When you talk about "the Valley" in tech, it's taken for granted that you mean Silicon Valley. But in the world of porn, "the Valley" is the San Fernando Valley, where the adult-film industry has established itself. Now, as porn goes online, there's a long, drawn-out war for dominance fought by the two valleys. And a tremendous battle has just been lost — by AdBrite, the online-advertising network based in San Francisco. AdBrite, Valleywag has learned, has lost the partner that gave it an entrée into the business of selling porn ads.

Why are green-eyeshades types calling AdBrite's customers and asking probing questions about the online-advertising network? The company founded by Philip Kaplan of FuckedCompany fame — pictured here with some friends — might be giving accountants an eyeful for a host of reasons. Let's rule out an IPO: The Sequoia Capital-backed startup, with a rumored $40 million in gross revenues, is still too small to go public. That leaves an acquisition as the most likely scenario. Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft have all bought ad marketplaces recently. But for Barry Diller's IAC, which also owns second-tier search engine Ask.com, AdBrite would be a modest purchase. One other possibility: AdBrite could be making a buy of its own to get more heft. Anyone heard more?

It's a sneaky strategy used by savvy Internet marketers everywhere: Buy your competitor's name as a keyword, and serve up pay-per-click ads to poach customers from the search results. But for DoubleClick, the online-ad network that Google's trying to buy, it seems a bit foolish to use Google keyword ads to go after AdBrite, the San Francisco-based competitor. For one thing, it's apparently a violation of Google's own rules about trademarks. And on top of that, it comes across as an admission of weakness — that customers are more likely to be googling "AdBrite" than they are "DoubleClick."

I've confirmed yesterday's rumor: Paul Levine is, in fact, leaving Yahoo to join AdBrite. Expect the former general manager of Yahoo Local to boost the online-ad network's efforts in geotargeted advertising, the hot market for placing ads based on a user's physical location. (Photo by James Duncan Davidson/O'Reilly Media)

Paul Levine, we hear, is leaving as general manager of Yahoo Local. His destination? Possibly joining AdBrite, the San Francisco-based online ad network founded by Philip "Pud" Kaplan, who's still better known for starting FuckedCompany. Levine's well-known in the industry as an expert on geotargeting, or locally targeted advertising. If Levine is, in fact, going to AdBrite, does that mean the startup plans to make a move on the market for targeting consumers by locale? Or is Levine just looking for directions out of Yahoo? (Photo by James Duncan Davidson/O'Reilly Media)

After killing most of the websites you care about on Tuesday, 365 Main, the troubled datacenter in downtown San Francisco, is back to business. The business of making excuses, that is. Cynthia Harris, the same flack who issued an immaculately timed press release Tuesday morning crowing about how RedEnvelope moved all of its Web operations to 365 Main, only to have them taken down by the outage, is going around telling everyone who will listen that nothing untoward happened. To which any user of Craigslist, Technorati, Six Apart's LiveJournal and TypePad, and AdBrite might respond, rrrrright. Data Center Knowledge has a detailed report. Here's what else I've learned — and why 365 Main's performance remains highly suspicious.

We've now learned more about the outage at 365 Main's San Francisco datacenter that knocked some of the Web's most popular sites offline. The latest theory: An employee, reportedly drunk, hit the emergency-power-off switch in 365 Main's Colo 4 room. (Update: I no longer know whether to trust the source who sent in the tip about a drunk employee.) Other sites located in other rooms were unaffected. This isn't the first time 365 Main has suffered an EPO-induced outage; a major one still remembered by customers occurred back in April 2005, and another took place last year. After the jump, a gallery of the carnage caused, and a roundup of reactions.

An AdBrite employee who "quit after a few weeks due to so many issues, I can not even write them all" points us to this classic video of Philip Kaplan (yes, yes, the one from AdBrite and Fucked Company) breakdancing. Pretty fly for a white guy.

Oh, those halcyon years of the Internet! When men were real men, women were real women, and for $5.95 an hour they'd prove it to you! It wasn't so long ago, kids, that Philip "Pud" Kaplan of Fucked Company (yeah, the failed AdBrite CEO) was makin' home webcam videos — sexy threesome videos.

For those of you who just tuned in, Philip "Pud" Kaplan of anti-evil-dot-com-blog Fucked Company fame gave up his job as AdBrite CEO. But did he ever commit the evils for which he trashed so many dot-coms in the 90s? From the last line of CNET's article:

AdBrite, the startup that just replaced CEO and Fucked Company founder Philip Kaplan, is being attacked for profiting from porn ads. Indeed, all pages on adult-oriented ad sales site AVNAds have an AdBrite copyright notice at the bottom. But an anti-AdBrite site, the anonymously registered Really Fucked Company.com, stretches that connection to the limit:

Are we in a bubble? Yes! No! Maybe!

• In a fit of business brilliance, Microsoft launched a paid PC care service, thus profiting from the shittiness of its own products. [Australian IT]

Best comment of the week award (winner gets half the Webvan profits) goes to sarahka: