On Sunday, Digg founder Kevin Rose went online, turned on his webcam, and proceeded to shave his head. A Britney Spears-style breakdown for San Francisco's linkbait lothario? No, it was just some charity bet. But we still wonder if former flame Julia Allison's recent run through town had anything to do with Rose's mental state. The saddest thing of it all: 806 people tuned into Rose's lifecasting session to watch.
I, for one, can't count any number of occasions that I wished I could pull my trouser waist up in at least a nominal effort toward chaste discretion. Can you come up with a better caption? Do so in the comments. The best one will become this post's new headline. Friday's winner: "Curses! Low light again!" by godospoons. (Photo by pjammer)
TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington is viciously critical of Web startups that make their users pay for their wares. But he's perfectly happy to charge party sponsors for booths. The return on investment was hard to find at TechCrunch's annual party held at August Capital's Sand Hill Road offices on Friday. The booths, in the midst of free booze, pretty people, and business cards to swap, went completely unnoticed. The party, TechCrunch's third annual event held with the VC firm, was unremarkable. But the afterparty was legendary. We got in and took photos of the whole thing.
"Good news! Julia is moving to Silicon Valley for the winter!" — Valleywag intern Alaska Miller, reporting live from the TechCrunch party on notorious nontrepreneur Julia Allison's plans to move to the Bay Area from New York later this year. By "good news," I assume he means the fact that we have all fall to prepare.
Why did I let Jackson West take a vacation? While our associate editor was away, we actually wrote something nice about Gavin Newsom — and he only had to save San Francisco from a rogue IT guy to do it! Microsoft's Windows chief, Kevin Johnson, ended up in Sunnyvale, Calif. — but not, as he'd hoped, in the corner office at Yahoo HQ. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg flubbed more media interviews this week, prompting us to suggest he get help. Maybe he could take tips from the Internet-famous Julia Allison, who crashed his developers' conference?Allison's sort-of ex, Digg cofounder Kevin Rose, said he was buying Google. Surely not for Knol, Google's weak attempt at taking on Wikipedia — at launch, its search engine didn't even work. Jackson, come back and help us make sense of this crazy business! (Photo by Jason Calacanis)
The other night, Lockhart Steele, the ex-Gawker Media guy with the porn-star name, threw a lovely, cliquey little party in SoMa. Steele ditched the usual startup-founder blowhards for a pack of writers and editors — I had a national newspaper assignment before my first club soda. But things turned ugly when Wired covergirl Julia Allison traipsed in around 11 p.m. Instead of cheering her, partygoers whom I'd mistaken for grownups just minutes before took turns sniping about Allison behind her back: She's jumped the shark. She's not that pretty. Just look at her arm fat! Bonus hater points to the guy who mimicked Allison's trademark hand-on-hip pose — just out of her view.
Here's Rex Sorgatz's video of various people reading from the de-Harvardized copy of tortured soul Keith Gessen's All The Sad Young Literary Men. It was shot largely in the Gawker offices! And it involves such noted internet personalities as Andrew Krucoff, Choire Sicha, Julia Allison, Alex Pareene, Rachel Sklar — the d-list goes on and on. You'll either find it entertaining and funny (I did!) or feel like you need a decoder ring. A cheat sheet to the best moments is after the jump, if you want all the surprises spoiled, along with an update on the status of the modified All The Sad Young Literary Men, now an official literary hot potato.
Back in San Francisco: Wired covergirl "Julia Alison," attending Facebook's F8 developers conference. Say what you want about her, just get her name right — so she can Google herself later. As tight as Allison is with Randi Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg's older sis, having attended Randi's Vegas bachelorette party, that's still not enough to get her name badge spelled correctly.
"I realized that I was and am the center, the focus of attention by millions and millions of people. My family and everyone I knew were and are actors in a script, a charade whose entire purpose is to make me the focus of the world's attention." No, it's not a new blog post by Wired cover girl Julia Allison. It's a quote from a medical patient with the newly defined Truman Show Delusion. What drives someone to believe they're the star of a reality-TV show?
