Revenge of the Dot-Com Poster Boy: "He was the king—and kingmaker—of New York's Silicon Alley, a new-media cheerleader turned media mogul. Then the bubble burst—but he's back." —Wired News

I'm considering doing a Bubble 2.0 Moguls gallery, in the spirit of Suck.com's original Net.Moguls series. Any nominations?

eCommerce Accelerating: "It's taken a while, but most of those seemingly nutty mid-90s predictions about the potential for ecommerce are being borne out." —Henry Blodgett

San Jose hotels report occupancy jump: "San Jose's 14 major hotels saw major gains in their occupancy rates in November, another sign that Silicon Valley's struggling hotel industry is starting to recover." —Silicon Valley Business Journal

The Hyatt on 101 at North First Street in San Jose has to be the nastiest hotel I've ever stayed in. A ground-floor room with a sliding glass door—with a broken lock—opening onto the parking lot. A non-smoking room with a cigarette butt on the floor under the desk. But the Tiki theme did make up for it. Not.

Ten predictions for the new year: "900,000 more websites will add RSS feeds. Bloggers will cover all of them. One of the sites will be the blog of an obscure profession, such as shoe cobbling. This will be groundbreaking news, because now shoe cobblees will be able to participate in a Conversation with their shoe cobbler. Thirty-seven VC firms will invest in the cobbler." —Blake Ross

Cash pours in for student with $1 million Web idea: "'I didn't expect it to happen like that,' Tew said. 'To have the job offers and approaches from investors—the whole thing is kind of surreal. I'm still in a state of disbelief.'" —Yahoo! News

Investors? Now that's a Bubble story.

Tom Taulli On Technology: "In light of recent high-priced acquisitions (for example, Skype), it makes more sense for startups to lose money and go for growth—not build a stable, profitable business" —Forbes.com

OK, I know, two links to one article. But the above quote was just too good not to point to. The return of Get Big Fast. Nice.

Year in review: The Internet reborn: "Five years after the dot-com bust, the Internet is showing vigor and inspiration not seen since the 1990s." —News.com

I was going to write a Year in review post, but I'm lazy so I'm just going to link to c|net's. Happy New Year, y'all!

Tom Taulli On Technology: "Tech will look like 1998. Smaller—less developed—companies will get large sums of funding." —Forbes.com News

When I was twenty-eight
It was a very good year
It was a very good year for smaller, less developed companies
With large sums of cash
And the Friday beer bash
But it came undone
When I was thirty-one

Of bubbles and developers: "Silicon Valley is a different place these days. After years of dot-com fallout, 2005 saw tech companies regain their self confidence—a fact signified by rapacious M&A, guilt-free spending on marketing activities and bold strategic statements." —The Register

Confidence. Rapaciousness. Guilt-free spending. It's morning in the Valley.

Chinese Blog Bubble Popped Before It Began?: "Over the summer we wrote about a bizarre story about a Chinese blogging firm that was getting attention for claiming that it was going to go public with a $1 billion valuation. There was no reality to back up the claim—just a CEO saying it would be so. There were a lot of other problems with the article, as well (including misleading statements about how much money the company had raised and how much revenue it was making), but it should come as no surprise to find out that the company (which did, indeed, raise the $10 million it was looking for just a few months ago) is now laying off one-quarter of its staff." —Techdirt

2006 Trends to Watch Part V: Crash 2.0: "We're going to see a shakeout among the startups that are hoping to build a business around online advertising. Those who have established a sizable audience footprint and have started monetizing it I am sure will be fine. I have no doubt Google, Yahoo and Microsoft—the axis known as GYM—will no doubt succeed. However, for everyone else planning to build a yet-to-be-launched business that's built on online advertising, the noose is tightening." —Steve Rubel

Monetize those eyeballs while you can, monkey-boy!

High-Tech Industry in Israel Goes From Bust to Boom: "Israel's high-tech sector is having its best year since the dot-com implosion in 2000"—The New York Times

The Tech Bubble in the WSJ: "The Wall Street Journal has put out its list of the top 25 most-clicked articles from 2005. The bubble still prevails, with seven of the top ten articles being tech-related—and two of the top three having to do with Google (arguably the top two articles, if you consider that a 'hurricane news tracker' isn't really a story at all)." —Paul Kedrosky

Florence during the Renaissance: "This is what Florence must have felt like during the Renaissance with so much happening in so many technology areas." —Vinnie Mirchandani

I wonder if Florence had people insisting there was no renaissance.

What's An Ookle?: "Whatever Ookles.com is, Johnson says it includes tags and search but isn't about either; it taps into memes and core shifts of the Internet industry; it's heavily viral." —WebProNews.com

I sold a deal once to a company called ememes.com. The finance people never could figure out how to pronounce it. For the record, it was "EE-MEEMZ". I think their check cleared before they bit the dust. Good luck, Scott.

The Bubble Cycle is Replacing the Business Cycle: "Let's put to rest the myth that the Fed is blind to asset bubbles and never intentionally acts to prick them. The truth can be obtained by anyone with an internet browser and a few hours on their hands to read the voluminous Fed Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting minutes." —AlwaysOn Network

I want a ride on that cycle.

