Having famously "plowed through" San Francisco's eligible bachelorettes, Digg founder Kevin Rose went L.A. for his most recent paramour, Shira Lazar. Who is this Web-video wannabe with links to Dov Charney and Julia Allison?

Digg, the raucous online news-rating site, has laid off 8 people from its 75-person workforce. CEO Jay Adelson writes that the company will "aggressively focus on reaching profitability within the year." There's no way.

Is Kevin Rose, the celebritard-wooing founder of Digg, deeply concerned about Apple CEO Steve Jobs's wellbeing? Only for as long as it takes him to log onto his broker and unload his position in AAPL.

Kevin Rose, the boyish founder of Digg, a testosterone-soaked news-discussion site, has resolved to "date someone seriously" in 2009. Specifically, he plans to woo Marley & Me star Jennifer Aniston.

Perhaps Digg really is the future of the news business. The headline-discussion site, once an icon of the Web 2.0 movement, is losing millions of dollars a year.

Earlier this year, Leah Culver appeared on the cover of a tech magazine blowing an enormous pink bubble. But the shrill-voiced San Francisco programmer no longer desires fame — even the modest sort afforded Silicon Valley's microcelebrities. The turnabout seems odd, considering how aggressively she once courted notoriety.

Digg poster boy Kevin Rose is so hot that 726 people have already subscribed to a Twitter stream on which Rose pretends to be a head cold. For context, New York Times reporter Matt Richtel has 819 followers to the novel he's posting as tweets. Note to self: Become a celebrity first, then take up writing.

It only takes hearing so many jokes about Al Gore inventing Twitter to figure out that the former vice president has signed up for the microblogging service. Wisely, he's not really participating in the site, just using it to market his websites and announce his interview with Digg founder Kevin Rose, which airs tonight on Current, the Gore-backed cable channel. Current and Digg have been teaming up for a series of election-related events, including a party on election night. But Rose and Gore's acquaintance goes back almost two years.In late 2006, Gore's Current made an offer for Digg which valued the social-news startup at $100 milion or more. Wonder if Rose and Gore discussed business at all in this interview. As VentureBeat recently pointed out, Digg's traffic is flat, and it hasn't significantly increased its valuation since Rose and Gore's 2006 chat.

Want to watch North Carolina gyrate to a hip-hop beat? Tune into Current, Al Gore's user-generated cable channel. I don't mean people dancing in the streets; I mean an outline of North Carolina pulsating. The channel is carrying, on live TV, headlines you could read on Digg and messages you could read on Twitter, along with video snippets from current viewers. Other than that, it's offering the same kind of exit-poll projections you could get on CNN, but in hot pink and cyan instead of the traditional red-blue-gold color scheme. Digg founder Kevin Rose pops up occasionally with live updates from a San Francisco night club where Current, Digg, and Twitter are hosting an election-night party. It's Web 2.0 in your living room — and it makes me wish I could Brillo-pad the "vision" out of "television."

BoomTown reporter Kara Swisher rappelled from a skylight at Jerry Yang's secret hideout to score this draft copy of an ad, in which a bunch of tech bigwigs come out in favor of gay marriage — or at least in opposition to Proposition 8, a California state ballot initiative which would ban it. No Valley company in its right mind would be seen opposing gay marriage, so why bother?Right: Because it's an awesome branding opportunity. The draft is a self-parody of corner office drama, full of Honorary Co-Chairs, Leaders, and Former CEOs. But the real story is: Who's missing? Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt are here, but not Larry Page. Twitter's Ev Williams is here, but not Digg's Kevin Rose. Federated Media: Present. TechCrunch: Absent. Mark Zuckerberg is not here, but Sheryl Sandberg pulled a John Hancock: She's right up top, where Owen can't miss her. Oh, look, she's trying to make nice! She's going to be sorry.

Click to viewWhy is Kevin Rose on a publicity binge? In the past two months, the founder of headline-voting site Digg has garnered two magazine covers. There he is, with a smoldering leer on local San Francisco magazine 7x7. The look reminds everyone why Diggnation cohost Alex Albrecht once said that Rose, a prolific dater, has "plowed through everyone in town." For Inc., Rose participated in a wacky crowd shoot which echoed the Beatles' "A Hard Day's Night." It's obvious why Rose is a hot commodity: Write about him, and traffic to your magazine's website will soar. (Will he sell print copies? I doubt Digg users visit newsstands.)It's obvious what's in it for the magazines which write about them. Rose makes a compelling story, even if Inc. had to resort to ridiculous hyperbole:

We're not sure we buy Inc. magazine's cover math, any more than we believed BusinessWeek when that magazine told us Digg founder Kevin Rose was worth $60 million. But the cover is impressive. (As are Rose's biceps. Photoshop?) Your suggestions for captions are welcome in the comments; the best will become the post's new headline. Yesterday's winner: DrewFinch, for "All your data are belong to us." (Photo by aprilini)

The bromance between Diggnation cohosts Alex Albrecht and Kevin Rose is so palpable, and same-sex marriage so trendy, that I was a bit surprised to hear that Albrecht was engaged to someone else. Aw, Kevin, I hope you don't feel jilted! Someone will make an honest man of you, someday. The two performed their Web show live on stage at the Future of Web Apps conference in London — which, we hear, was just like Cyprus but without the crystal-blue sea and the matching swimsuits. Can you think of a better caption? Leave it in the comments. The best will become the post's new headline. Friday's winner: franky, for "Mark Zuckerberg signs petition against new Facebook design." (Photo by jimjarmo)

It's complicated. God, is it ever. The same October Details story that follows around New York's "Internet playboys" and their bicoastal hangers-on runs with this chart of who dated, funded, or hated in this overdocumented side of the Web scene. So sweet to know we're not the only ones keeping a scorecard, but one of its subjects, Caroline McCarthy, claims there's inaccuracies! Let's do Details and the kids recently fanning their fameballs from the coverage a favor and fix it up then. Ready? Let loose in the comments with your errata.

