Seriously, though, surreptitiously spying on what users do is actually the underpinning of the entire web advertising industry.

– Anil Dash, via Twitter

We get bullshit turf battles like Tumblr not being able to find your Twitter friends or Facebook not letting Instagram photos show up on Twitter because of giant companies pursuing their agendas instead of collaborating in a way that would serve users. And we get a generation of entrepreneurs encouraged to make more narrow-minded, web-hostile products like these because it continues to make a small number of wealthy people even more wealthy, instead of letting lots of people build innovative new opportunities for themselves on top of the web itself.

– Anil Dash, in a post on his personal blog, entitled “The Web We Lost”

It’s the best standalone platform there is for witticisms.

– Evan Williams, CEO of the Obvious Corporation and former CEO of Twitter, speaking about Twitter at Climate Week in New York, via @anildash

Renewed aggressiveness from Microsoft could do the whole tech industry a lot of good. iTunes is as bloated and user-hostile as Outlook was in the ’90s.

– Anil Dash, on the Surface tablet

He will now get even more as a newly born public company leader, so we asked a panel of thoughtful insiders to reflect on how it might change his work style.

How do you think Mark Zuckerberg will adapt to working in the public eye?

Arguing online is like wearing a sharkskin vest. You look like a jerk.

–Anil Dash, in Businessweek’s How To issue

So the first person to leave a comment on a Gawker network post will now be in charge of policing the thread of commenters who reply, maintaining a high level of discussion and recruiting other voices to participate and bring more page views. And there will be multiple comment moderators and threads per post. Free labor!

In a conversation with longtime blogger Anil Dash, Denton said he’s tried throughout his entrepreneurial career at Moreover and Gawker to cultivate good conversations online, at scale. Lots of things haven’t worked.

For instance, the gamification of comments — basically, giving people badges for repeat participation — were a wrong turn, because they encourage insular communities and aren’t a motivator for the most interesting people.

And while Facebook’s embedded comment system might help control for blog-comment trolls on sites like TechCrunch, Denton said, it makes conversations more boring by discouraging new and anonymous commenters. Those people often share the juiciest information.

“The most interesting comments, they don’t come from people with Klout scores. They don’t come from people with a history on our sites,” Denton said.

The ultimate goal of the new system, Denton said, would be to attract people like American Apparel’s Dov Charney or NBC’s Brian Williams — who are at the center of news on Gawker sites — to chime in themselves.

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One of those sites, Branch, actually hosted a recent conversation on “How do blogs need to evolve,” with many pioneers of blogging contributing.

Even though Branch is mostly closed to the public, the site was able to pull in voices for that conversation from people like early blogger Anil Dash, Matt Haughey from MetaFilter, and founders of Blogger-maker Pyra, in part because Branch is backed by Obvious Corp, which is Pyra and Twitter co-founder Evan Williams’ new company.

Obvious said this week that it is helping the Branch team with its technology, design, branding and marketing, and also sending in its own COO, Jason Goldman, to take on an active role. Branch also got funding from SV Angel and Lerer Ventures.

Another new discussion site is PandaWhale. It’s not as pretty as Branch, but it does some nifty tricks around aggregating threads of conversations from elsewhere on the Web, rather than trying to be a new destination unto itself.

So, for instance, PandaWhale users can import a Facebook or Twitter post — as well as all the replies on that platform — onto a single page, and combine it with a discussion on that topic on PandaWhale. All the site’s conversations are public. You can see an example here.

PandaWhale, which opened to public testing this week, was started by Adam Rifkin and Joyce Park, two hyperconnected Silicon Valley start-up people who lead a monthly event for founders and engineers, called 106 Miles. They previously founded the social app maker Renkoo. Greylock Partners, Omidyar Network and Lightspeed Ventures provided PandaWhale’s seed funding.

Like Quora did before them, both Branch and PandaWhale are kicking things off with topics related to technology, but they both hope to go broader than that.

Ok it’s official: No more maudlin Steve Jobs remembrances unless accompanied by the release of a revolutionary product.

Anil Dash (@anildash) via Twitter

Condé will revive Gourmet as Gourmet Live, an app/magazine designed to be consumed on devices like Apple’s (AAPL) iPad. In a presentation at the publisher’s headquarters this morning (promotional clip below), Condé executives and consultants talked up the app’s digital selling points, such as social gameplay, e-commerce opportunities, etc.

But they didn’t spend much time talking about the people who were going to fill the app with content. That’s because Condé Nast will be relying primarily on the magazine’s 70 years of archives for that–the demo makes frequent reference to David Foster Wallace’s great “Consider the Lobster” essay–plus whatever a small staff of “producers” rounds up from outside.

