The story described a scene one might come to expect if one has ever watched an episode MTV’s Jersey Shore: a needlessly heated conversation, and some huffing and/or puffing thrown in for good measure. It included a picture of Snooki, sans signature poof, curled up in her seat, clutching a stuffed animal as she dozed. Touby was not amused by the interaction, to say the least:

“It was gag inducing,” said Touby, who suffers from Prosopagnosia (more commonly known as Face Blindness) and had no idea who they were. It’s not personal. She didn’t recognize Robert Redford when she saw him in a movie, and was once introduced to a “short man” at a party who turned out to be New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg. “They acted like queens,” Touby continued of JWoww and Snooki, who she called “self-important bitches” on Twitter.

At the time of the unpleasant run-in with the two Ed Hardy aficionadas, Touby turned to Twitter to ask whether anyone could identify the snarling “Suki” seated in front of her:

…She even snapped a “sneaky shot” of the sleeping reality star in the hopes of figuring out her identity – the same image later used in the Fishbowl DC post on the unfortunate meeting:

This morning, Snooki took to Twitter to air a grievance of her own:

We’re pretty sure Snooki is not a regular reader of Fishbowl DC (I mean, really. What “New York Times best selling author” has the time for reading blogs, anyway?), or else she’d have known that Touby wouldn’t have any need to “sell” a photo to the very blog network she helped create.

The moral of the story? Um. Don’t poke a sleeping Suki?

h/t FishbowlDC

We caught up with Touby today by phone in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to find out what she’s been up to, her thoughts on Foursquare and Chatroulette, what her plans are next and more.

One note – many here at Mediaite have worked for Touby including Glynnis MacNicol and Rachel Sklar (FishbowlNY.com) and myself (TVNewser.com).

Mediaite: Since you officially left in late September, you’ve been to Asia, Europe, South America and from the East to the West Coast of the U.S. What have been some of the most memorable experiences for you?

Touby: Probably visiting China. You know, you have a conception of what China is supposed to be like, but actually experiencing it, it’s just mind-boggling how hard they’re trying to catch up with the rest of the world and how successful they’re becoming at doing it. It’s incredibly powerful. The vastness of China’s cities, Beijing and Shanghai, you just cant conceive of it. With the amount of infrastructure created, I no longer feel confident we’re going to be able to stay ahead of them going into the next few decades. Western civilization has to watch out. I never expected that. I thought, ‘Oh sure, they have great architecture, they’re focused on creating infrastructure,’ but I never realized how far ahead they had gotten. It was kind of frightening because of the negligible consideration to the environment there is. It’s kind of all-out development, with no thought to repercussions or consequences. That was kind of frightening to me thinking about the state of the world, and the future.

“I’m kind of competitive. Being Mayor of my home was very exciting, whereas Jon is only Speaker of the House.”

Mediaite: -You said in your ‘exit interview’, “Even if I was away from the office or ‘on vacation,’ I was always doing work constantly…This was my responsibility and I felt very much like it was a child in many ways.” How how is been being away from your child?

Touby: Basically I just can’t stay away. I’ve been continuing to answer emails from people in the community, people who have needs, people who need referrals. I’m turning down a lot of student interviews for theses and things like that. When it comes to helping someone connect to the Learn department, to teach a class, if a customer needs to post a job, I find myself continue that role in a way I hadn’t expected. I don’t feel that far away from it, but I gave the child to a very good adoptive father and Alan [Meckler] has been really careful about keeping the spirit of mediabistro, and he respects it a lot, respects community, and really wants it to thrive. I don’t feel as frightened as I might have if someone else was the owner.

Mediaite: How has your media consumption changed during your sabbatical? What are your go-to news-gathering tools?

Touby: I’m embarrassed to say it is still newspapers, the Times and the Journal. Actually, I’m not embarrassed to say that! I haven’t had or given myself much time to read stuff online. I’ve read more books in the last few months than I’ve read since college. That’s the good news. I’m able to get back to book-reading whereas prior I didn’t have the concentration for it. Our concentration is so fragmented by Twitter, Facebook, now I’ve joined Foursquare and Yelp, it’s really hard to turn that off and sit down with a book. We have Kindles and have just packed them with books.

>>> NEXT PAGE: Touby on Foursquare, Chatroulette, a future tell-all book and more.

Meckler and WebMediaBrands (then Jupiter) made their spending powers known back in 2007 when they purchased Laurel Touby’s mediabistro.com for $20 million (full disclosure: I used to work for mediabistro.com, as did a number of my current Mediaite co-workers). Just this past summer WebMediaBrands sold off Internet.com for $18 million in cash (this followed the laying off of 60 people at the company in March) and Meckler tells AOL’s Daily Finance that “we have $25 million in the bank and virtually no debt, so we’re looking for sites that media professionals read.” Certainly sounds like WebMediaBrands is positioning itself to become even more of a media and event powerhouse. But is all as it seems?

Lost in the speculation seems to the the fact that on September 16, WebMediaBrands received a Nasdaq notification letter warning them that the company “no longer complies with the requirements of Nasdaq Marketplace Rule 5450(a)(1) for continued listing on the Nasdaq Global Market” and that if they did not raise their stock price above a $1 they risked losing their listing. According to Nasdaq rules the company has “180 calendar days, or until March 15, 2010, in which to regain compliance with the listing requirement.” Yowzer. Being booted off Nasdaq is no small thing. It essentially means that the powers that determine these things have not only lost faith in the company but lost faith that the company will ever pull itself back out of the hole it is currently in. Short version: getting kicked off the Nasdaq is bad. Of course this hasn’t happened yet to WebMediaBrands, they’re just being warned against it. So how to raise stock price? How about some well-timed bluffing.

It’s not a secret (less so this last year!) that stock prices have a lot to do with perceived strength. And as we’ve already noted above, Meckler is sure sending out the sort of signals that would encourage people to perceive his company as healthy and strong even if the Nasdaq numbers don’t quite (yet) support that conclusion. So: is his assertion that the company is “actively looking for acquisitions” merely one way to convince people to invest? Only time will really tell — and really aren’t the markets just one big guessing game — and according to Nasdaq we have slightly less than 180 days to find out. Meckler himself certainly hasn’t hesitated to invest.