I motored on up north to lovely Petaluma, Calif., on Sunday, to be on Leo Laporte’s most excellent “This Week in Tech” show.

My fellow panelists included Milk’s Kevin Rose, CNET’s Rafe Needleman and all-around good guy Mike Elgan, talking about a wide range of topics, from Google’s music efforts to Rose’s distaste for Amazon’s Kindle Fire to the tech in the latest “Twilight” movie.

Here’s the whole show for your viewing pleasure:

In an interview last week, Greylock partner David Sze said he thinks a celebrity content management system will be a big business. “It used to be when these platforms first started, the top users were always digital stars — the Kevin Rose and Robert Scoble types. If you look at it today, there’s an amazing shift going on — it’s all general celebrities and the scale is order-of-magnitude multiples of when the tech stars were dominating the system.”

As I’ve described it before, WhoSay is a social media tool for celebrities, aimed at “helping them manage their social media presence and making sure photos and videos are posted on a page the stars themselves can control and eventually monetize.”

For instance, here’s a picture of Tom Hanks’s refrigerator, via an embed code that allows the actor to maintain the rights to his image. Hanks also used WhoSay last week to bitch about how RSS feed readers of Gawker’s headline about his new movie might think he was actually dead. (Tom Hanks knows what RSS is?!)

Greylock has one of the most extensive venture capital portfolios of the leading social Web companies, among them general and open platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Pandora, Airbnb and Tumblr. WhoSay, by contrast, is a much more specific publishing tool.

WhoSay — which was incubated by Creative Artists Agency but operates independently — had already raised $6 million from investors including Amazon and High Peaks Ventures. Greylock is adding an undisclosed amount into a previous Series B round.

Of course I have something to say about the news yesterday that AOL would be a key investor in a new early-stage venture fund being started by TechCrunch’s perpetually petulant editor Michael Arrington — with a big, fat and decidedly greasy assist from a panoply of Silicon Valley’s most powerful VC firms and angel investors.

Arrington has previously called me “chief whiner” — oooh, buuuurn, although fair enough, since I have compared him to an egomaniac turtle named Yertle in the past — about my nagging him over the importance of upholding standards of fairness and ethics in journalism.

So as not to let him down, let me begin the whining.

First, my initial reaction when I first heard about the deal: Ugh. Sigh. Hopelessly corrupt. Now 100 percent more icky! A giant, greedy, Silicon Valley pig pile.

I was upset.

By early evening, after my kids told me to chillax, my dark mood had changed to accept that the transaction — however profoundly distasteful to me — was part and parcel of the insidious log-rolling, back-scratching ecosystem that has happened in every other center of power in the universe since the beginning of time.

And so it goes in Silicon Valley.

In fact, the creation of a $20 million investment kitty that Arrington has dubbed CrunchFund is simply the formalization of a long-standing arrangement that has already been going on since he founded his popular tech blog.

That is to say, in which the basic standards of journalism are first warped by calling it newfangled truth-telling and then endlessly corroded by using a wily and unusually aggressive combination of favors and threats to extract, from start-ups and VCs in need of press, both exclusive access and information.

And now, inevitably, money.

This could have been a lot cleaner, of course, by Arrington simply resigning from TechCrunch, becoming a VC and perhaps starting a new blog where his agenda is much clearer, from which he could huff and puff away as he does with much entertaining gusto at real and (mostly) imagined slights.

There is certainly precedent for VCs blogging, including Fred Wilson, Brad Feld and Ben Horowitz. And, despite my criticisms about ethics, it is clear that Arrington is a talented writer whose unique voice would be even stronger if it was truly seen as separate from what has become a news organization.

But because of his obvious need to be the center of attention — requiring the ermine kingmaker mantle and foisting his patented I’m-here-to-tell-it-like-it-is attitude on us all — that appears to be impossible.

