She has participated in many a lip-dub video herself, including one with Julia Allison, the New York party attendee who parlayed a career of writing about nothing for magazines to appearing on the cover of magazines for doing nothing. Allison is not mentioned in her piece, but she is surely present within it; Zuckerberg mentions "Flagpole Sitta," a lip dub performed by the employees of Connected Ventures, the ex-startup of Allison's ex-boyfriend Jakob Lodwick.

Allison dispatched, Zuckerberg moves to targets closer to home, taking on the Camp Cyprus 20, the Internet 20somethings who filmed themselves singing along to "Don't Stop Believin'" at a seaside vacation home in Cyprus right as Wall Street imploded. What she does not mention: That the first person we see in the video is her Facebook coworker Dave Morin; Facebook engineers and designers appear later. Zuckerberg slams them all equally: "You hate them for having so much fun — damn that unbridled, financially secure joy!"

Next target: Revision3, the San Francisco online-video startup best known for recording Diggnation, a podcast by Digg founder Kevin Rose. "They probably won't be recording any more lip dubs any time soon, we hear they laid off a third of their staff this week," Zuckerberg writes. Ouch! She could have added that after reading her article, Revision3 also won't be lending out its production facilities for any more of Zuckerberg's music videos, as it did for "Dontcha," a spoof about the iPhone.

Ah, the smell of burnt bridges. Zuckerberg, in person, comes across as shy and self-effacing. The only hint of bile I ever detected was in a previous video, "Valleyfreude," where she mocks Friendster, an also-ran social network crushed by Facebook, and scoffs at Yahoo for offering Facebook a mere $1 billion in an acquisition offer her brother turned down.

But Randi Zuckerberg has always had her eyes on a bigger stage than the Valley. Even her job at Facebook, running the site's election-related features, has been helpful in this regard, landing her on ABC and other news broadcasts to talk about online get-out-the-vote efforts. Now she's moonlighting for Tina Brown, in the hopes of getting her hooks into New York media circles.

The Daily Beast, an unwieldy, overstaffed website, is an unlikely candidate to emerge from next year's economic wreckage. But that won't matter to Zuckerberg: She's already perfected the art of stepping over those she can safely discard. Watch out, Facebookers: Do you think she'll forget how you made her take "Valleyfreude" offline?

It's obvious what's in it for the magazines which write about them. Rose makes a compelling story, even if Inc. had to resort to ridiculous hyperbole:

Rose has managed to put himself at the center of an ever-expanding new-media empire. In addition to Revision3 and Digg, he recently launched an Internet messaging service called Pownce. Thanks to Rose's star power and a well-designed website, Pownce quickly attracted more than 150,000 people, who use it to share music, videos, and links with their friends. This means Rose owns an online newspaper, an online television network, and an online communications platform.

Ladies and gentlemen, geeks of the world, please welcome Kevin Rose. He is the first vertically integrated Internet celebrity — part Steve Jobs, part Howard Stern — and the next media mogul.

Wait a second: Revision3, Rose's "online television network," is mostly a vehicle for distributing videos where Rose chugs beer with Albrecht and discusses Digg headlines. It just laid off several employees and canceled five shows. Pownce is barely known outside of San Francisco — and its insidery core of users know that it's secretly a great way to swap copyrighted music and video files without getting threatening letters from the RIAA. And Digg?

Well, Digg just raised $28.7 million in venture capital, after several rounds of acquisition talks with Current, News Corp., and Google went nowhere. Digg needs to get big — which means Rose needs to change his image.

He's always been the beer-drinking slacker who started Digg on a whim, and never wanted to run a big company. That story no longer works. Instead of believing in the wisdom of crowds, Rose needs to run from it. His tech-geek fan base isn't large enough to take Digg into the territory where an IPO is plausible.

Burnt by a goofy BusinessWeek cover that made him look like a joke, Rose has stayed away from print. But now he needs the mainstream media as much as they need him. Coverage in second-tier publications like 7x7 and Inc. lead to more, higher-profile stories.

Will editors in New York's high-rise offices ask pesky questions about Pownce and Revision3? No, they'll just read his clips, and think Rose really is the next Howard Stern. In that future path lies true stardom, not just Internet fame, and real riches, not just paper ones. But it means abandoning the ideals which led him to start Digg in the first place.

