search engines. Where's the "untweet" button?

Tumblr Unreblog: What happens when your girlfriend follows the same cutie you do on David Karp's kiddy blogging service, and notices your habit of reblogging the Tumblrette's every last quip, pic, and quote? Ah, for a way to instantly zap all of your reblogs! It's either that, or propose a threesome.

LinkedIn Snub: So you meet a "social media marketer" — i.e., someone trying to get paid to talk to their friends on Twitter all day — at a party. You grudgingly exchange business cards. The next day, you get the inevitable connection request on LinkedIn — even though you barely know the twit, let alone feel comfortable recommending their work. The feature LinkedIn needs: A way to politely acknowledge your interaction without actually exposing your whole list of industry connections to them.

Untexting: If AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile can shuttle text messages from phone to phone through the magical ether, surely they can reach into your friends' devices and delete that hastily sent SMS before it's read and the damage is done.

Get to work, geeks! There's too much information on the Internet as it is. Time to make the world safe for undersharing!

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)

CHILLAX BLOGOSPHERE, THE RUMORS ARE TRUE!

PETSWHOWANTTOKILLTHEMSELVES: THE BLOG WILL SOON BE PETSWHOWANTTOKILLTHEMSELVES: THE BOOK. IN A RELATED STORY, LITERATURE IS DEAD.

Admirably self-deprecating! Blogger book conjurer extraordinaire Kate Lee at ICM did the deal, of course, although she's not giving up any more details. Jessica Amason and our own Richard Blakeley are also pitching their own Tumblr-to-tome deal for their celebration of gluttony, This Is Why You're Fat. (And commenter Soup points out two other Tumblr book deals: Garfield Minus Garfield and Postcards From Yo Momma. Note to self: borrow some money from Doree Shafrir.) America has a lot of this to look forward to after it finishes its bacon. [All via future book Pets Who Want to Kill Themselves]:

Bateman already posts literally dozens of times per day to her Tumblr. Not that we're judging, but she wants to throw up even more content, via her BlackBerry, a setup that wasn't working out for her initially:

Grrrr. My Tumblr account won't stay signed-in on my Blackberry.

This prompted a reblog from photographer Mo Pitz, who added:

Might be the white whine of the week…

Indeed! But Bateman was not amused, and wrote a post titled "Interesting that you feel I'm WHINING." Ouch:

I don't remember sending out invitations. Feel free to Unfollow. Top right corner.

Don't be like that, 'Mals — it was totally supposed to be a compliment. Now you gave Mo a sad, amplified by the power of your celebrity:

Ohhhh, no… sorry. I didn't mean that as an insult…it was a joke. I thought it was a fairly common tumblr meme. Eek.

Kind of a big general internet meme, actually. But give Bateman time: At 30+ posts a day on her laptop and 'Berry, she's bound to get the hang of all your basic stupid memes eventually, and will thus have wasted as much of her brain as the rest of us on Tumblr.

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.

Her Tumblr is at "tanya77" dot tumblr dot com, but it's definitely Bateman. She likes to take pictures of herself, sometimes shouts out her production company, and her RSS feed is captioned "Everything is going to happen. Justine Bateman said so."

And the actress-turned-screenwriter has a lot of time on her hands. On Wednesday she posted and reblogged 32 times; on Tuesday, 36. She even blogged during a Screen Actors Guild meeting.

But Bateman is still getting the feel for Tumblr culture. Content is copied, respliced and remixed frequently on the blogging service, as Bateman's own reblogs show. The actress gets touchy when it happens to her. "I don't like it when people edit my posts," she recently declared. "If you want to reblog me, please don’t remove or change my comments.... Please unfollow me if this is upsetting or difficult."

If Tumblr doesn't work out for Bateman, she can always retreat into her Twitter.

Next step for nerd Mallory of the 21st Century: Dating Skippy.

(OK, that was mean. We're really just jealous she's following Balk.)

Oddly, that photo caption, to the third shot above, is available only in Google's cache, the post in question having been deleted. Possibly because it contained phone number of Peter's brother, who posted a comment saying "his family is really worried about him."

Knox apparently made it out alive, but isn't saying what happened, exactly.

You've been on Tumblr basically forever, Knox. Literally dozens of bored Brooklynites are dying/mildly interested to know what happened, here. Is liveblogging NFL games a recipe for disaster? Can Giants fans not handle defeat with grace? Painkillerblog the answer, if you would.

UPDATE: Knox weighed in in the comments below, and also updated us via email: "My finger was dislocated because I slipped on the ice coming home. So I went to a hospital instead. Everything is fine now except having to explain myself a hundred times. " Thanks Peter.

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]

Advertisers will pay $1.2 billion to place ads on sites such as Facebook and MySpace, compared with a previous forecast of $1.4 billion in May and $1.6 billion at the start of the year.

This is due to the decline in bullshit advertising tactics that are not proven to work (a category that includes advertising on Facebook and Myspace). But hey,Tumblr is only worth $15 million and it's at least as annoying as Myspace. So there's always hope. [NYP]