iTunes 8 includes Genius, which makes playlists from songs in your library that go great together. Genius also includes Genius sidebar, which recommends music from the iTunes Store that you don't already have.

It sounds like an iTunes version of Pandora, geared to selling you more music you might not have discovered on your own.

Here's something odd: Zuckerberg has had a Twitter account since at least May — mentioned in Rose's Twitter account of his teatime with Zuckerberg — but it seems mostly inactive. Is he just trying to fit in with the San Francisco crowd, or is there something more going on here? I'm reminded, for some reason, of the time Facebook PR director Brandee Barker friended her counterpart at Microsoft right before the two companies announced a big advertising-and-investment deal.

1. Robert Scoble
2. Michael Arrington
3. Jack Dorsey
4. Biz Stone
5. Matt Cutts
6. Pete Cashmore
7. Dave Winer
8. Guy Kawasaki
9. Loïc Le Meur
10. Kevin Rose
11. Merlin Mann
12. Stowe Boyd
13. Jeff Atwood
14. Jeremiah Owyang
15. Veronica Belmont
16. Kara Swisher
17. Scott Beale
18. Marc Andreessen
19. Ryan Block
20. David Sifry
21. Emily Chang
22. Om Malik
23. Timothy Ferriss
24. Nick Douglas
25. John Battelle
26. David Cohn
27. Louis Gray
28. Tom Foremski
29. Tim O'Reilly
30. Ariel Waldman
31. Matt Mullenweg
32. Dean Takahashi
33. Philip Kaplan
34. JD Lasica
35. Sarah Lacy
36. Brian Solis
37. Charlene Li
38. Rafe Needleman
39. Dan Farber
40. Howard Rheingold
41. David McClure
42. Margaret Mason
43. Jason Goldman
44. Leah Culver
45. Chris Shipley
46. Jackson West
47. Liz Gannes
48. Owen Thomas
49. Adeo Ressi
50. Max Levchin

(Photo from Michael Arrington)

Shortly thereafter, reearsh firm Hitwise ran numbers which showed that Digg would be inconsequential for Google's traffic, only the 13th largest Web property, well behind Google News. Coincidence? Perhaps, but they can't have been helpful for Digg's negotiations.

One other sign that the deal has been going nowhere: Digg has been interviewing for a head of PR. That's a position they wouldn't fill if they were close to a sale. That said, we hear Digg board member Brett Bullington, who helped sell JotSpot to Google in 2006, has been pushing to keep negotiations alive.

So are things on? Are they off? Never say never in deals. But even Digg CEO Jay Adelson acknowledged this week, at a meetup with Digg users in Chicago, that his company has been too prone to leaks during negotiations. Could he be getting a taste of the same from the Google side? That's a theory I dig.

(Photo of Rose by Brian Solis/Bub.blicio.us)

Allison's sort-of ex, Digg cofounder Kevin Rose, said he was buying Google. Surely not for Knol, Google's weak attempt at taking on Wikipedia — at launch, its search engine didn't even work. Jackson, come back and help us make sense of this crazy business! (Photo by Jason Calacanis)

Adelson said the move will open Digg up to new verticals and make it possible for stories that wouldn’t make the cut on the main Digg site to find an audience. Users will be able to control the threshold for submitted articles being promoted to the front page of these.

You don't ask questions on Digg. You give emotional answers. Next time, Kevin, submit this one as: How Obama already beat Clinton!

A commenter on this submission wrote: "Clinton rules" and got buried 11 times. On Digg, only Obama rules.

Rose submitted this news after someone else already had. Don't do that.

Plastic bags were banned "one year ago this week"? That's too long ago for Digg users to care.

Again with the questions. Next time, write this headline as: "How Diet Coke makes you fat."

Microsoft gets you no where on Digg, unless somebody's throwing eggs at Steve Ballmer. Zune was a sponsor at a Digg's last meetup in New York and they couldn't give away T-shirts.

This Digg headline is far too wordy. Put down the thesaurus and just use the word "stunning."

A common mistake made with Digg submissions is that people think anybody outside of the Bay area knows who people like Mike Arrington, Marc Andreessen, Jeff Bezos and Paul Graham are.

As one commenter notes: "maybe there aren't a lotta diggs cuz this story sucks!"

The top comment; "You really don't care about duping other submissions, do you, Mr. Rose?" You can't submit a story to Digg that's already hit the front page and expect it to hit the front page. Not even if you're Kevin Rose. Only if you're Mr. BabyMan.

