"Its hysterical what they are going to make me wear. Yesterday I felt like they had found Ricky Ricardos garage sale and bought up his clothes just for me." — dot-com billionaire Mark Cuban, on the costumes for his upcoming appearance on ABC's reality show Dancing with the Stars. [Blog Maverick]

His ability to seduce Yahoo into paying almost $6 billion for Broadcast.com shows that entrepreneur Mark Cuban already knows how to dance his way around the negotiation table. Now the general public will be able to see the Dallas Mavericks owner attempt to do the cha-cha and Texas two-step. Mark Cuban will be on this fall's version of ABC reality series "Dancing with the Stars," competing against such luminaries as a Spice Girl and that chick from 90210. While we won't be tuning into the premiere — come on, who in Silicon Valley still watches regular TV? — we fully expect to see clips of Cuban twirling, lifting, and (we're hoping) falling on his fat ass, replayed over and over on your favorite video sites. Like Broadcast.com ... oh, wait.
Photo: Shoutfan.com

Is the Internet boring? Well, generally speaking, duh. Except, of course, when blogging luminaries get into a scrap over whether it is. Billionaire entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban started things a month ago when, in an offhand sentence, he declared the Internet "dead as a growth platform" because of a stagnation in the speed of home broadband connections. He reiterated his comments to Portfolio.com, and then repeated them on his blog. Say something often enough, and people start to notice. People like Web 2.0 venture capitalist Fred Wilson. A classic blogfight — observing the three rules of the genre — ensued.

Mark Cuban, the billionaire founder of Broadcast.com, never learned to shut up. (That's why the Mavericks owner has been fined over $1.6 mil by the NBA for 13 incidents.) So instead of humbly accepting that he made his money by offloading his ridiculously overpriced video streaming company to Yahoo, he still tries to defend Broadcast.com's business potential. Eight years ago, writes Cuban, cwhen the company IPO'd, "We had full length audio books, full length CDs, full length movies, TV shows...We had preroll commercials. We had inserted commercials. We even inserted video commercials into audio files and streams [Whaaa?]. And user generated content ? Yep...Companies or individuals could upload full videos with synchronized slideshows and we even allows hot spots in the videos. And of course we gave you realitime statistics of how many people were watching your video..." We get the point — they had all that YouTube has and more. Tiny little difference: YouTube works.

More details on the major podcasting-video venture from Jason Calacanis and Mark Cuban. In addition to the much-discussed Los Angeles studio space, rumor has it there will also be a New York franchise, run in partnership with an as yet unnamed media entity. This location would allow for block closings and live concerts, recorded for release both on Cuban's HDNet and (at lower quality) other online venues. The sets will be constructed around built-in advertising as a way to defray production costs and allow for free distribution under the auspices of Creative Commons. Looking forward to that first off-the-hook podcast block party.

Billionairess Mark Cuban gets so fired up by his hatred of Youtube and Google that he accidentally comes up with a pretty good idea, then sails right past it. In response to Youtube taking down clips from the Oscars in response to pressure from the Academy, Cuban recommends that content owners submit dozens of short clips of actual content, each padded with ads or filler, and all linked to the content owner's website. This will "overwhelm" Youtube somehow, according to Cuban. His plan has all the rationality and (all the likely success) of, say, George Clooney's scheme to destroy Gawker Stalker by flooding it with fake sightings. Still, why not?

It's a sneakily good plan to post short intro clips of something to Youtube with a linkback to a full-length, extended, and/or or high-quality version on a proprietary site. Padding the clip with spam, however, is where Cuban's revenge-complex manifests, as it would do minimal harm to Youtube and potentially irritate viewers right out of their inclination to visit the proprietary site. But who cares, it sounds so populist and crazy, just like everybody "overwhelming" Youtube with porn! Well, populist in terms of giant media/entertainment corporations, anyway. If Cuban and others like him would just drop their personal animus and figure out ways to make Youtube their pal, they'd get more traffic and likely not be so perpetually ulcerated.