Yes, online advertising is headed for a slowdown — but signs of problems were present in the market well before Wall Street went into crisis. An explosion of usage had created a supply of space for ads that far outpaced marketers' demand. A recession will further temper demand. Berger, and countless like him at ad-supported enterprises, would have ended up on the street regardless. (Which is a pity, since I've met Berger, and he strikes me as personable, clever, and eminently employable elsewhere.)

Revision3, best known as the home of Digg founder Kevin Rose's beer-chugging Diggnation podcast, has always been the kind of lovably goofy startup one hopes does well despite itself. Anyone who suffered through "Internet Superstar" knew the show was going down. It failed on the merits, not because of distant economic forces beyond anyone's control.

To paraphrase Tolstoy: Successful startups are all alike. But every unsuccessful startup is unsuccessful in its own way.

And so with all the startups whose managers have jumped on the firebus. If they had run their businesses efficiently, they wouldn't have needed to fire anyone. They are laying people off now not because of an economic imperative, but because they have a convenient excuse to cover their mistakes.

Revision3 should always have concentrated on its main shows, and found cheap ways to experiment with new shows, as it's doing now. Helium.com should have figured out that there's not much money in user-generated content before laying off a third of its 110 employees. And Seesmic? Well, Seesmic should never have launched at all, good economy or bad.

I'm declaring the layoff window shut. Big companies lay people off because of economic conditions; startups lay people off because their managers have fundamentally misjudged some aspect of their business. Any startup CEO who lays people off, from here on out, should be held accountable for his own mistakes. Blaming the economy for your cuts? So mid-October 2008.

New York-based NNN and Los Angeles-based Smashface had publicly announced the split just last Friday. In light of the breakup, the Smashface team travelling to New York to make the announcement is an curious move. A new episode of Epic Fu is planned for release tomorrow.

What brought down Revision3's network wasn't the security hole, however. It was MediaDefender's response after Revision3 technicians noticed the breach and shut it down. MediaDefender's servers, in what that company told Louderback was an automated response, started trying to contact Revision3's servers through the now-closed hole. That turned into a flood of traffic that overwhelmed Revision3's network.

MediaDefender has worked for Sony Music, the Recording Industry Association of America, and the Motion Picture Association of America to shut down illegal file-sharing networks. But Revision3's use of file sharing for its own content was entirely legal; to the extent its servers pointed to any illegal files, it was only because of MediaDefender's hacking, Louderback tells me.

Revision3 has asked the FBI to investigate MediaDefender's alleged abuses. For years, the music and movie industries have been telling us that sharing files is criminal, and that blocking file-sharing networks is proper. For millions of file-sharing users, it would be quite satisfying to see the opposite proved in court.

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
• 
  

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.

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."

(Photo by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten)

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?

Probably by not watching shows like the newly launched "Digg Reel." Instead of letting you just watch the top-rated videos on Digg, "The Digg Reel" shows them to you — but not before it wastes 96 seconds of your life with a bumper and chatter from overly loquacious host Jessica Corbin.

While it looks like comely lifecaster Justine Ezarik, better known as iJustine, who's head over heels for her VC, she's merely lipsynching. The real siren of the piece is Randi Jayne (née Zuckerberg, and yes, she's the Facebook guy's sister) who sings the sultry lyrics. Jayne's fiancé is a VC with Shasta Ventures who served, she says, as her inspiration. Even if this clip, produced by Kevin Rose's Revision3, doesn't approach the level of popularity reached by "Valleyfreude" or the iPhone parody, it's sure to inspire at least one new Valley pickup line: "You can sit on my board anytime."

Diggnation, a beer-soaked roundup of the top headlines on Digg, relies on Rose's on-screen talent, and is still Revision3's biggest show. A News Corp. stake could bring distribution on MySpace and Hulu — and, most importantly, keep Rose's interests aligned with both Digg and Revision3 after a News Corp. buyout. Word is News Corp.'s newly launched Fox Business Network, the CNBC rival, also wants to use Rose for coverage of CES, the large gadget trade show in January.

It's a curious rumor, especially for its specificity and detail. The only problem with it? No one close to Revision3 seems to have heard anything about the plan. So this deal could be nothing more than a cocktail-napkin sketch circulating within News Corp., not yet refined for the negotiating table. Or, perhaps even a trial balloon, strategically leaked.

