QLabs (Photo: Foursquare)

Good news, Silicon Alley denizens. After much demand from fellow gossip-mongers, Betabeat has decided to resurrect your favorite recurring Friday feature. Welcome back to Rumor Roundup! Overheard a juicy tidbit about impending departures or imminent acquisitions? Dying to dish about startup blunders or frothy financing? Holler at your girls: tips@betabeat.com

THE SUN SOMETIMES SETS ON THE AOL EMPIRE Multiple sources have told Betabeat that AOL Ventures plans on shutting down QLabs--the press-shy experimental think tank in Soho located at 670 Broadway. "The time frame must be darn near immediate," one source told Betabeat, alluding to some urgency around winding down existing projects. "It's dead," said a source with indirect knowledge of the decision. "Their funding ran out," the second source added, speculating that the initiative had a set funding size, but "nothing yielded."

During a rare visit to QLabs in May, Betabeat discovered that the 4th floor space functioned as sort of the yin to AOL Ventures' investment yang--with both organizations trying to keep their corporate parent nimble.

QLabs hired a number of hackers who collectively decided on ideas to pursue. After some market research, the team, which operates non-hierarchically, churns out a prototype in six to eight weeks. If the minimum viable product fails to take off, it gets scrapped. The unspoken expectation, QLabs director Chris Danzig told Betabeat in May, was that it would produce a hit within two years, or roughly five months from now. “It’s very possible it could be a successful business with a few tweaks,” Mr. Danzig said back then. “But I’d much rather throw away something that has potential than burn away time on something that’s not working.”

In an email, Mr. Danzig said, "As a general policy we don't discuss the lab with the press (only the lab products)."

QLabs managed to get traction on at least two products, the incubator told us in May: Framey, which lets users post video comments on websites, and Brom.ly, an events recommendation service that pivoted into an events recommendation tool for the Huffington Post.

The recently launched HuffPost Labs, which operates like a startup for online news experiments within the Huffington Post, also works out of QLabs.  (Codecademy and Turntable.fm were working out of the spacious environs this spring.) But HuffPost Labs director Connor White Sullivan told us that the two incubator-like organizations are distinct. "We get our budget from HuffPost," he said of his budding four-person team. "All I can tell you is they're excellent engineers that built good products."

"As we refine our strategy, we have become more focused on our innovation agenda," an AOL spokesperson told Betabeat. "This was one component of a broader portfolio in AOL Ventures.”

WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS A cadre of Silicon Alley citizens–including Onswipe CEO Jason Baptiste and CNET columnist Ben Parr–headed to Vegas two weeks ago for some end-of-summer partying and ended up having a meet cute with Ron Jeremy. Turns out that the notorious porn star likes hanging with the tech set. He showed up to the same mid-day party Mr. Baptiste and Mr. Parr were attending. "Ron Jeremy just came to our private party," one source told Betabeat. "He told us about his rap song with Lil' Wayne who the Hipset guys are close with.” Oh Mr. Carter, say it ain't so?

WWJD? Apparently some trolls have signed Instapaper founder and bombastic blogger Marco Arment up for an email newsletter he certainly didn't authorize. "Thanks to whichever of the trolls signed me up for all of these Jesus email newsletters yesterday," Mr. Arment tweeted. "Not a good week for liking other people." Following a very public spat, perhaps it was someone at The Verge?

SECRETS OF THE SOUL Whoever said ladyblogs are just for ladies clearly hasn't met NYU journalism professor Clay Shirky. Professor Shirky copped to enjoying advice columns on the women-focused site The Hairpin at a reading at HousingWorks Books. “My favorite bit of anonymity on the web is this thing that Edith Zimmerman runs on the Hairpin, called 'Imperfect Advice from Strangers,'" he said. "Which is the best name for an advice column, ever.”

The head of Joseph Kony, minus his teeth, sells for $1 million. His actual teeth go for $50,000, depending on availability. A little too pricey? How about $100 for a thank you letter from Richard Gere for funding a Tibetan militia to resist Chinese rule. A mere $25 will also get you a personal thank you for donating to build a "discrete tactical vehicle" for U.S. military interrogators.

That's the nightmarish world depicted by Kickstriker, a hoax built by a group of NYU grad students from the Tisch School's ITP program for Clay Shirky's tech communications class. The object of the fake site is to get people to think about "how a world of crowdfunded warfare might not be so far away," reports Wired. “Polemically, that’s really interesting," Mr. Shirky tells Wired, "but that’s actually a thing that could happen, given that there are these guns for hire. What would it take to create a crowdsourced hire of [mercenaries]?”

The site's subversive "About" page takes its mock inspiration from the incredibly problematic Kony 2012 campaign, which Wired points out was marked by "messianism, comfort with U.S. military intervention and disquieting racial undertones":

Following the massive success of Invisible Children's "Kony 2012" campaign, we found ourselves excited about the potential that crowdsourcing held for addressing global conflicts. We were equally disappointed when that campaign unraveled, amid a backlash and public scandal. While "Kony 2012" succeeded at raising awareness and connecting potential activists with an issue, it ultimately failed due to suspicions regarding the role that Invisible Children played as a middleman. Kickstriker is our attempt to cut out the middleman in online activism, allowing funders to directly support the causes they care about.

