"Geeks on a Plane" is one of those sponsored clusterfucks rampant in the tech industry where the rich and near-rich gather to disruptify their apps and incubate their engagement strategies over drinks. But this one is mobile: Google, PayPal, QualComm and other major firms shell out for American investors and startups to meet up around the world so they can "gain insight into local markets, demographics, [and] business models," and "meet cool people, new ventures, have fun on planes, trains, buses."

Vancouver-based NowPublic is ostensibly all about citizen journalism. But since Guy Kawasaki sold Truemors to it and signed up as an advisor, it's becoming better known for publishing flattering lists of "influencers," supposedly ranking them according to various social media metrics. The first "Most Public" list focused on New York, but a new list for the Valley and San Francisco is "coming soon." And by virtue of being included in the latest edition, we received an early copy as a press release. Who comes out on top? Ubiquitous attention slut Robert Scoble, naturally. Full list after the jump.

AUSTIN, TX — Randi Jayne (née Zuckerberg) and Revision3 COO David Prager have done it again. She rewrote "Roxanne" as "Rock Band," an homage to the popular Harmonix videogame; Prager, though he didn't pair up in front of the camera with Jayne as they did in iPhone parody "Doncha," helped produce the video. In the clip below, Robert Scoble, Digg CEO Jay Adelson, Facebook fanboy Dave McClure, and media raconteur David Spark headline. They play undistinguished louts who, by playing the game, transform themselves into real rock stars. The backup singers include Jayne and Rana Sobhany, a marketer who's planning a SXSW party tonight at Six Lounge. The video:

AUSTIN, TX — A confession: Between the rain pouring down and the rumors pouring in, I didn't even make it to the Austin Convention Center today for any of SXSW's official programming. A show veteran granted me absolution: "No one makes it to the third day." The third night, however, was not optional. The hot ticket: Facebook's Get.friends party at Pangaea. The Crush party at Six Lounge a half-block down Colorado Street was the chill-out alternative. Scott Kidder and I hopped between the two, snapping pictures all the while. Mazyar "Mazy" Kazerooni of OpenHulu fame joined up for the party tour. At Six, I found myself sandwiched between Sarah Lacy and Julia Allison, SXSW's two controversy magnets. Back at Pangaea, I spotted Dave McClure grooving ecstatically to BT, the electronica artist Facebook evangelist Dave Morin picked for the event. (Don't tell Morin: BT has a MySpace page.) The afterparty? It took so long to get going anywhere that we ended up having it outside on Colorado Street, where Wired's Megan McCarthy administered breathalyzer tests. More photos:

At Sunday's SXSW afterparty, Facebook fanboy Dave McClure acquired a fan club: Facebookers Web-video auteur Randi Jayne (née Zuckerberg) and Brandee Barker, chief damage-control officer. More photos from the party, after the jump; your best headlines in the comments.

Stanford professor BJ Fogg and Facebook fanboy extraordinare Dave McClure put on a class this fall for Stanford students interested in building their own Facebook apps. To the likely detriment of all involved, the class turned out to be a rousing success.

So what do these Facebook ads which have MoveOn.org in an uproar actually look like? The ads, despite all the fuss, are cussedly hard to find. Mark Zuckerberg's hundred-year media revolution seems to be taking about that long to get underway. But Facebook fanboy Dave McClure has found an example in the wild. By buying a T-shirt on Busted Tees, he was able to capture screenshots of the ads MoveOn claims violate Facebook users' privacy. What do you think?

What the hell is a poke? Facebook's proprietary pestering system, the poke, is about as ambiguous as waking up on the couch of a good friend after a wild night of partying, followed by blacking out. Is it a friendly wave? A solicitation? An accusation? There's a whole social graph of plausible "poke" translations authored by Silicon Valley tool and Facebook fanboy Dave McClure. One little poke could mean everything from "yo" to "let's have sexual relations." Charming, yes? Here's a far better idea.

Stanford has hopped aboard the Facebook application bandwagon with a new class: noted developer BJ Fogg and Facebook fanboy Dave McClure (who may not be employed by for Facebook but is awfully busy flacking the company) will be teaching "Create Engaging Web Applications Using Metrics and Learning on Facebook." Although offered through the computer science department, the course appears more geared to business students. Pupils will be graded based on the number of users they can garner rather than quality of code, and there will be an event at the end of the course to pitch the applications to investors. Is it any surprise Facebook moved to the west coast and that Stanford leads Harvard in incubating technology companies? As VentureBeat notes, while Stanford jumps on the latest tech fad and offers students a chance to strike it rich, Harvard ironically had admonished Facebook's creator Mark Zuckerberg and shut down a precursor to the popular Facebook for privacy violations and political correctness concerns while he was a student.

The Internet has already busted the extremely creepy people search engine Spock. It's bad enough that the site trawls social networking profiles, amassing every personal statement you've ever made online. Now it's an outright slander brigade. A few high school students who used a Spock-built Facebook application that generate amusing stories, a la the old Mad Libs fill-in-the-blank books, were surprised to learn they had been tagged as a "fat, retarded pimp who likes screwing prostitutes," or as "a man-whore who hangs out at stranger's houses and drinks rum and Coke." (Sounds like some bloggers we know, but no matter.) Those, however, are the least of Spock's scary lies.

Entrepreneur, programmer, man about town — if by "town," you mean "Palo Alto." That's our Dave McClure, part of the PayPal gang and now, in geek semi-retirement, an extreme fan of Facebook, the buzz-ridden social network. I've known Dave a long time, and respected his critical thinking skills (as well as his avid commenting on Valleywag). Which is why I've never understood why he joined right in the Valley's Facebook frenzy instead of standing back and, with all his experience, questioning the hype. For the answer, roll the tape.

Everyone's famous on the Internet! And the webstars really shine in Scott Beale's Wednesday photos from O'Reilly ETech 2006. In this edition, Ted Rheingold of Dogster, 3/4 of the Boing Boing crew, and an episode of escalating violence.