(By the way, I await Arrington’s usual inane rant about the fictional conflicts of interest related to my gay Google marriage anytime now in 3 … 2 … 1, always and purposefully leaving out the pertinent facts that I can only wed one person, get no financial benefit and am also a prominent critic of the scary search behemoth, while he can make a badillion questionable and grossly tangled investments.)

Personal annoyances aside, what’s most interesting here is the group of Silicon Valley power players who lined up to bow and scrape and then hand over a small pile of dough to the blogger who would be king.

They include: Sequoia Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Greylock Partners, Austin Ventures and Accel Partners, as well as individual investments from partners at Benchmark Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, entrepreneur Kevin Rose and DST Global’s Yuri Milner. And, of course, the inevitable Arrington BFF Ron Conway.

Holy googa mooga, that would be, well, everyone, except Ashton Kutcher and Justin Timberlake (who will surely appear soon enough).

As one person also pointed out to me, I don’t recall this many competing VCs investing in one company, let alone another venture fund.

It goes without saying that the reasons they all decided to jump in this fetid pool with abandon are quite varied, if all entirely compromised.

One investor told me — off the record, naturally — that he thought it would be an interesting experiment to see what happened and so he wanted in, especially since everyone else was doing it.

Another well-known VC said that there is no downside to being financially affiliated, especially in attracting talent to its start-ups, with Arrington and, by extension, TechCrunch.

The well-respected Reid Hoffman of Greylock was the only one brave enough to talk on the record, explaining the reasoning pretty clearly:

“Techcrunch will get some real deal flow from entrepreneurs that we would otherwise not see, because they have established a prominent position as the SV/Tech industry information feed. As many tech entrepreneurs read it — both within Silicon Valley and globally — and view the information news feed to be their target for announcing themselves to the world, Crunchfund will have access to deal flow to these diverse and early stage companies. Some of these companies will be the kind of early stage companies with billion-dollar potential that Greylock invests in.”

There you have it: No one can afford to be out of the deal flow in these times, even if it means cutting corners.

While TechCrunch’s owner, AOL, said Arrington will no longer be managing editor, with only writing duties at the site he dominates and with no editorial control, Hoffman’s use of TechCrunch for CrunchFund was accurate, because in the eyes of many they are interchangeable.

That’s due to the fact that Arrington still breaks or is clearly the source for important stories on the site and, more importantly, is the big swinging dude who attracts all the eager entrepreneurs to the party. He is the fulcrum of that site, even as it has grown.

And so it will remain, I am guessing, no matter how much AOL insists it will not be so, because the easy questions pile up quickly:

Will Arrington keep doing what are clearly news stories, for example, even though he protesteth too much — as he did in the New York Times yesterday — that he is not a journalist?

And, if so, is it right for him to do so given his insider status, creating a nonparity of sourcing and crystal clear conflicts of interest?

Most of all, can he resist his palpable love of news-breaking and scoops, even if he gets them in ever more unseemly ways?

As if to make it all pretty, Arrington told reporters yesterday that he has put a clause in his limited partnership agreement so he can report on anything he likes, and in any way, about his investors and their companies, however confidential, except those he invests in.

O joyous day! Freedom of the press is preserved and our sacred First Amendment can breathe a sigh of relief, now that it is enshrined in an unholy blogger-VC LP agreement.

After pausing for a moment so that Thomas Jefferson and Edward R. Murrow can stop spinning in their graves, you can go down this road for many increasingly bumpy miles, which only becomes more twisted and confusing as it continues.

I finally talked to one investor in CrunchFund, who said simply and honestly: “It’s not that much money, so who cares?”

Indeed, who does care anymore about crossing what had long been very bright lines in journalism and, if you want to get all cosmic, in life?

Obviously, most of all, not AOL, or its CEO Tim Armstrong, or its head of content, Arianna Huffington. The pair, for whatever reason, decided to make a startling exception for Arrington from a rule that explicitly bars reporters at its media units from investing in the companies they cover.