[Photo: Getty]

Or at least, their money is united in podcast-love. Calacanis is assembling not just a cute pied-à-terre for his personal podcasts, but rather a full-fledged production studio — part of a considerable venture that has billion-boy Mark Cuban involved. Calacanis's old pal CK Sample is even helping with the tech staffup. According to a tipster, the studio is

Bubbletime billionaire Mark Cuban is really just a man of the people — the little people who see their copyrighted videos get uploaded to Youtube, and yet don't have the resources of, say, Viacom to force those videos offline. His solution? Inundate Youtube with porn in order to force the issue of active rather than passive content filtering. Now to be fair, Cuban didn't know that Google Video already has porn, but then he also thought Google (rather than Apple) would spell the doom of DRM, and he famously declared that only a moron would buy Youtube. So he's not exactly batting 1.000, but this is about principles. Upload your porn for Mark Cuban. Immediately.

Since interest continues to percolate regarding the anonymous billionaire discussed in Michael Wolff's (no, not that Michael Wolf) Vanity Fair article, here's another round of guesses. When last discussed, we declared a toss-up between Mark Cuban and Barry Diller. Remember, the two key hints are "appropriately larger-than-life character, remarkably fit" and "he knew nothing whatsoever about the newspaper business, or news." After the jump, a few more names get dumped into the mix.

We asked for your guesses as to the identity of the mystery billionaire mentioned in Michael Wolff's Vanity Fair article, and you adroitly caught on to the resonant void of the name(s) we didn't float ourselves. The key bits of trivia were "appropriately larger-than-life character, remarkably fit" and "he knew nothing whatsoever about the newspaper business, or news. Zip. Nada." Aside from unlikelies such as Warren Buffett and Edgar Bronfman Jr., the most cogent guesses after the jump.

PAUL BOUTIN — Skip the year-end recaps and next week's inevitable Predictions for 2007. Instead, bone up on these four tech/biz insiders whose blogs you don't read, but should say you do. All four are way more successful than you. Each posts faster than you can read. SVUG's party trick: Read 'em today, then trust they'll keep blogging the same topics through March.

On Geek Entertainment TV, the fun video blog hosted by faux-clueless Irina Slutsky (a master at cutting through buzzwords and making tech sound dirty), dot-com billionaire Mark Cuban recaps his talk to the Consumer Electronics Association. Topics include MySpace perverts, drunk e-mail checking, advanced TV tech, and how his startup Broadcast.com was different from YouTube (sure it was: YouTube is actually worth something).

Is there a clinical psychiatrist with flexible ethics in the house? Mark Cuban needs a diagnosis. Today the billionaire blogger published a stream-of-consciousness monologue about Google, YouTube, and iTunes. A selection reads:

• Could Tom Freston replace NBC Chief Executive Bob Wright? We're hoping yes, because a) we still blame Jeff Zucker for Hidden Hills, and b) Freston-Moonves II will make Ali-Frazier II look like Tyson-McNeely. [NYP]
• There's nothing more painful than admitting that Mark Cuban is right, but, you know, Mark Cuban is right. [Reuters]
• The Post has a brand new website with spiffy features including blogs, gossip news, and a celebrity-sighting map that is a complete and total rip-off of Gawker Stalker. [NYP]
• Rachael Ray's friends as annoying, talentless as Rachael Ray. [Radar]

The first naysayers to come out swinging against the crazy valuations of sites like YouTube ($1.5 billion), Facebook ($2 billion), and MySpace (a ricockulous $15 billion) are reporters and bloggers, and a few analysts known for a healthy cynicism. Slate writer Daniel Gross, for example, today praised the role of skeptics in the social-network-valuation boom. But who'd expect Mark Cuban to join them?

Like forest fires in Colorado and tornadoes in Kansas, Silicon Valley is always alert to the national disaster that could shake it to its foundations.

• Bubble billionaire (from Broadcast.com) Mark Cuban signs with Sirius Satellite Radio, promising to "raise hell" and "take no prisoners." We can only hope Donald Trump takes Mark's war metaphors literally and breaks his jaw — or at least starts a noogie fight. [Orbitcast]

He's not completely jumping ship, but the dot-com billionaire is selling his blog search engine, IceRocket, leaving his co-owner the CEO spot. Did Mark Cuban realize his property couldn't overthrow Technorati, the tiny giant of blog search?