Ethan Kaplan, Warner Bros.'s 29-year-old vice president of technology, uses Twitter like his cohorts. Well, almost like his cohorts. He slipped up using Twitter's direct-message feature, and broadcast to the Internet a request to talk to someone in business development at Zappos.com. Despite advertising "Shoes, shoes, shoes!" on its website, Zappos has branched out into selling everything from camping axes to computers. Could it be branching out into music, too? It's hard to think why Kaplan would want to talk to Zappos otherwise — unless he's figured out that the music industry doesn't have much of a future, and it's time to find a job at a more promising company.

Jason Calacanis and Dave Winer weren't the only ones lowering the Gnomedex geekathon's quest for spiritual uplift. Robert Scoble, the outspoken videoblogger, took issue with Warner Music digital guru Ethan Kaplan's critique of the conference. Not, mind you, for anything Kaplan said, but for his failure to address bigger issues that plague the real world. Scoble thinks that Kaplan is hypocritical for working for a record label that publishes a rapper with an "evil" no-snitching policy. As fellow Valleywag contributor Nick Douglas astutely points out in the comments, Scoble is saying that an employee is culpable for and complicit in any and all wrongdoings committed by an employer during his tenure at the company. It's an outlandish standard that Scoble himself couldn't meet at current employer PodTech, let alone previous paycheck-issuer Microsoft. But it's typical in displaying geek hubris. Sure, we can all change the world. Let's hold hands and blog!