That happened after he recently did a complete 180 from a previous decision to stop investing and jumped right back in, leaving Armstrong and Huffington to clean up the ethical mess.

They only made it worse, with their decision to throw journalism under the bus by letting Arrington do as he pleased, while touting how important it was for other content sites at AOL to remain more pure.

In the spirit of full disclosure, these kinds of ethical lapses are endemic these days in journalism. Case in point: The appalling phone-hacking controversy taking place at News Corp.’s News International unit in Britain.

While I cannot speak for Dow Jones, I can say that the behavior in another News Corp. property certainly takes its toll on those who adhere to higher standards at the company, especially when it comes to morale.

Thus, I can imagine how others feel at AOL — including those you-know-who-you-are silent ones at TechCrunch — who can’t and, more to the point, wouldn’t make the deals Arrington has been allowed to get away with.

It is not a good feeling, I can assure you.

And, while I have not spoken to her about it, I’d imagine that Huffington cannot be thrilled to be pushing for better journalism at AOL and trying to burnish her cred by hiring some top reporters, while also having to deal with this.

That’s okay, because Armstrong was perfectly willing to do the awkward pretzel-twist needed to explain away the controversial situation, also in an interview with the Times:

“TechCrunch is a different property and they have different standards. We have a traditional understanding of journalism with the exception of TechCrunch, which is different but is transparent about it.”

In this case, Tim, I am sorry to inform you that transparency is a complete canard and is more likely to end up covering up a lot more transgressions than it ever will reveal.

And, essentially and lazily sloughing it off by saying, “That’s just Mike being Mike,” is not going to cut it, at least not with me.

Not that any amount of tsk-tsking about it matters, I suppose, as Arrington finally gets his fervent Pinocchio-on-a-star wish to be a real-boy VC, can add yet another tainted buck to the pile of billions his venture pals already have, and just call it another typical day in Silicon Valley.

Still, when you are the designated whiner-in-chief, it is pretty much all one can do.

Rose told NetworkEffect that his first app “will be in social and location aware” and should be ready to show in three to four months.

Milk started operations last week and already has a team of six, including co-founder Daniel Burka, who was creative director at Digg and left his gig as director of design at Stewart Butterfield’s Tiny Speck to join Milk. The company is currently raising funding.

Rose told TechCrunch that Milk will be more agile than Digg and that he intends to keep control of the business rather than ceding it to others as he did at Digg.

Rose said he intends for his ideas to be “big” and “audacious,” but who wouldn’t say that?

Six months ago, Rose stepped down as interim CEO of Digg, the company he founded more than six years ago. His recent track record is mixed, with considerable success as an angel investor but a botched and immensely disliked product overhaul at Digg right before he left.

Yes, it is perverse, but I really want to come in dead last in Time magazine’s “140 Best Twitter Feeds.”

Why? Well, there’s no way I am getting near the top with the likes of Sarah Palin and Lady Gaga in the same list, so I felt the 140th–get it?–slot on a Twitter poll is the next best thing to aim for.

Here’s the deal, according to the magazine’s Web site:

“TIME picks the 140 Twitter feeds that are shaping the conversation. Take a look and vote on whether you think these top tweeters should be on our list.”

The list is split up into categories, such as authors (Neil Gaiman, who is #1, and Margaret Atwood), celebrities (Gaga and the inevitable Justin Bieber) and companies (Zappos and Whole Foods).

There is also a technology group, with luminaries such as New York VC Fred Wilson, man-about-Web Kevin Rose and, of course, the King of Tweets Robert Scoble.

I am in that group too, with the description: “When this woman reports a rumor, you can pretty much count on it to be true.”

Thanks…I think–although I prefer to call it reporting a fact.

In any case, early on, I was doing badly in the voting–as I had hoped and is entirely correct considering I am unknown to anyone but certain geeks–and was right near the bottom with some suspect deal sites.

But by last night, GigaOm’s Om Malik had dropped below me, along with Wilson. I was at the unacceptable 131 spot.

