Notorious nerdbody Julia Allison, the Star editor-at-large best known for her geek conquests, has this to share with Valleywag: Digg cofounder Kevin Rose has asked her out on a date. Really, could she have come with a more thoughtful present for a gossip blogger? How sweet. Let me go out on a limb here with my prediction: This is going to end badly. Incredibly, someone has already registered kevinandjulia.com.
Is Yahoo censoring hot gossip about its Hollywood ex-boss's family? Page Six and other LA gossip rags tell us Lindsay Lohan's lastest BFF with benefits might be none other than Courtenay Semel. That's right, former Yahoo topper Terry Semel's daughter. Reportedly, the pair were seen together at a housewarming party with LA "power lesbian" Jeanette Longoria.
New Yahoo Media czar Scott Moore dropped Yahoo News star Neil Budde from his org chart. Rumor has it he ran Yahoo Food director Deanna Brown out of the company as well; when we asked Brown, now at Scripps, about the incident, she starchily declined to comment. Now we're hearing Moore was responsible for at least one more departure as well.
Larry Page and Lucy Southworth weren't the only Silicon Valley denizens to get hitched over the weekend. Former Photobucket marketer MJ Kim married Joyent CTO Jason Hoffman in a ceremony on Saturday before a large contingent of the Ritual Roaster crowd. The thing that makes these nuptials among the geekiest ever, aside from the whole thing Flickr'd and Twittered to an absurd degree? Kim proposed to Hoffman through an Outlook meeting request. Screenshot of the proposal after the jump.
Russian chat forums are infected with software designed to mimic flirtation and lead unsuspecting lovers into divulging personal information, Beyond Binary reports. These Russian love bots have such sophisticated AI, they can establish up to 10 relationships in 30 minutes. Not impressed. Call us when they design software that doesn't take the shirt off your back but instead puts it back on.
Silicon Alley meetup impresario Brett Petersel, roundly mocked here and elsewhere for offering to pay anyone $25 to set him up on a date, has had a taste of fame and can't get enough. He's even planning to start a business based on the "buzz." Problem is, Petersel isn't as good at leveraging his newfound microcelebrity as he is hosting meetups for Silicon Alley wantrepreneurs and their VC patrons. His latest blunder?
So it's past midnight at the Valleywag holiday party when I answer the door. "Owen's totally wrong about that Facebook thing," blurts out Kara Swisher, whom I hardly know, in the conversational space most people would waste with a vacuous Hello it's good to see you can I come in. "What's with Loudmouth Gay Guy," she adds, nodding toward a tipsy guest. "Handle it, will ya?" I used to wonder why Owen had such an obvious thing for Kara, but I get it now: Kara Swisher is the ruthless-yet-right reporter we wish we could be, but can't. Back to book reviews for me. (Photo of Swisher not impressed with the animatronic reindeer by ... oh wait, I took this one.)
If rumors are correct, Larry Page and Lucy Southworth should be married by now. One hopes that they're back to a suite on Richard Branson's Necker Island resort, recapping their mile-high makeout session from last year. Update: Or not! The latest rumor from the coconut telegraph: The wedding is Sunday, not Saturday. One hopes the future Pages are practicing for tomorrow, at any rate.
BusinessWeek is trying to call a halt to Larry and Lucy's wedding! We get that Google is killing your print-ad sales. We get that being dependent on Web searches for, say, half of your traffic or whatever scares the bejeezus out of you. But really, mainstream media, this is a low blow — trying to put a pause on marital bliss with a conveniently planted scare story on billionaire prenups?
Before Jakob and Julia, before Brett Petersel's wad of cash, before Jason Calacanis's roaringly single '90s, there was Ed Yourdon, a young geek in love and already connected to the social graph. In 1965. Yourdon, known for his innovations in structured programming, graduated MIT that year and soon after started up at a NYC-based consulting firm. There, he reunited with Toni, a friend from high school and Yourdon's future wife. They soon split again. That's when the proto-poking began. Social media minx Alisa Leonard hosts Yourdon's entire account on her Socialized blog. Here's the 100-word version to help you remember a more innocent time for nerd romance.
Sorry people, show's over. Connected Ventures cofounder Jakob Lodwick has pulled the plug on JakobandJulia.com, his joint venture with his girlfriend, Star editor-at-large, and geekboy aficionado Julia Allison. "My interest in creating fuel for the gossip sites has dried up," Lodwick writes on the blog. "I don't enjoy the attention anymore." We'll hold you to that, Mr. Lodwick. Allison, however, doesn't seem like she's going to hold you much at all anymore, judging by the following response.
Pictured, above, is the reception tent for this weekend's nuptials of recent Stanford Ph.D. Lucy Southworth and her beau, Larry Page, the Google cofounder worth about $20 billion. A curious charter captain in the British Virgin Islands decided to take the boat for a spin around the wedding site — the Richard Branson-owned Necker Island — and took these shots of the preparations. The tent above has apparently been outfitted with air conditioning and security cameras, more clearly pictured in the image below. The captain also noted that it looked like workers were adding sand to the beach and placing fake plastic palm trees along a sandbar to give it that authentic tropical look, I guess. What happened to Larry and Lucy's eco-friendly bash? More pictures after the jump.
Can't a girl publicly humiliate her boyfriend by dumping him via her Facebook status message anymore without getting harrassed by a horde of social news readers? Nope. New York videoblogger Sandra Soroka tried to get away with it. The image above got over 1,600 votes on Digg. Somewhere along the way, somebody decided to exact revenge on poor Sandra, deleting all her photos on Flickr and replacing them with this one. And it's absolutely grotesque. Click, only if you dare.
Brett Petersel can gather most of the New York tech scene on a whim, organizing events such as October's Lunch 2.0 in Soho and last month's Web 2.0 Social Networking Tech Meetup in Chelsea. But the guy can't can't get a date. So he's decided to pay for one. "I will give $25 (US) to anyone who sets me up on a date, and then another $25 (US) if a second date occurs," Petersel wrote in a Facebook note. Here's the whole ad.
Brad Fitzpatrick, the founder of LiveJournal, is a Silicon Valley archetype: The brilliant engineer and troubled young man. In noisily quitting Six Apart, the San Francisco-based software company which acquired his company two years ago, one of the reasons he gave was that he was tired of working on LiveJournal. Now Sup, the Russian company acquiring LiveJournal, has asked Fitzpatrick to join an advisory board meant to protect users' interests, and he's gladly agreed. Why the sudden change of mind?
But drooling is as far as you're going to get, fanboys. Sloan lives with self-described "creative entrepreneur" Doug Jaeger in New York. Though there may be hope, at least to judge by the story Sloan told the Observer about Jaeger. Apparently, when Steve Jobs announced the device last winter, the couple decided to hold off purchasing iPhones until their second generation. But come June, Jaeger decided he couldn't hold back. He purchased an iPhone.
San Francisco real-estate agent and blogger Damion Matthews, left, apparently has a bit of a thing for Facebook board member and hedge-fund manager Peter Thiel, right. Matthews, who first blogged about Thiel in April, recently declared the financier "dreamy." Well, handsome enough, we'd say, but hardly dreamy. At any rate, we hate to break it to you, Damion, but Thiel's taken. If he weren't, though, you'd have a better shot than that Tennessee girl who lined up to get his autograph.