• Web analysts unite! Web Analytics Wednesday brings together all web analysts to analyze web things. Most important: The first round is free! 6-8 p.m. at Zebulon on Natoma St. [Web Analytics Demystified]
• Yahoo's Brickhouse division hosts another Wii Wednesdays 500 3rd St. Boxing starts at 6 p.m. [Upcoming]
• Spontaneous Drinking Night in San Francisco. 6 p.m. at the House of Shields. [Facebook]
• Illuminating Paths holds a fundraiser for low-income students in San Francisco with a benefit at Slide on Mason Street. $10 at the door gives you that do-gooder glow, and a shot at winning an auction to go rock climbing with Revision3's vlog-hot David Prager. Starts at 6 p.m. [Illuminating Paths]
• Going to the SNAP Summit on Friday? Not bought your ticket yet? Today is the last day to get a 15 percent discount on your entry fee. [Eventbrite]
• Psst Go Sox!

Got a to-do that's a must-do? Send it to calendar@valleywag.com. Check out more events on our Google Calendar:

Pogue attempts to pack the supposed evenhandedness of a gadget review into his song-and-dance routine, with tiresome results. And in the end, all you remember is the disgraceful spectacle of a Timesman bawling at the top of his lungs, "I want an iPhone!" Gee, David, we thought a call to Apple PR chief Katie Cotton would have scratched that itch a long time ago.

"Dontcha," by contrast, captures the most essential point about the iPhone: It turns its owners into monsters, imbuing them with a false sense of their own importance and sex appeal. The spectacle of geeks attempting to rap and perform dance hip-hop moves perfectly captures the inflated sense of self the iPhone lends. The video, directed by recent L.A. transplant Nora McDevitt, has a cast of microstars: Randi Jayne, the force behind "Valleyfreude" and sister of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg; David Prager, COO of online-video startup Revision3; and Irina Slutsky of Geek Entertainment TV. (Jayne, Prager, and Slutsky also produced the video.) Jayne, in particular, shines, getting the Britney Spears wind-machine treatment as she disses the Sidekick, the Razr, and other cell phones that just aren't as hot. It almost — almost — made me want to buy one, something the endless Apple hype parade has yet to achieve.

While I'm excited to see my photo in Valleywag — I'm a huge fan — alas, I didn't get fired. After 14 years there (give or take), I would have walked away with a sweet severance package. They did everything they could to get me to stay. Nope, it's actually a much more boring story about moving from one fun job ( that was mostly in New York) to another that's closer to home - and that's a more exciting challenge. Sort of like what you (Owen) did, actually. But I do appreciate the plug for my rental house in Vermont! Every link helps... It's still available for a few weeks this fall if you're interested. Jim PS, on the numbers for PCMag advertising - which I had very little to do with as the head of edit - you might want to see how the other magazines (PC World, Computer Shopper, Maximum PC) have done in that same time frame. PCMag was still the leader in market share when I left yesterday, as it has been the entire time I've been at Ziff Davis (since 1991). If PC Mag dropped, the others dropped even more.

Digg, of course, was infamously profiled in BusinessWeek last August, which assigned the company a value of $200 million. Most of Silicon Valley found that number spurious, but the credulous executives who run big media companies actually believe what they read in magazines. With Rose launching Pownce, a new Twitter-like file- and bookmarks-sharing service, and Adelson increasingly focused on Revision3, now would be a good time to offload Digg, whose noisy community of users is just getting more and more fractious.

Then there's Marc Andreessen and Gina Bianchini, the chairman and CEO, respectively, of Ning. Ning, long an ill-defined Web 2.0 startup, has found its purpose in life — making Facebook apps and other social-networking tools easier to build. Along with the purpose came $44 million in funding, in a round orchestrated by Allen & Co. And hence the invite. It's a bit early for Andreessen to sell, so we'll bet he'll content himself with hawking his build-your-own-MySpace tools to everyone besides Rupert Murdoch.

Why build when you can buy, though? Facebook, the former college-kid social network which has been growing spectacularly since it opened its doors to everyone last fall, has all the buzz right now, prompting Murdoch himself to diss MySpace. Facebook, of course, has been showing every sign of wanting to go public. The IPO option gives CEO Mark Zuckerberg, rumored to be attending Sun Valley this year, more leverage in any negotiation.

Rounding out the tech corps: Bill Gates of Microsoft; Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, CFO Sue Decker, and even the gone-but-not-gone Terry Semel; and Mike Volpi, the former Cisco executive who's now running online-video startup Joost. Oh, and the usual old-media suspects.