This will not stand! Thus, so I can shoot the moon, I urge everyone to vote for:

132 Mike Allen
133 Om Malik
134 Amazon Deals
135 Fred Wilson
136 DealDivine
137 Nieman Lab
138 Best Buy Deals
139 Coupons.com
140 Steven Johnson

A well-known writer and entrepreneur, Johnson has 1.4 million followers on Twitter and does not deserve this ignominious loss as much as me.

Tweet that.

Exactly what it looks like today (well, with some future improvements), according to CEO Matt Williams, who said that Rose–who founded Digg in 2004–has only acted as an adviser since Williams replaced him as CEO six months ago. Williams disputed reports that Rose had recently resigned from Digg to start a new company, saying Rose has been gone all along.

In an interview, Williams said his team has been in “fire-fighting mode” since he joined six months ago, paying off in 20 percent more user-contributed Diggs, 20 percent more time on site and 50 percent more comments since the end of 2010.

Williams also disclosed that Digg VP of Product and Engineering Keval Desai, a major hire who had joined the company from Google in January 2010, is on the way out. Desai will be replaced by Ben Folk-Williams, who was most recently at Vast. The two are currently both working at Digg in a transitional stage.

Williams has essentially spent his tenure digging himself out of a failed product revamp that left Digg unstable and angered users. That long-delayed, and then ultimately rushed-out launch–known as V4–had also contributed to the departure of Digg’s original CEO, Jay Adelson. Digg has essentially only added back old features, listened to its users and restored stability, with no new features to speak of since Williams joined.

“There have been a lot of comments about Digg being dead or Digg being yesterday’s news and the reality is actually quite different,” Williams said. “We hit a wall six months ago but we’re still a top Web site and the user base is quite vibrant. Users love the direction we’re heading and love what we’re doing.”

Digg now intends to focus on community and personalized news products, said Williams. He said that Digg has never been profitable in the past, but it should be cash-flow positive this year, and has enough money in the bank to last “well into 2012.”

Part of what’s next could include extending Digg’s social ads product to other sites around the Web. Digg’s homemade advertising product, in which user voting changes the price of an ad, now accounts for more revenue than banner ads, said Williams.

After much turnover and multiple rounds of layoffs, Digg now employs about 40 people at its long-occupied office in the Potrero Hill district of San Francisco. The employee with the longest tenure is now community manager Dan Huard, said Williams, who has been at Digg 5.5 years.

TechCrunch reported today that he had resigned and was closing a $1 million round in funding for the venture.

But, so far, no one’s saying what it is.

Let’s hope it turns out better than Digg has.

Because although Rose has had luck as a Web celebrity, calling yourself a “Digg founder” ain’t what it used to be, especially since his stint last year as interim CEO presided over a hugely unpopular launch that the company has been extracting itself from ever since.

Rose said he currently serves on Digg’s board. Sources said he didn’t actually “resign” from Digg, though, but rather pulled back after handing over the CEO role to outside hire Matt Williams. Last year, Rose called serving as interim Digg CEO a “nightmare” that “I would never wish on my worst enemy.”

While Rose would clearly rather be in the spotlight for his own success, he has been able to string together an impressive portfolio for an angel investor, with companies like Ngmoco, Twitter and Zynga. In addition to continuing to appear on Diggnation, Rose also recently launched a video show and newsletter called Foundation.

Update: Williams commented,

When I took over as CEO of Digg 6 months ago, Kevin’s role changed to that of Founder and Board member and nothing has changed since then. Thanks for all the positive comments we’ve been seeing, we’re excited about our direction as well.

Thus, JustSpotted, the social media celebrity-tracking service, is launching a SXSW edition of its mobile Web app that helps users stalk tech A-listers by combining public records of what events they plan to attend (via sites like Plancast), live check-ins (from sites like Twitter) and user-contributed sightings (contributed directly to JustSpotted).

