Geek-loving cover girl Julia Allison turns 27 soon and all she wants — other than a MacBook Air and whole long list of stuff — is a boy, "tied with a red bow, like a new car for graduation." Knowing Julia's taste for geeks like Kevin Rose and some guy who used to run some video site, we figured: Who better to help Julia land a new man than Valleywag readers? So help her out and vote in our latest poll.

"It would be easy to put together a scorecard and a list of Web 2.0 luminaries who haven't graced their pages," suggests sexy Internet daddy-type Dave Winer. "We might find out who's sleeping with the editors of Valleywag." Great idea, Dave! You make a chart, we'll run it at full 720-pixel width. Promise. But only if you specify which editor. One of Winer's commenters claims Blognation owner Tristan Louis got a free pass from the 'Wag. But did Louis pay through the nose for Mary Jane Irwin's sweet, sweet GFE embrace, or is Owen Thomas giving him the reacharound for free? Readers care about those little details.

Protoblogger Dave Winer suggests Valleywag doesn't write about people its editors sleep with. His readers quickly correct him: "Or could it be that you've slept with the editors, but you're really bad at sex?" Precisely. Who wants to hear about bad sex? [Scripting News]

Mitt Romney, my choice for president, "suspended" his campaign today. More disappointing? Dave Winer, who will never, ever let you forget his pioneering role in blogging, will continue to blather on about the election in his Twitter feed for months and months. Dude, we get it. You like Obama.

Five years ago, daddy-blogger Dave Winer bet NYT president Martin Nisenholtz that by 2007, blogs would be more relevant sources than the Times in Google search results for the year's top news stories. (Obligatory brag: The bet was my idea.) The Long Now Foundation has handed down its final decision on the bet. The Times came out ahead on the mortgage crisis. Blogs won on the other four topics — the Iraq war, Virgina Tech's shootings, oil prices, and Chinese exports. But you need to know that the Long Now panel blamed the bet's terms for its lopsided outcome:

There are lies, damn lies, and personal ads. Dave Winer, a newcomer to The Well, an online community, posted one in 1994 that said he had an "athletic build." I don't have a photo of Winer circa 1994 (anyone?), but this one from 2001 doesn't show much supporting evidence. Winer's ad, courtesy of Upcoming.org founder Andy Baio:

Death threats get dished out online routinely, and few take them seriously — the Kathy Sierra row of last spring being the notable exception. But Dave Winer, the blog pioneer, may have chosen the wrong target over the weekend. In a Twitter sent while watching Hillary Clinton on TV, he wrote "Kill Hill Kill Hill." Webheads accustomed to Winer's dyspeptic logorrhea may dismiss such talk as the ranting of an addled mind. But the Secret Service, which protects Clinton as both the spouse of a former president and a presidential candidate herself, may view it with more jaundiced eyes. If agents pay Winer a visit, will he Twitter about that, too?

Blogger Rogers Cadenhead doesn't get to declare the official winner of the bet between the Dave Winer and the New York Times. Google — the company, not the search engine — will call a winner, and the Long Now Foundation, which holds the cash in the pot, will decide the issue. I know because I set this all up in 2001, by talking to Google PR chief David Krane before approaching Winer and the Times to arrange a wager on whether blogs or the paper of record would cover the big stories of this year better. The bet ran in Wired's Long Bets issue.

Five years ago, blogger Rogers Cadenhead recalls, blogging sorta-evangelist and RSS king Dave Winer made a long bet with Martin Nisenholtz, the senior VP for digital operations at the New York Times. The proposition was this: "In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times' Web site." The best part is, their arguments at the time both pro and con are pretty hilarious—because they've been rendered obsolete. Though technically one of them won, there was another real winner, Cadenhead points out.

Twitter isn't all Jason Calacanis yelling death to Luddites or Jeremiah Owyang pontificating on his own marketing prowess. Sometimes it's about love. Loooooooooooove. Coooooooool. Like this sweet tweet from blogfather Dave Winer. Want to know what she said?

Ten years ago, on December 17, 1997, Jorn Barger coined the term "web log" for a webpage where an author "logs" the other webpages they find interesting. Since then, blogging has become serious business for some and a place for nonsensical blabber for others. Though Dave Winer frequently claims that he was the first to launch a weblog at Scripting News, it was really just an online archive of columns rejected by HotWired. Jorn Barger had the first true weblog worthy of the name at Robot Wisdom.

