Recap: Lacy co-wrote the magazine story which catapulted Kevin Rose of Digg to wider fame. The coverline, over a photo of the linkdump founder with his thumbs up, proclaimed: How This Kid Made $60 Million In 18 Months. Cue Silicon Valley derision, which didn't stop Lacy quickly tapping a New York publisher for a rumored six figures.

And, in all these stories, even Valleywag glossed over the fact that Lacy is smoking, so smoking that she'd even be considered smoking in one of those cities where models and actresses congregate. She's also flirtatious, especially after a drink or two.

Not saying that's the reason for her success. Lacy's married, to a civilian, happily. The fact that she and Jeremy Stoppelman of Yelp are both attractive, and know each other, does not mean that they're having an affair, or that she sleeps with other tech execs. And she got the book deal without ever meeting her agent, or publisher, in person, though they might have snuck a look at her photo, I guess.

But, in maintaining access to young entrepreneurs such as Max Levchin and Joshua Schachter, the likely subjects of her book, Lacy's looks don't hurt. Oh, I guess this counts as one of those bubble indicators. You know it's a bubble when ... the tech business books are written by hotties.

Not that there's anything wrong with that — boring guys built this industry. Just that the profile of Karim is the second-most painfully dull New York Times article I've ever read (after the Weddings section). An excerpt:

On Wednesday, during a walk across campus and a visit to his dorm room and the computer sciences building where he takes classes, Mr. Karim described himself as a nerd who gets excited about learning. Nothing in his understated demeanor suggests he is anything other than an ordinary graduate student, and he attracted little attention on campus in jeans, a blue polo shirt, a tan jacket and black Puma sneakers.

Last time a newspaper described someone this dull, the next paragraph read "No one suspected he'd murder an entire family."

With YouTube, Grad Student Hits Jackpot Again [NY Times]

Last fall, several Oracle representatives visited [a client] at his Aliso Viejo, Calif., office. They had noticed he was spending less on Oracle products and wanted to know why. He told them, "I don't ever see you unless you want to sell me something."

"I feel like a bootie call."

At a recent Oracle meeting, [Ingersoll-Rand CIO Barry] Libenson got a detailed look at the company's technology plans and spent two hours chatting with Mr. Ellison.

"So man...how's the house? No, the other one. Okay, the other other one."

Phillips Leads Effort at Oracle To Woo Its Users [Wall Street Journal]

He created a pen that had a ball and clip mechanism on top, for no purpose other than to give the owner something to fiddle with. "It immediately became the owner's prize possession, something you always wanted to play with...We began to call it 'having Jony-ness,' an extra something that would tap into the product's underlying emotion."

Who Is Jonathan Ive? [BusinessWeek]

Schachter became one of Web 2.0's favorite success stories when Yahoo bought him and his popular tagging service. We love him too, especially for how he sums up his hands-off approach with his users: "If I went in there and said, Hey, you're using that tag wrong, people would just tell me to fuck off."

Joshua Schachter, 32 [Technology Review]

Steve Case was not the soul of AOL. The founding chairman was squeezed out because, frankly, he didn't fit the culture. The real man running AOL was vice chairman Ted Leonsis. Dot-com scribe Michael Wolff writes in his book Burn Rate that when AOL brought in Leonsis,

Case became...the suit, and Leonsis became the visionary...He could talk the talk, he could sell the vision thing. He was creative, motivational, combative. He was everywhere...furiously insisting that AOL was what he wanted it to be, rather than what it was.

People believed him...You couldn't help thinking that what he was saying had to be true, that otherwise he'd never have the guts to stand up there and say it and huff and puff like that.

Sound familiar? That's the same reaction executive Jason Calacanis gets from many who read his personal blog.

He "has guts," he's a "very brave man." Every move he makes — calling for AOL to stop recording searches, having the nerve to hire his competitor's top users — wins more converts to the Jason Calacanis Fan Club. When journalist Paul Boutin went with Jason to a small press conference (a dozen reporters talking to Google co-founder Larry Page and CEO Eric Schmidt), he was impressed with Jason insisting to Eric that Google must be working on an operating system. As far as we know, Jason was dead wrong — but that didn't matter.

Like Ted Leonsis, Jason entered AOL through an acquisition. The company bought his blog network, Weblogs, Inc., in 2005. They expanded his power by putting him in charge of relaunching Netscape.com — a lousy gift, given the crochety user base that resisted his changes. But he stuck through it, proving to AOL that he's brave and tenacious. And what seems more important at AOL — getting it right the first time or risking the brand time and time again to chase new profits? Netscape was already dying, and even the most painful changeover could at least change the user base to a younger, more marketable crowd.

Jason is unafraid to point out his company's failures. We don't know how well this attitude fares within AOL, but publicly it's winning him much respect.

For example, a tired Leonsis blogged about AOL's recent massive leak of millions of user search records. "I personally feel just awful about it," he wrote in a one-paragraph entry.

Meanwhile, Calacanis wrote a full-page entry on how angry the "hard times at AOL" made him, and how hard it is to heal the damage done by the privacy violation or "the call" (a reference to the famous customer service call in which a rep refused to cancel a user's AOL account). His emotion could be real or rhetorical, but either way, he seems like a man on a mission to fix "his" company.

And he may get the chance. "Somebody's got to be the next CEO of AOL," Jason told himself while talking to Wired Magazine. "Why not you?" He even pointed out a video of AOL CEO Jonathan Miller calling Calacanis's hire part of AOL's "succession plan." That was a joke, said Calacanis, who regularly makes the same joke on his blog. But a big joke, told often enough, becomes true.

Photo: Revenge of the Dotcom Poster Boy [Wired]