Kickstriker begs the question, what if the causes you care about are making it easier for the military to torture prisoners, building a better weaponized drone, or helping Blackwater hunt  down Joseph Kony?

It's a purposeful exaggeration, of course. We'd venture that the kind of people interested in black ops or wet work are probably pretty careful about leaving an Internet trail. To us, the more real-world concern might be what happens when the ease of crowdfunding sites is applied to things like political campaigns and other causes, which Kickstarter prohibits. What if you didn't need a pair of billionaire brothers to organize and mobilize an extremist movement?

The project's cofounders, Mehan Jayasuriya and James Borda, aren't all doom and gloom, however. As Wired notes, they also embedded a little "Easter Egg" in the site. The names of the "MIT students" working on the drone? "That would be real names of the rappers Lil B, Kreayshawn and Gucci Mane."

Much like Lena Dunham on last night's episode of "Girls," New York technophiles seem to be embracing their "experimental" side. Some side projects are more facetious than others. But a new leisure pursuit from News.me general manager Jake Levine and designer Justin Van Slembrouck released today falls into the more utilitarian camp. Welcome to the Last Great Thing. Each day for a month, the duo plan on featuring a single link to the last great thing someone saw online.

The twist is that the site is "purposefully ephemeral," Mr. Levine told Betabeat by email. "There will be no archive. What's visible on Tuesday won't be findable on Wednesday." As far as gimmicks go, the disappearing link tops "by invitation only" in our book. We already feel a sense of panic over missing something great! Today's entry from Clay Shirky is off to a stellar start.

Mr. Shirky links to a YouTube video from a Muslim-American college student Tasneem Afridi called "I Don't Understand White People," that delves into the some of the issues explored in recent essays about "ironic racism" or those Shit ___ Girls Say videos, but in a more intimate, personal way.

Tomorrow's entry will be from Hilary Mason, chief scientist at Bit.ly. "We want contributions from people that move conversations forward. And we want to provide a kind of space for reflection that's missing from other types of aggregation," said Mr. Levine. The idea was to give submissions a "focus that's missing from our fast-moving streams," he said, citing Mr. Shirky's video entry. "It hasn't made it's way into the "memestream," but it's incredibly important. There's not a single person who wouldn't benefit from watching Afridi's video."

Mr. Levine said he was inspired by Branch, a fellow Betaworks startup making its prodigal return to NYC soon, and Robin Sloan's new iOS app Fish. "Lastgreatthing is for something abnormally good, something personal, something to love, something worth returning to," he said.

It's not all fun and hobbies, however. "If it 'works,'" said Mr. Levine, "We'll be looking for hints as to how we can scale and distribute this type of content throughout our product suite. The experiment in some ways at the intersection of our editorial efforts (Getting the News series) and the applications we're building."

And yes, in case you were wondering, this side project is also tied to the learning-to-code fever currently infecting Silicon Alley. "I'm particularly excited for it because Justin, our designer, and I built it without dev help!" Mr. Levine exclaimed. "Part of the reason I ended up at Betaworks," he added, "is because I made a little app and sent it to John Borthwick."

What's that? We think we just heard the sound of 100 new sign-ups for Code Year.

(youtube.com)

It's the sad truth of the Internet: you can tweet and blog your sweet little heart out, but there's no guarantee that anyone is actually listening. But what if there was a platform that gave you the chance to deliver whatever thoughts, feelings or advice you had, right to the intimate confines of someone's inbox? And they actually voluntarily signed up for the chance to hear you?

It's not a newsletter or a shared-interest listserv: it's a new project out of NYU's ITP masters program called The Listserve that gives the chance for one person each day to share their thoughts with thousands through a random lottery email system. Users sign up to receive one email daily from a randomly selected user. The email can be about anything--from what they had for breakfast that morning, to a picture of a kitten, to a politically-motivated diatribe--and it's sent, either publicly or anonymously, out to the other Listserve subscribers.

The project was incubated in an NYU masters class run by Internet scholar Clay Shirky entitled "Designing Conversational Spaces." Listserve's tagline? "If you had the chance to speak to one million people, what would you say?"

"The basic idea that it comes from is to see what people do when given a spotlight," Josh Begley, a Listserve group member, told Betabeat via phone. "I’ve long been curious about that idea. You know, even on Facebook when you see a bunch of friends having this perception that a lot of people are listening, sometimes we end up doing crazy, heartfelt or surprising things. So we're just trying to create a scenario in which that can happen in a low budget way."

Alvin Chang, another Listserve member, explained it further. "How do we play with it to the point where we can find something out about how people are having conversations and how people are viewing things in context based on not only design choices, but contextual spaces?"