(Photo by mariachily)

If his casual-games venture goes well, he'll have more free time to spend squiring Allison around Manhattan. (She even sometimes gets Forman's name right when introducing him to strangers.) And every moment Allison's out and about is a moment when she's not online obsessing about Rose. Less drama, more money? Rose had better hope Forman's startup takes off.

(Photos by b_d_solis)

Melody and Kevin on Twitter

Rose wielded his power and influence, landing two tickets to a private Death Cab for Cutie show. Color McCloskey impressed.

First Rose bought her a drink. Then breakfast.

After reading these two messages, we're wondering if "ice cream" is a euphemism for something else these lovebirds might crave. Like an iPhone 3G?

Who can resist the old In-N-Out?

The clincher: what kind of girl Twitters about really fruity-sounding tea, unless she's dating Kevin Rose?

Wall-E + brunch = obviously dating.

Melody and Kevin on Vimeo

On her Tumblr, McCloskey introduces this video: "Such a good song. Also cute cameo at the end :)" Skip to 1:12 to see who she means. Here's a hint: It's Rose.
Melody and Kevin on Flickr

On Flickr, we find Melody and Kevin sharing a drink through two straws. Haven't we seen Rose pull this move before?

Yes, yes we have. Rose and New York dating columnist Julia Allison similarly shared a milkshake at the Future of Web Apps conference in Miami earlier this year. Rose ended that fling not long after it started. Apprised of Rose's latest, Allison told Valleywag: "He's missing out."

Missing out? Not judging by this final Flickr shot of the cute noncouple:

When it comes to selling Digg, it seems Rose is the one who can't seal the deal and is left pining for what might have been. Rose on Diller:

He is so well connected. He basically walked into the room with this amazing, badass suit on and just sat down and was like, 'Oh, Digg. Yeah. Love it.'

Look for Digg's acquisition abstinence to end soon, with Google's Marissa Mayer — infamously known to be looking for "random play" — as the one to pop Digg and Rose's sellout cherry.

What's interesting is the timing. A source familiar with the talks says Google and Digg reached an agreement last month; it's not clear whether the offer was verbal or a formal termsheet. So why the delay? One possibility: Digg may have been exploring whether it could hire a rock-star CEO and raise more money. Adelson has long been flying cross-country, twice a month, to San Francisco from his upstate New York home, and privately complains about the commute to friends. But so far, I've heard nothing about Digg raising a new venture-capital round, or Adelson making way for a higher-profile hire.

Of Digg's possible acquirers, Google is the company's most natural home — despite Digg having a multiyear advertising contract with Microsoft. Google desperately wants to get a handle on social networking; it has struggled to sell ads profitably on News Corp.'s MySpace. More importantly, Digg could help Google improve the relevancy of its search results, especially with the news articles Digg readers vote on and discuss so vociferously. That might be worth more to Google than any ads it might manage to sell on the site.

The deal may not happen. Insiders are already mystified by its lack of progress since word first started spreading last month. As Sarah Lacy revealed in Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good, Digg has held a series of deal discussions that never came to fruition. That history makes it hard to take any new Digg-sale rumor seriously. But we hear these discussions are close enough to take seriously. Cupcakes, anyone?

(Photo of Rose by Brian Solis/Bub.blicio.us; cupcakes by a_cooper)

(Photos by NewYorkInsider and NYFoundersClub)

Previously:

• A is for Adelson, who cofounded Digg
• 
  
• B is for Botha, who sold YouTube big
• 
  
• F is for Fitzpatrick, and "hookers and blow"
• 
  
• L is for Levchin, who never goes slow
• 
  
• P is for Parker, the Valley's bad boy
• 
  

Tumblize actualized my crazy vision in ways I didn't think the internet even allowed for. They're poet/designers making haiku websites out of dreams.

Click to expand the images.

Start with a lame Tumblr theme like mine. Feel socially inadequate.

Go to freethemes.tumblr.com or, as we have here, tumblrthemes.com. Scroll down and click through the archives until you find a winning theme — not one that you like, but that you think will make other people like you.

Click on "Demo/Download" to see what the theme looks like in full screen. Is it wearing skinny jeans, a vintage shirt with a loud print and a snappy fedora? Good. You've found your theme.

On the preview page, look for a link to download the theme as a .txt file. Click on it.

Firefox will open the .txt file. Do not try to understand what you are looking at. Select all of the text and copy it.

Go to your Tumblr dashboard. Do not check to see if anyone has reblogged you. Your theme is lame, so no one has. Instead, click on the "customize" link at the top.

Click on the "theme" tab.

