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New York-based journalist and Star editor-at-large Julia Allison was a surprise guest at Friday's TechCruch9 event. Valley folks will likely have never heard her name, but she's famous in some East Coast circles. So why did Allison fly out to California specifically for Michael Arrington's soiree?

Allison stood out at the schmoozefest for a host of reasons. First of all, a Diane von Furstenberg dress among the blue shirts and khakis? And while Allison has her own blog and website, her career pursuits are not tech-oriented in the slightest — in addition to her gig at Star, she writes a dating column for Time Out New York. She wouldn't know the CEO of a semantic search engine if he patted her on the ass, which, judging from the the picture above, almost happened. (That's Barney Pell of Powerset playing pattycake, by the way.)

In this this video interview of Julia and her friend Meghan Asha, they claim they only attended the event to meet tech boyfriends. Oh, and they want to meet tech guys who can help them program a website, and I'm pretty sure that "help them" means "do it for them."

I'm sure there's more to it than that. Of course Allison's gathering string for a column about hunting for a geek boyfriend. And if she is any indication, people outside of our little sphere are starting to pay attention, again, to the exuberance bubbling underneath Silicon Valley. The women who are about to invade the Valley are not the same gold-diggers as before, only out for that stock-option action. This time, they want the stock-option action and free sysadmin time.

For this, too, we have Arrington to blame.