For those of you who took journalism classes, Mr. Chang is essentially applying famed journalism scholar Marshall McLuhan's popular phrase, "The medium is the message," to this experiment.

The group argues that what differentiates the project from other large-scale email lists is that it's not organized around a specific theme or topic. It simply exists to allow people to share and listen to what others have to say, regardless of their interests, location or physicality.

"The obstacle that most people have now is that they are in silos, they talk to people of like-mindendess," said Greg Dorsainville, another team member. "When I thought of the use cases of getting an email from someone you don’t know and you don't know the topic it will be about, it’s an antithesis to that type of behavior."

To protect anonymity, the user who is randomly picked to send out the list-wide email can choose to have it sent either from their email address, or by the Listserve team, and each email will be vetted before being sent, to avoid users sending out hardcore porn or computer viruses. "We just want to make sure that some 12-year-old who happens to sign up for the list doesn’t get porn," said Mr. Chang.

Listserve is staged to be a social experiment. The group members say they want to see what gets people to communicate, and how their messages change depending on the size of the audience and the medium used to convey their message.

"I want it to be understood that this is as earnest as it sounds," said Mr. Dorsainville. "We would like to take out this notion of communication having to be about something else behind it, like how Facebook gives you a platform because they want you to bare your data. That’s not what we want to do. We want to share your stories and your feelings and your opinions."

Very earnest, indeed.

It's worth noting that the project will only begin once it reaches 10,000 subscribers. Until then, perhaps playing the Fame game can satisfy your desire to be heard.

You know O'Keefe, and have probably heard of some of his "greatest" hits:

• He dressed up like a pimp and entrapped community organizers from ACORN, effectively dismantling the organization.
• He was arrested for trying to wiretap the office of U.S. Senate member Mary Landrieu of Louisiana.
• He got NPR's senior vice president of fundraising canned for calling the Tea Party "weird."
• He attempted to get CNN correspondent Abbie Boudreau on a boat for a psychosexual entrapment video, which he very publicly failed at.

And so on. O'Keefe's last major public appearance was when he was profiled by the New York Times Magazine (which wasn't received entirely favorably for it's attempt to humanize O'Keefe, among other reasons). In the profile, the author remains fairly weary of The Teabugger:

My first meeting with O’Keefe, a month or so earlier, was somewhat awkward. He arrived at the Chart House restaurant in Weehawken, N.J., right on time, but he seemed slightly surprised he had showed up at all. “You’re from The New York Times,” he said. “How can I be sure you’ll be objective and accurate?”

“The same way I can be sure you’re not filming this conversation,” I replied.

O’Keefe assured me that he would never do such a thing.

Well, he might not have taped his interviewer, but he certainly went after Mr. Shirky, Mr. Rosen, and the Times. Video highlights, so you don't have to watch:

• People are seen noting the New York Times as an "elite" paper, and referring to "elites."
• A self-depreciating joke is made about "us Chardonnay swilling news junkies."
• Analysis of the Times hesitations behind initially covering Barack Obama as a presidential candidate is heard.
• An "even if" theoretical of Liberals at the Times who wanted to get Obama elected is heard.

And per the ever-reliable analysis of Andrew Brietbart:

The professors stop short of saying that the Times explicitly intended to help the Occupy demonstrators. What they say is, effectively, “If the Times had wanted to help Occupy, here’s how it would have done so–and that’s in fact what it did.”

If you'll notice, nothing in the above indicates either of these men—who have consulted and/or written for the Times in the past—openly admitting a bias within the Times. They pose theoreticals, and how they'd play out, but as you can see above, it's plainly clear a connection between theoretical intent and actual intent isn't moved forward.

Even for a video where quotes are so obviously removed from their context and clips are edited with the prejudice of a toddler with an industrial paper cutter, the video isn't all that damning. Even the music ("Video Killed The Radio Star") has a pretty light ring to it.

Jay Rosen took to Twitter earlier to preempt a forthcoming response: "I'm at O'Hare now, switching planes. Later today I will have a statement about James O'Keefe's attempted 'sting' against me and Clay Shirky." In an email to BetaBeat, he reiterated that he will definitely be weighing in on this, "But I am right now in meetings in Cedar Rapids and won't be able to blog about it until later tonight, maybe much later."

Shirky, who isn't that active on Twitter to begin with, has yet to respond publicly. UPDATE: Shirky responds to the matter to The Atlantic Wire's Adam Clarke Estes, noting that he hasn't even watched the video.

Interesting that O'Keefe would go after these two, instead of, say, someone with actual authority at the Times. Especially without targeting any of the things they're famous for speaking on: the way technology is reshaping journalism. Which O'Keefe is clearly a student of.

If you want to watch, well, it's your ten minutes (far more entertaining alternative, which isn't saying much: the Fake Jay Rosen Twitter, which has a wonderful avatar):

[Above: The "Gotcha" Dancers. Who are far more entertaining than O'Keefe, as evidenced...]