"The problem with most conferences is we don't have enough to do," laments seminar veteran Dave Winer, who admits to Web surfing, emailing and instant-messaging during presentations. In Las Vegas today, speaker Mike Arrington from TechCrunch forgot to show up. [Update: Arrington says he never agreed to do the event.] Why bother? Instead of onstage pony shows and awkward demo booths, conference sponsors should just set up an open bar. Invite potential clients to come schmooze with a few paid celebs and Marc Canter (zzz at left). Think David Hornik's The Lobby for the rest of us. But first, make sure the Wi-Fi's rock solid.

This week, a bunch of bloggers are gathered somewhere to blog about blogs, blogging and bloggers. We forget the location — Vegas? or is it Beijing? — but topics will include blogs and politics, blogs and business, blogs and the media, and how to make some dough at this blog thing. Unless Dave Winer shows up and pisses everyone off by telling the truth again, we'll skip it.

I'll be sad if Techcrunch editor Michael Arrington ever figures out what all those tedious journalism-school terms like off the record and deep background actually mean. Because I hate the way tech people act as if Arrington and other established writers work for them. They see journalists as outsourced copywriters, under specific orders what and what not to write. Yesterday Arrington blogged, "We got a senior person at MySpace to talk to us about it off record .. . this person confirmed that [MySpace cofounder Tom Anderson] is really '36 or 37' and that MySpace has been trying to keep this quiet." He was promptly chewed out by a member of the Valley's most know-it-all caste: a software engineer.

"When I got a prominent link from a TechCrunch piece on September 30, it generated 228 hits." — Scripting News blogger Dave Winer disputes the clout of the latest A-list, Techmeme Leaderboard. (TechCrunch is No. 1 on the list, Winer No. 35.) For context, Winer once counted over 100,000 hits to Scripting News from one of Valleywag writer Paul Boutin's articles for Slate.

"Just curious why do you lie in your public posts, yet try to sound so reasonable in emails? Answer is on the record of course." — Blogfather Dave Winer, in a not-very-private email to Valleywag writer Tim Faulkner. Tim's reply: "That's just how I roll, Dave. How do you manage to sound so unreasonable all the time, in every conceivable medium?"

Update below. Arguing with a child will just leave everyone frustrated, but some people never learn. If you thought blogfather Dave Winer's recent spat with blowhard Jason Calacanis was childish, you don't know the depths of the man's juvenility. In January, he argued with commenter Nick Irelan on his blog, Scripting News, about the origins of RSS, blogging, and podcasts. But unlike most Winer spats, the Internet manchild's typically disproportionate response could actually land him in legal trouble.

Gnomedex, the Chris Pirillo-organized geekathon that took place over the weekend, claims to "unlock the attendee's spirit." Instead, the highlight of the event was the opening of a giant can of whoopass. Relentless self-promoter Jason Calacanis and blather-prone blogfather Dave Winer locked horns, and it wasn't pretty. Calacanis's presentation, unsuprisingly, was an infomercial for his latest venture, the human-powered search engine Mahalo. A few attendees started to heckle Calacanis, and Winer jumped in with the proclamation, "You're spamming us!" The presentation continued but led to a one-on-one berating, a weekend blogfight, the dissolution of a "friendship", and Winer withdrawing from Calacanis's TechCrunch20 startup conference. Winer's offended by Calacanis's self-promotion, Calacanis by Winer's lack of manners; but what really cheeses me off is their rank amateurism when it comes to heckling.

Says blogfather Dave Winer: "The iPhone is a great example, but it'll be a short-lived product, I think, kind of like the Apple III or the Newton." Or, say, every business venture Winer has ever touched. [Scripting.com]

TIM FAULKNER — Dave Winer, web technology pioneer and prognosticator, is sharing his vision of Web 3.0, the buzzword that was cliché before it was even coined. Unfortunately but perhaps unsurprisingly, his prediction, or rather his aspiration, has little to do with the evolution of web applications or modes of expression; instead it amounts to a detente to the self-made feud between professional journalists and the blogosphere.