I saw a theme this morning as I perused the various other tech sites: Hulu invites! Hulu, the video-streaming partnership between News Corp. and NBC, is throwing open its doors to many early adopters by offering up thousands of invites on several tech sites. If you haven't gotten a chance to play around with Hulu and want to see just what the hell Paul Boutin is complaining about, here's your chance. GigaOm, Read/WriteWeb, TechCrunch, and Mashable are giving away 2,500 invites each. All, we note, are clients of Federated Media, John Battelle's online-ad network. Coincidence, conspiracy, or just part of a future Hulu advertising campaign?

New York gossip column Page Six has more details on this weekend's wedding of Google founder Larry Page and future Stanford Ph.D. Lucy Southworth. Even bilionaires have planning snafus. Logistics have turned nightmarish, to be expected when you cram 600 guests accustomed to penthouse suites and private jets onto a tiny island. The Southworth-Page nuptials, scheduled for Richard Branson's private Caribbean getaway, Necker Island, have taken over neighboring Virgin Gorda, a short boat trip away from the wedding site. Other details we've heard from a plugged-in tipster:

MerchantCircle has secured an additional $10 million in series B funding from past investors Rustic Canyon Partners, Scale Venture Partners, and Steamboat Ventures (Disney's VC arm), as well as new investors including Barry Diller's IAC and Square 1 Bank. The press release claims, "the investment validates the company's 'merchant-first' business model." I'd say, rather, it confirms that investors who should know better will sink cash into a disreputable business.

"Quite rationally, our board felt we were giving away a really valuable asset, and no amount of provocative quotes from John Battelle or The Cluetrain Manifesto could assuage them," Stephen DiMarco, chief marketing officer of Web analytics company Compete, on how the board reacted to providing free access to their data. [How to Change the World]

Can you believe that last week's Web 2.0 Summit was the fourth such conference? Its humble beginnings were barely in evidence, as venture capitalists, corporate biz-dev types, and M&A scouts seemed to outnumber the startup founders they were trying to hunt down. Friday afternoon was a return to the old school, however, with Flickr cofounder Stewart Butterfield and LiveJournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick among the presenters. Sadly, John Doerr, the expert inflater of the first dotcom bubble, did not cry. Check the photo gallery for the conference's final, terrifying orgy of schmoozing. Some participants were so exhausted that, by the closing cocktail party, they were making deals with their eyes closed.

WEB 2.0 SUMMIT — At this conference's closing cocktail party, organizer John Battelle noted that Valleywag had stopped using our favorite photo of the George Hamilton-lookalike online-advertising magnate. So sorry, John! Consider this your fond farewell to all the moneybags who paid $3,595 to mix with a handful of geeks and hacks. "Now I'm going to get blotto," said Battelle. In case you want to join him, check out this weekend's Valleywag Calendar.

WEB 2.0 SUMMIT — At a panel discussion about making money in online video, Federated Media VP of sales Chas Edwards said he'd pulled checks "from a million dollars down to $10,000" for video ads on Federated's network, which includes the popular shows Diggnation and Ask a Ninja. The burning question: Who paid a million bucks to Federated, run by Web 2.0 conference co-chief John Battelle, and for what? We were unable to tackle any of Federated's execs at the jam-packed conference Wednesday. Somebody get Edwards or jbat to spill the details, and send it to us. Otherwise we'll wonder if Edwards wasn't actually referring to Microsoft's non-video advertorial deal for which Federated bloggers wrote ad copy. Why? Because Edwards also said the biggest dollars come from selling "host endorsements" rather than separate advertiser-produced spots.

WEB 2.0 SUMMIT — Is preternaturally tan conference organizer John Battelle, who runs online-ad network Federated Media, here to interview top industry executives — or cut some deals of his own? "There's this idea that you can sprinkle some pixie dust on all this inventory and make more money," he observes, speaking of the mass of Web ads sold at bargain-basement rates. AOL's Curt Viebranz says that ads sold on Tacoda — the startup he just sold to AOL for a reported $275 million — sell at a $4 cost per thousand viewers. When he hears that figure, Battelle raises his eyebrows and asked Viebranz to talk to him after the panel.

Study your trivia and get your answer buzzer ready, as there's a contest this evening at the Web 2.0 Summit. Nerdboys and geek girls, your life's in jeopardy, Web 2.0-style.

"If I wanted a $14 billion advertising business, I could get halfway there by buying Yahoo right now. But that's just me. " Federated Media head John Battelle to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at the Web 2.0 Summit.

THE PALACE HOTEL — Web 2.0 Summit program chair John Battelle was racing about the site of the Web 2.0 Summit this morning, we hear. The cause of the last-minute scramble? "We still haven't heard from Marissa Mayer," an informant heard him say to a colleague. Could Google's eccentric queen of search be skipping out on the exclusive conference, where she's scheduled to speak? Battelle's tone suggested Mayer might not be the only star on the program missing in action. We'll report on who actually shows up — and any last-minute substitutions.

