LiveJournal, only months after Six Apart sold the blogging site to Russian Web firm Sup, has resumed its tradition of corporate drama. Jason Shellen, the company's VP of product management, just announced he'd left the company. I asked him if this had anything to do with the ruckus over LiveJournal's elimination of unpaid, advertising-free accounts. "No," said Shellen, who worked at Blogger and then Google after the search giant bought the blog startup. "In social media, you have to have a thick skin." What did Shellen in was the 10-hour time difference between Moscow, where Sup is headquartered, and LiveJournal's San Francisco office.

AUSTIN, TX — I almost didn't sleep last night. At 4 a.m., after posting party reports for you ungrateful bastards my gorgeous, intelligent readers, I considered just powering through until my breakfast meeting with the boss, who was flying back to New York in the morning. Instead, I caught a disco nap. Even so, I arrived at the PureVolume ranch looking more rested than the weary souls shuffling in for free breakfast tacos. If you haven't had an Austin-style breakfast taco — soft tortilla with eggs and bacon or chorizo — then you should reflect on the direction your life is taking and what you can do to amend your ways.

9:00 P.M. Under Route 101.
It is nightfall. The almost-silhouetted gangs come in from separate sides: climbing over the fences or crawling through holes in the walls. There is silence as they fan out on opposite sides of the cleared space. Then one of the Yahoos' Sidekicks rings, and they really have to take this call, so everyone waits and a few Googlers check in on Dodgeball.

Google Blogoscoped went and did it — the search blog revealed info from the Orkut profiles of major Googlers to the unwashed, uninvited masses.