Gourmet used to employ dozens of people, many of whom made a lot of money (for editorial types). How many people will be working on Gourmet Live? The number “won’t be significant,” says Condé Nast distribution executive Bob Sauerberg. “You can’t compare the two things because they’re completely different.”

He’s right in at least one way: Condé and Activate, the boutique consulting firm Michael Wolf and Anil Dash launched this year, don’t expect many of Gourmet’s print subscribers to spend time on the app this year–they’re courting tech-savvy users who probably didn’t read the magazine but who may spend a lot of time on Foursquare, etc.

Leveraging brand equity–and decades of content–with a new property may turn out to be a great idea. It’s certainly better than letting all that stuff lie fallow. But it won’t appease people who loved the old magazine. Then again, people who love old print brands are learning to live with disappointment these days.

First, CBS (CBS) digital dealmaker Quincy Smith and crew formally unveiled Code Advisors, the M&A shop they’ve been assembling for nearly a year. Now comes Michael Wolf, last seen in the halls of MTV Networks, where he was COO for a bit more than a year.

That was all the way back in 2007, but Wolf’s contract with Viacom (VIA) kept him more or less tied up until 2010. Now he’s opening up his own shop: Activate, a boutique media and tech consulting firm.

That’s a return to form for Wolf, who made his reputation as a tech-savvy media consultant at both Booz Allen and McKinsey (for a time capsule that’s also 100 percent up to date, see Kurt Andersen’s 1997 New Yorker profile of Wolf). He says he’s self-funding the operation, and won’t need to take on investors, as he already has paying clients (whom he won’t name).

He also has a co-worker: Anil Dash, the longtime veteran of blogging software pioneer Six Apart, who is now a director at Expert Labs. Dash says he’ll keep his job at the nonprofit, which is a sort of tech/good government mashup, and split his time between that and Wolf’s shop.

And yes, just because people still mix them up–Wolf is not Michael Wolff, the bomb-throwing media agitator/aggregator. That’s this guy.

Exactly how is the introduction of vanity URLs on Facebook going to go?

At 9:01 p.m. PDT on Friday, the giant Silicon Valley-based social-networking site will allow its 200 million members to log in and claim a friendlier username for part of their URLs instead of the long string of gibberish that is now there.

That a lot of sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and others already allow you to do this is not really the point.

But, because it is about people’s names and because it is certain to be chaotic in its execution, I think we can pretty much slap the moniker “URLgate” on this one and just call it a night.

Nonetheless, in an email tonight inviting media to an open house to see its new HQ building in Palo Alto, Calif., the PR team at Facebook–which often gets into hot water over various public snafus that arise at the young company with regularity–is mightily trying to make nice with journalists to perhaps head off any bloggish bellyaching.

They wrote: “We wanted to let you know that we decided to reserve usernames for the key journalists and outlets we work with. Look out for an email from someone on the communications team with more details.”

Firestorm of disgruntlement from those who did not make the list sure to follow? Of course!

In any case, my top preferences?

Http://facebook.com/internalfacebookmemostoboomtownstat

Http://facebook.com/findmeontwitter@karaswisher

And, if you want to read a very funny take on the gathering Facebook username–yes, FU!–storm, read Anil Dash’s great spoof post on the issue.

My favorite fake prediction Dash makes is one that you just know is going to come true:

“In response to the growing buzz on Techmeme about ‘The Facebook Debacle,’ [Facebook CEO and founder] Mark Zuckerberg posts on Facebook’s blog with the news that the company has created the Facebook Username Dispute Resolution Community.”

[Photo of the vanity license plate above, courtesy of COOLPL8Z.com.]

Last week, I wrote about October Tech Blogger Challenge on the the charity site called DonorsChoose.org, which funds classroom projects in high-need public schools, using the Web to match teacher project requests with donors.

I picked tech projects in both San Francisco (where I live) and Washington, D.C. (where Walt Mossberg lives) and have set a goal of $25,000. So far, our AllThingsD page on the DonorsChoose site (and you can also access it using the nifty fund-raising thermometer on the left rail of the main BoomTown page here) has raised $1,928 from seven donors.

That puts us fourth, just behind Endgadget ($2,830 from 22), TechCrunch ($2,875 from eight) and the putting-us-to-shame Fred Wilson ($9,283 from 32).

We want to thank all who have given, but we’re asking for more from more now both to help the kids and also for our more nefarious purposes, which require sheer numbers.

That’s due to BoomTown’s dastardly master plan of winning the award Yahoo is giving. The company is sponsoring an award for the bloggers who inspire the most readers to give and the winner will get a free lunch with CEO Jerry Yang.

Here on the Tech Leaderboard in terms of donor numbers, we are fifth (Anil Dash drops in with 14). But Fred Wilson is still leading by a mile!

Like Yang needs to have lunch with another VC!

So here is our video plea to stop this unfortunate event (and where all that will be discussed is widget valuations and real estate):