Tech A-listers might be a dubious distinction, but the site, which will be available starting later this afternoon, will be pre-loaded with them–the examples given are Guy Kawasaki, Mark Zuckerberg, Zappos’ Tony Hsieh, Vaynerchuk and SV Angel’s David Lee.

Users can also search for any name they choose, such as potential investors and super users they want using their new app.

SXSW has become more of a VIP experience, with secret parties and private back rooms. And though geek spring break is bigger than ever, the fact that all these people are crammed into one small downtown area gives hope for serendipity.

But when serendipity isn’t enough…

Now, five months into the job, Williams is finding a voice of his own, separate from Digg founder Kevin Rose’s, and trying it out on the Digg community; the longtime veteran of Amazon recently participated in a well-received Digg Dialogg video interview, posted on Tuesday, to answer user questions. (It’s viewable here).

“There was a launch that was in violent disagreement with what our community expected out of the Web site,” Williams told Leo Laporte, who facilitated the interview based on Digg users’ questions. “It’s truly a tragedy of the ages, to some extent.”

But Digg is still a “very vibrant Web site,” with close to 20 million monthly unique visitors, Williams said, and the opportunity to hone a focus on social news that other companies may not have.

(Plus, despite layoffs, a perceived lack of relevancy relative to other social start-ups and multiple leadership changes, Digg still has plenty of money in the bank.)

“It is our top priority to rejuvenate the community,” Williams said.

Digg’s latest launch, called V4, was seen by many as a move to devalue the site’s homegrown community. V4 was the most significant in a string of product changes that took power away from the small body of users that set the agenda for the news site and gave a stronger voice to publishers and Digg’s own curators. And V4 was also an overdue, complete technology overhaul that left out many much-loved features.

In the Laporte interview, Williams quickly tackled precise details about previous features the Digg community wants reinstalled, noting, for instance, that the site has already brought back the “bury” button, allowing users to counteract other users’ votes on submitted stories. He said Digg is also planning future features such as a honing of its news-ranking algorithms for slower weekend traffic, when less-worthy stories may make it to the top.

Beyond those tweaks, Digg will make large-scale efforts to become more personalized, said Williams, and to create communities around specific topics. That’s not necessarily something that the old-time crowd will love, but it may make the site more useful for a broader audience.

Williams encouraged users not just to visit the site, but to comment on and vote up stories with Diggs; those participatory behaviors have decreased as a portion of overall traffic since the launch of V4, he said.

Being the voice of Digg is no small task, and it’s not just because of the company’s hypercritical user base. Digg has long been associated with the founding presence of TV and online video host Kevin Rose. And until Williams joined, Rose had been interim CEO after longtime leader Jay Adelson was pushed out of the company in April. Now Rose is occupied with his many angel investments, a new video show and a newsletter called “Foundation.”

Digg users were uncharacteristically positive in the comments section of the Williams interview entry. (The friendly tone makes me wonder if the old crowd has indeed high-tailed it somewhere else!) “Digg is in good hands,” said one. “I must say that Digg is doing a fantastic job listening to the community and implementing new features,” said another. One user even acknowledged, “I realize changes take time to implement.”

With higher-resolution cameras in our smartphones, everyone seemed to be adding social photo posting to their apps.

Hi-res photos hit Facebook, pictures came to Foursquare, and phones filled with apps to crop, stretch, filter, sketch and generally punch up our often marginal photography.

So, in honor of a big year of sharing photos with friends, here is a quick gallery of shots from the holidays, gathered with care from the walls and feeds of a few of tech’s most social shutterbugs.

Dave Morin

All three companies make mobile apps (primarily on the iPhone) that allow users to take and immediately share images with friends. It seems kind of simple and mundane, but all these smart people seem to think photo-sharing is the future.

Morin and Path are the most convincing about there being a larger idea behind what they’re doing. San Francisco-based Path is stubbornly focused on close personal connections–a.k.a. real friends.