Ignore Tumblr's built-in theme options. No one will follow you if you use one of those, let alone ask you out for organic, locally-produced ice cream. Click on the "use custom HTML" link if you haven't enabled it already.

Highlight all of the code in the box. Select paste from the edit menu.

Click on the "Update Preview" button. But first, put on your thick, black-rim glasses and crank up Jakob Lodwick's Muxtape. Take off your shirt. Get out the camera.

Looks good? Of course it does. Now click "Save changes," Mr. Popular.

Go to your Tumblr and check out your fantastic new theme. You'll be in the Tumblr-meme-propagating inner circle soon enough!

Digg Dubb: Groove Is In The Heart from Trammell on Vimeo.

Sargent's interview with Ask a Ninja cocreator Kent Nichols went well until the Ninja himself joined the show via a video feed that didn't really work. "I can't even understand what he's saying," Nichols told the crowd after an inaudible Ninja monologue went flat. Another technical difficulty: cutting between the Ninja and the stage on screen, the audience got a nice look at the other open windows running on the computer running the show's A/V board.

Sargent's whole schtick is running his show as an amateur hour; he pretended to be fired from his last show, Infected. But how could Ad:tech's audience, hardly Sargent's Web-savvy, insidery target, know this? When Revision3 cofounder Kevin Rose took the stage as a guest, the lines between schtick and snafu continued to blur. Rose used to host a cable show on a now-defunct channel called TechTV. Sargent asked him if he'd ever want to go back to traditional media. Rose said no, of course, and explained that he preferred Internet TV to cable because its less structured and pre-planned.

Advertisers, though, kind of like a bit of structure. Never was it more clear why TV producers so carefully manage air time than when guest Tiki Bar TV creator Jeff MacPherson came on stage and told a five-minute story about not meeting Steve Jobs. Not meeting Steve Jobs? Could have been told in 30 seconds.

As the live taping wound down, Wine Library TV's Gary Vaynerchuk came on. And he almost saved Web television for the whole bunch, drawing cheers from the assembled ad buyers and sellers with a typical I-did-it-you-can-do-it-too rant. Sargent, ignoring the live audience, cut Vaynerchuk off and suddenly it seemed like Vaynerchuk didn't belong on stage. True. Vaynerchuk's video intro featured clips from guest appearances on shows hosted by people known by their first names — Conan and Ellen. Unlike online video, Vaynerchuk has made it to prime time.

Who wants to hang around with a guy best known for drinking beer on camera while discussing tech news, and a 17-year-old whose chosen profession is talking about startups and going to conferences? For all its tiresome, self-congratulatory puffery, TED at least offered tech veterans a respite from the Web 2.0 cool-kids crowd. Next year, we won't have to bother publishing TED's attendee list: We'll just copy it straight from the list of top Twitter users, as Anderson seems to be doing.

Revision3 Coach David Prager stated in a press conference after the game, "Digg came to play dirty, but little did they realize that we can play dirtier." In a post game interview, Digg's Kevin Rose said, "I founded both companies ... I'm going to join the Revision3 team now."

She totally blew the screen test for Big Brother today. She choked, and they had her re-shoot. She may still have a shot, since the casting guys were interested in her 10k followers. Seriously though, I think she's a lost cause for Mahalo Daily.

Our tipster thinks Digg founder Kevin Rose's ex-girlfriend Posh Suicide of SuicideGirls has the inside track. Suicide certainly has a camera presence, but can she handle interviews? Judging from the above clip excerpted from her guest appearance on Gametrailers.com, it seems Suicide might have a hard time replacing the goofy but smart and quick-quipped Belmont. But perhaps that's not what Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis is after. Say, does that casting couch feel warm to you?

(Photo by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten)

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(Kevin Rose photo by Sara Morishige)

Three possibilities:

• Incompetence — the site is actually down.
  
• Stupidity and laziness — reputable companies don't take their entire site down in the middle of the day without a damn good reason. Those reasons include going out of business, major security failures and essential must-fix-right-this-second bug fixes. Maybe Digg's engineers don't want to work at 3 A.M., but that's what they get paid for. It's generally a good idea to not inconvenience your customers. Intentionally taking your site down for a mere software update at peak traffic time? Dumb.
  
• Brilliance — Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson know that the tech press will write about it, or at least notice that Digg is down. I've gotten three IMs about it already this morning. It could be a stunt to generate publicity, Steve Jobs style. Every Tuesday, Apple fanboys gather around store.apple.com to see if the site gets taken offline — it's a sign that new products are coming imminently.

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