Julia Allison posted an email conversation with the editor of Wired, the magazine that, in case you missed it, put her on the cover this month and thus made her famous for being famous for nothing. Ever the crafty self-promoter, Allison asked if her cover was as good for Wired as it was for her: "I hope - that as time goes on, you'll be proud you took the leap," the Time Out New York dating columnist wrote. Remember aspiring fameballs: follow up is key. Wired editor Chris Anderson replied, "I feel great about this one." So sweet. In another moment protocelebrities should study, Allison makes a thinly-veiled pitch for some kind of Wired writing gig by pretending she's tired of all the self-promotion (for real this time!) and wants to get back to her "roots" (what??) as a writer:
If you're annoyed by internet fameball Julia Allison and Non Society, the "lifecasting" startup she just launched with partners Mary Rambin, Megan Asha and (effectively) Wired magazine, you could always wig out and publish your extensive thoughts on every last reason the site is a grotesque monument to talentless celebrity and that the people involved are annoying. Or you could make like Topher Chris, aka Christopher Price, and resign yourself to the fact that your life will never be as amazing and action-packed and CRAZY as those of Allison & Co., and will consist entirely of doing pedestrian things that no one in their right mind would want to watch, totally unlike Allison and her buddies (ahem). Then you could set up a site called, say, Non Exciting, based on this shockingly honest premise. And then you might even find, in the end, that you've actually created (intentionally or not) the most clever send-up of Allison's fame to date. After the jump, a side-by-side comparison of the Non Exciting and Non Society intro videos.
Snake, meet tail. The voyeuristic ouroboros that is Julia Allison's love affair with Valleywag got even more play in her coveted Wired cover story than her own startup did. Don't let us waste your time when you could be hustling us for fame; here's the 100-word version of her "secrets" to self-promotion.
Wired's August cover, featuring Internet nobody Julia Allison, wouldn't normally be going online for another week or so, when the ink-on-dead-trees version hits subscribers' mailboxes. (How pre-postindustrial!) We asked Wired executive editor Bob Cohn why the magazine rushed it online. He told us the posting got pushed up a few days owing to "all the attention online" for the as-yet-unseen cover story — whose subject is how to stir up attention online.
Wired magazine's special issue on micro-celebrity includes a cover profile of Julia Allison, the college dating columnist who's garnered such internet fame. (Well, actually, the cover of Wired is about as much attention as she's ever drawn, so the article is self-fulfiling.) Anyway, I didn't remember the reported anecdote of my "meeting" with the then-editor of Gawker to demand coverage of this protostar; a trawl through the archives was called for. Here-in email, blog posts and comments-are those fateful days in late 2006 that gave the web Julia Allison.
Wired posted its profile of Julia Allison, the Time Out New York dating columnist and onetime protocelebrity (now in the process of crossing over into the real thing). Yes, the cover story (preceded by the cover itself) retreads much that Gawker readers already know about Allison, and many of you will, no doubt, find the piece altogether too friendly, a celebratory, rather than judgmental, distillation of her techniques for self-promotion and attention whoring. But there is news. Confirmation, for one, of Allison's long-rumored reality TV show for Bravo, IT Girls. Wired said the deal was signed in June, though it's clearly been in the works for much longer. Then there's a terrifying new wrinkle to Allison's new "lifecasting" Web venture, Non Society:
Hey, Julia Allison's on the cover of once-important lifestyle rag Wired! Ms. Allison, who's moved beyond the "dating columnist/celeb talking head" thing to become a noted dater-of-rich-nerds, is the subject of yet another of those interminable stories about becoming Internet Famous in Three Easy Steps. We haven't read the piece, except that we already did in a different magazine like a month ago. More importantly: editors and contributors who perhaps have some doubt as to your value as a cover model may undermine the honor with unflattering photoshop work and coverlines. ("Even if you're nobody," eh?) Just ask right-wing comedienne Ann Coulter. And consider yourself warned.