God, I love scooping John Battelle on his own business. If you've been wondering when the hell you'll have time to sit still long enough to watch Xeni Jardin talk about vaginal ads and butt-biting bugs — they're big in Japan! — here's your answer. Virgin America, crazy billionaire Richard Branson's irreverent new airline (Branson toyed with the idea of renaming coach class to "Riff Raff"), will carry the equally iconoclastic tech blog's new video venture, Boing Boing TV, as part of its inflight seat back programming. We should've seen this coming when Virgin asked Boing Boingers to name one of their planes. Until Virgin's promised inflight Wi-Fi networks are deployed, this'll be the next best thing to surfing YouTube from 30,000 feet over Illinois.

Silver-tongued entrepreneur Auren Hoffman was able to extinguish a growing wave of criticism directed at his people-search company Rapleaf with a single blog post. He promised to mend his ways and bring fixes to Rapleaf's privacy practices. We didn't have much faith in Rapleaf's reform — Hoffman's post was mostly rhetoric, little change. A week later, Hoffman has gone out of his way to prove our doubts by partnering with MerchantCircle. MerchantCircle, of course, is the local merchant directory we've criticized before. Of course, Rapleaf and MerchantCircle are in some ways a perfect match.

I stopped by the House of Shields for the "unofficial afterparty" of this week's Federated Media Conversational Marketing Summit and was greeted by a crowd of FM employees and Web 2.0 regulars. You could tell the crowd apart pretty easily — the FM employees wore suitjackets and had the ad-salesman glow to them, the regulars all answered "no" when asked if they attended the conference. A few FM employees indulged my request to pose for a picture doing the John Battelle salute, including Director of Author Services Bill Brazell, pictured above. (Fun fact: he and I graduated from the same high school!) So what is "Conversational Marketing" anyway? New advertising paradigm? Or just a way to keep FM boss Batelle in Mystic Tan? At one point, social media gadfly Chris Heuer and I talked about whether the term itself has a definition beyond "bullshit." He seems to think it does, I'm still undecided. The whole idea has the taint of undisclosed advertorial to me, especially after last June's "people-ready" mini-scandal and its aftermath. After the jump, check out the gallery for more tech marketing people than you can handle.

Could it be true? Eric Savitz of Barron's blogs about the apparent comeback of his former employer, The Industry Standard. The weekly tech trade magazine inflated, and imploded, more or less in sync with the dotcom bubble; shuttered by owner IDG, it's seen a series of mostly pathetic attempts to resuscitate its website, all of which floundered. But the website now promises that the Standard is "coming back." Odd timing, given Time Inc.'s shuttering of Business 2.0, and the discontinuation of the Red Herring's print edition. Founder John Battelle tersely wishes the new Standard luck. I'm betting that the publication bypasses print and goes straight to the Web — just like Battelle's current venture.

Okay, this is ridiculous. On what planet is the bikini-wearing readership of TechCrunch sufficient enough to warrant Federated Media serving up the above ad on its site? None, of course. Federated Media founder John Battelle emails us to point out that the bikini ad from DivaVillage.com and other gender benders displayed to the site's mostly male readers aren't a result of targeting gone awry, but simply the result of Federated Media serving up low-paying, untargeted "remnant" ads when it's not able to sell ads at full price. Battelle also notes that it's TechCrunch's decision, not Federated's, to accept those ads. So there you have it, TechCrunch readers: Michael Arrington, according to John Battelle, thinks you want to buy bikinis.

Private Equity Hub reports that Federated Media, the online ad network, has raised $4.5 million in a second round of funding, not long after raising $2 million in venture capital, on top of some seed funding. This, of course, after rumors that FM was "overdue" in raising more funds. We're not sure what founder John Battelle plans to do with all that cash, but perhaps, just perhaps, he might want to bankroll some hair-replacement therapy for FM videoblogger Morgan Webb.

TechThatOut believes it's caught Morgan Webb, host of derivative, me-too, copycat tech videoblog WebbAlert, exposing her ... scalp? The screenshot is a bit blurry, raising questions about whether Webb is actually missing some follicles or just had her hair pulled back too tightly. But it does make one wonder why TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington went gaga and declared her "fairly hot." A quick survey of Valleywag's temporary officemates got a different ruling: "fairly scary." But there's something equally scary, and even balder, about WebbAlert.

It's not you. It's me. We can still be friends, right? That's how I translate Digg founder Kevin Rose's blog post announcement that Digg is dropping Battelle's Federated Media as its online-ad rep and signing up with Microsoft. Says Rose:

If you can't be Larry Page and Sergey Brin, why not try being Martha Stewart? That's Jason Calacanis's new plan. (We think he'd look absolutely fetching in an apron, too.) Less than two months after he launched his search engine, Calacanis has shifted strategies, emphasizing how-to content on the so-called "human powered search engine."