Unlike every other social site, where there’s an implicit pressure to collect as many friends and followers as you can (and at the same time increase the site’s user numbers), Path is only for the people you really know and trust.

In order to force and foster that kind of sharing, Morin’s team has left out many of the social Web features we’re used to. Users can do only two things on Path: Share photos and view them.

There are no reciprocal friend relationships, no likes or comments, no fun photo-editing filters, no publishing photos to services like Facebook and Flickr, no editing something after you post and no global user search (you have to know the email or phone number for anyone you want to add).

And there are additional restrictions. Users can only ever share with a maximum of 50 people (though they can follow more than 50 people, if invited). Every single post has its own privacy settings–you can share with either only the people tagged in it, or only your share list. If you get sick of someone who’s sharing with you, you can “pause” that person until further notice. Users who don’t have iPhones can view photos on the Web.

The most interesting feature for me is that users see which of their contacts have viewed any one photo. So on Path, you can’t lurk in peace. People know when you’ve seen their posts. This might be a little creepy, but it also could cut down on those annoying awkward conversations that sometimes happen when you’ve seen someone post about something online and then they start telling you about it in person.

Photos are tagged with the location where they’re taken automatically, and users can add people and tags. If someone else takes a picture at that same location, tags that have been previously used near that place recently will be at the top of the list.

The idea is those tags will be used to help users relive their memories stored on the service. So, for instance, someone Morin shares with could retrace his “path” of wine tasting in Napa by zooming in on a map of the pictures he posted from California wine country.

But the thing is, if you want to go try Path (which you’ll be able to do in the U.S. and Canada as of 9 pm PT tonight by going to Apple’s App Store, and in the rest of the world within a few hours), it’s going to seem rather empty at first. You’ll have to seek out friends to share with from scratch–but even worse, nobody will be sharing with you until they decide to add you.

Unlike just about every other social service, Path is not really viral. At all. So even though it’s interesting, its numbers are highly unlikely to correspond favorably to those of competitors like Instagram. And after all, how many mobile photo-sharing apps are you really going to use?

“We really prioritize slow organic growth over hyper-viral growth and going after influencers to build this really steep graph,” said Morin, who formerly helped lead Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect before leaving the company in January. “We are building Path to be a 30-year brand.”

He added, “Many of the photo-sharing apps are photo-blogging apps and popularity contests. On Path, you should always feel comfortable being yourself.”

This antiviral stuff almost seems like overkill, but Morin grounds Path’s feature decisions in the theories of the evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar (known for the oft-cited “Dunbar’s Number” of 150 acquaintances, he also proposes that 40-60 people is the outer bound of our personal networks) and Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman (who talked about the difference between experience and memory in a well-received TED Talk on happiness).

If this hyper-personal stuff works, I think Path could potentially create a third major category of social network, distinct from the kind of relationships found on the two current giants, Facebook and Twitter. But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves–and c’mon Dave, you should really let people comment on and like their friends’ photos.

Path was co-founded by Morin, Shawn Fanning and Dustin Mierau, both formerly of Napster. The staff also includes Mallory Paine, who helped engineer the iPhone photo and camera apps for Apple, and Matt Van Horn, who formerly did business development at Digg. Fanning is chairman and landlord of the company but is working on his own other projects day-to-day.

Path has already raised a jumbo seed round with Index Ventures, First Round Capital, Founders Fund and Betaworks. The company also provided us with an extensive list of individual angel investors: Ron Conway, Kevin Rose, Ashton Kutcher, Keith Rabois, Dustin Moskovitz, Marc Benioff, Gary Vaynerchuk, Steve Anderson, Tim Draper, Joi Ito, Fadi Ghandour, Matt Cohler, Sam Lessin, Bill Randuchel, Karl Jacob, Paul Buchheit, Ruchi Sanghvi, John Couch, Michael Parekh, Claudio Chiuchiarelli, Maurice Werdegar, Don Dodge, and Chris Kelly.