There's one puzzling omission on the guest list, if reports are true: Quincy Smith, president of CBS Interactive. Smith is himself a former Allen & Co. dealmaker, which makes his absence curious indeed. Anyone know why people are saying Quincy won't show?

(Photo by briancaldwell)

Although Pownce has everything web 2.0 going for it ( a cadre of young, attractive entrepreneurs with street cred — Leah Culver, Kevin Rose, Daniel Burka, and Shawn Allen, a slick design, social features, a misspelled but cute name), it's also not very useful and is entering a crowded market of full-featured and niche applications. Can Rose continue to stretch himself thin and spit out new project after another? Or will he discover that success is sometimes contingent on focus and a novel or good idea? A little failure could be good for the ego of young Kevin Rose.

Last night, Digg founder Kevin Rose and pals celebrated the relaunch of his Revision 3 online TV network with a party at Mighty, a San Fran venue currently sporting sculptures of flying underwear (really. Don't know why). Scott Beale provides the photos below.

Photog Thomas Hawk shows off his full head of hair to Digg coder Owen Byrne. Owen is only smiling to lure Thomas closer; in the next unphotographed moment he whips out a switchblade and forcibly scalps Thomas.

Can you spot the ass pat?

Say hi to Valleywag's new party correspondent, Megan McCarthy! (Really! If you see her at a party, be nice, cause she's got the gossip power!)

"Stupid (mumble) geeks, (mumble) "The System is Down" (mumble) fifty-five times (mumble) burn this place down."

"Does anyone want Kevin Rose to sign their breasts? Anyone? Please don't make us pick Om Malik, we did him last time."

"Color me unimpressed; this is so not as fun as the last 'Project Runway.'"

If you ask video star Dr. Tiki to "write you a prescription" one more time, he will kick you in half.

Heeeeere's Johnny!

Vloggers Kent Nichols and Irina Slutsky left early to form a death metal punk band.

Revision3 Launch Party [Laughing Squid]

• There is only one event tonight that we should even mention. That's the kick-ass Revision3 party, held by the dudes who did Digg to celebrate their new video site's launch. First person to get their chest signed by me, Digg's Kevin Rose, columnist John C. Dvorak, and the three visiting hosts of Tiki Bar TV gets their photo on Valleywag. The party's free, natch. [Upcoming, Photo by Thomas Hawk]
• How can you tell a conference is really only good for its lobbycon (the practice of ditching the actual talks and schmoozing with other "attendees")? When the organizers go out of their way to pimp the attendees' demographics. So it goes for the Momentum Growth Conference on Wednesday. [Momentum Growth Conferance]
• Up in San Fran, tomorrow is the second day of the Intel Developer Forum. Watch CEO Paul Otellini try to be relevant again. [Eventful]

• CrunchBiz, the newest title from the TechCrunch blog network, went prematurely live today with some blank test posts after the bloggers at Supr.c.ilio.us outed it. Now the site (which is the B2B-centric blog I thought would launch last week) displays a South Park splash image, which is sadly the coolest thing we'll ever see on it. Love the favicon though. [Supr.c.ilio.us and CrunchBiz]
• Tony Brummel finally repents of his petulant e-mail to Apple honcho Steve Jobs. [Idolator]
• Mom, I got in Slate (and the Journal)! Writer Daniel Gross explains why Yahoo's short-notice forced Christmas vacation (which we revealed here) is an "idiotic" cost-cutting measure in light of the money this company throws around daily. [Slate]
• Intel's CEO says YouTube, not satisfied with shelling out about two million dollars a month in bandwidth costs, will eventually go to high-definition. Speaking at the Intel Whatever-the-hell Forum today, Paul Otellini goes on to say that YouTube is inspiring technology to move videos from the computer to TV. When was the last time you and your family curled up in the living room for a good hour of Lonelygirl15? [Bit-Tech]

The company, which relaunches this week with a site overhaul, new shows, and a party in San Fran, feels like Spike TV for the Internet. The shows are produced and published in-house, including flagship Diggnation, an hourish-long bull session where co-founder Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht (Kevin's fellow former TechTV host) drink beer, do shots, and swear a lot about technology.

Like Kevin tells the Times, plenty of geeks do that without a camera, but Kevin and Alex give off such a friendly vibe (it's the booze talking) that lonely techies in Denver feel like part of a big club. It's like Oprah without all the books.

Young Internet Producers, Bankrolled, Are Seeking Act II [NY Times]