The golden boys of New York's start-up scene are just as flashbulb-driven as the women who dote on them, a new Details mag feature reveals. Mostly they followed Tumblr's enfant terrible, David Karp, and his heterosexual beard Charles Forman, who pimps "social gaming" at iminlikewithyou but is still better known as last season's Mr. Julia Allison. There's a guest appearance by Kevin Rose, which you can just tell is going to get messy. He's inserted towards the end as the wise old sage, warning these new guys away from male Internet fameballing:

The whispers have started: How much money did Kevin Rose make personally by selling shares in Digg's latest round of VC funding? The talk that Rose has sold shares is driven by equal parts envy and admiration. To understand the reaction, it helps to realize that the notion of an entrepreneur selling his own shares directly to investors before a public offering — getting out of the company just as other investors were getting in — used to be taboo in Silicon Valley. But that was before Wall Street's IPO machine broke down, and before merger activity dried up. Rose is at the vanguard of a seismic shift in how the Valley pays off its entrepreneurs.Rose, whose stake in Digg was famously estimated by BusinessWeek as worth $60 million, may be a unique case. More driven entrepreneurs must be frustrated by Rose, the fun-loving rock climber, on-screen beer drinker, and legendary lothario. His company's rise has seemed effortlessly successful, driven more by the former TV host's fan following than Digg's innovations. But Rose has gotten good business advice, chiefly from Digg CEO Jay Adelson, a longtime friend. Adelson feels he gave up too much control to investors at his previous company, Equinix; he strove to protect Rose from the same fate, an effort which Sarah Lacy chronicles in her recent book, Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good. As a result, Rose still holds a substantial stake in Digg. Rose is already believed to have taken $1 million in a previous financing. It's not clear how much he's taken in this round, if any — but it stretches credulity to think he hasn't cashed out to some extent. Here's why: Normally, a company raising $28.7 million in a third round of financing, as Digg just did, would be giving up a substantial chunk to outside investors. But when the founder controls as much as Rose does, the math doesn't work. Former Digg engineer Owen Byrne, who complains that he hasn't had access to Digg's financials in some time, speculates that the round involved massive dilution — the reduction in value suffered by existing shareholders when new shares are issued. But Byrne has this exactly wrong: Allowing the VCs to put in enough money to make the investment worth their time, at a high valuation, would require substantial dilution, which would disadvantage employees and early investors. Much simpler to transfer shares directly from one large shareholder — Rose — to another. What's the effect? Already, employees at Facebook have been agitating to sell their shares, and the company is creating an internal market to let them do so. Rose, as another high-profile example, will put further pressure on startups' management to let their workers cash out. This seems dangerous: Digg, with its high traffic and Microsoft ad deal, has achieved some success — but it's hard to envision it lasting long as an independent concern. What will the boards of even less developed startups tell their founders, when they want to sell, too — that they're just not as cool as Kevin Rose?

Burn, baby, burn! That's the coded message in Digg CEO Jay Adelson's blog post about a "major expansion effort." The website, whose users rate and discuss news headlines, is hiring for 19 open positions, with more to come, as Digg expands internationally. Only at the end does Adelson mention how he's making this happen: $28.7 million in venture-capital financing. Coming after failed acquisition talks with Google, the financing round makes it clear that Digg is now planning to get bigger rather than sell out. It's a strange thing to celebrate.The obvious goal of the blog post is to advertise Digg's available jobs to prospective engineers. But in so doing, Adelson's alerting everyone to Digg's ever-expanding payroll expense — without talking up where the money is coming from. Digg has a sweetheart advertising deal with Microsoft, which sells ads for the site — but it hasn't found a revenue model of its own. And Digg has a management problem which will only get more obvious as the company swells. Adelson, who commutes to Digg's San Francisco headquarters from his home in upstate New York, has admitted that he's not as committed to the company as he could be, having been burnt at a previous startup, Equinix. Founder Kevin Rose, who still commands considerable respect among Digg's contentious users, has made it plain he's not interested in running a big company and taking it public. It's hard to picture Rose and Adelson staying if Digg is sincere about getting big.

Digg founder Kevin Rose claims this iTunes 8 feature from a reliable source:

At a press conference scheduled for September 9, Apple will unveil "unspecified new products," reports Reuters. Thanks, Reuters guys — that really helps! The event's theme is "let's rock." In August, Digg cofounder Kevin Rose predicted Apple would announce a new iPod Nano, minor changes to its iPod Touch, price cuts to older iPod models and version 8.0 of iTunes — in other words, the same kind of update to its iPod product line Apple makes every fall. Our eternal gratitude, Captain Obvious!

When he moved Facebook to the Bay Area, Mark Zuckerberg deliberately set up shop in Palo Alto, not the self-involved hipstersphere of San Francisco. But he's been spending a lot of time in the City lately. Friday, a tipster spotted him in SoMa, near Twitter's headquarters. Kevin Rose, founder of Digg and lover of beer and women, met with Zuckerberg yesterday at the Samovar Tea Lounge. And Zuckerberg just added Twitter cofounder Evan Williams as a friend on Facebook.