Buy.com Not Going Public—Maybe The Bubble Isn't Fully Inflated Yet: "Last month we pointed to Buy.com's IPO filing as yet another sign of a potential bubble. After all, this was a Bubble 1.0 era company with plenty of questions about it, that still wasn't profitable, trying to go public (for the second time) in the Bubble 2.0 era. However, it would appear that we haven't reached the truly bubblerific stage yet, because Buy.com has indefinitely postponed its IPO, citing (of course) current 'stock market conditions' which is a really obvious euphemism for 'our bankers couldn't find anyone to buy our stock.'" —Techdirt

Sounds like holiday sales numbers aren't going to be where they should have been.

Bubble Talk and Joe Kraus: "In an environment like this, he says, longevity is a strategy. Easy money won't always be around." —BusinessWeek Blogspotting

Another $250 million for Vonage: "With this round of financing the company has raised a whopping $658 million from private investors. Is this proof that the company continues to burn cash as it competes with the giants? This is the last round before IPO, a line I have heard before." —Om Malik

$658M. All I can say is, "Wow."

Dow's glide to 11,000 looks smooth: "Investors will sort through data on housing, durable goods and inflation plus earnings from companies like FedEx Corp. and Morgan Stanley next week, but none are expected to pack enough punch to undo year's gains and derail Dow's push toward 11,000." —Yahoo! News

The last time the Dow closed above 11,000 looks like it was some time in the Spring of 2001. Anyone have a pointer to a source where I can find the exact date? If so, email me.

Tiny Bubbles...: "Mike Arrington also wonders if there's a bubble brewing after all in the land of Web 2.0. His latest red flag is stupid parties." —BusinessWeek Tech Beat

It's not a bubble party until the CEO is cage-dancing with the hired party girls. I can't find mention of the party I'm thinking of in Google, but it involved ATG's CEO. Man, those were the days.

How Much Did Meebo Get?: "For a while, the word on the street has been that Meebo, barely 13 weeks old has been out raising some cash. But did they? Apparently yes! The amount of money they have raised is $3.5 million, at about $9 million pre-money valuation from Sequoia Capital, and Roelof Botha has joined the company’s board." —Om Malik

Buy.com Cuts Expected IPO Price: "Underwriters for Buy.com Inc., an online technology and entertainment goods retailer, on Friday cut the expected per-share price of the company's pending initial public offering to $8 from $11 to $13." —Yahoo! News: Business

Maybe they should call it Hold.com. Har har.

Big Buybacks: "Awash in cash, S&P 500 companies repurchased $311 billion in shares over the 12 months ended in September." —Forbes

Business Barometer: "The BBC is back, filming at Buck’s. Like the traffic on 101, the number of film crews showing up for breakfast at Buck’s is a barometer of the Silicon Valley bustle. And it was a déjà vu moment. The questions about the Internet opportunities sounded eerily familiar. Cut and paste ‘Skype’ for ‘Hotmail’ in the conversation..." —Steve Jurvetson's Flickr Photostream

Thanks to PK for the pointer.

Didn't Pay Your Mortgage? Don't Worry.: "The housing boom is being fueled by the willingness of lenders to let borrowers get behind—and stay behind—on their payments. Homeowners go deeper and deeper in debt and become less and less home 'owners,' but they get to keep the roof over their heads." —Slate

OK, I know I said I was swearing off my cynical side and would remain strictly irrationally exuberant. But this is kinda scary.

Bush denies he lives in a 'bubble': "'I don't feel in a bubble. You feel in a bubble in the sense I can't go walking out the front gate and go shopping like I'd love to do for my wife—although I may, and I'm not going to tell you what I'm going to buy her,' said Bush." —Yahoo! News

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

Reflection on LesBlog2.0: "The entrepreneurs are back. With more than 5 new interesting projects resulting from some of my conference conversations, and more than 35 entrepreneurs participating in the post conference CGS dinner that Jeff, Rodrigo, and myself organised on Wednesday dinner, it was clear that the entrepreneurs were back, and working hard to build new ventures." —Marc Goldberg (Occam)

Barron's: There is No Real Estate Bubble: "Perhaps the most interesting article in this weekend's Barron's was an article by two contrarian investors. They argue (among other things) that there is no real estate bubble. They make this poinut by saying that if you use a non-governmental inflation measure—such as the increase in the value of precious metals—and adjust property values..." —Daily Dose of Optimism

Google’s Nasdaq 100 bounce: "Famed Nasdaq 100 will add Google to the index on Monday. Index fund buying and another Google frenzy?" —Om Malik

Cash-laden equity firms shake up M&A universe: "For cash-rich investors, it's buying time." —MarketWatch

M and A are in my top five favorite letters. Right behind I, P, and O.

Even in Web 2.0 Scale & Size Matter: "However, the lack of planning for scale is a clear sign that we are living in a 'built to flip' age. No one, is thinking (or planning) about long term business models!" —Om Malik

Just because some aren't doesn't mean none are.

Sun: putting the dot in web 2.0: "Sun didn't go volume crazy in the 1990s because of a marketing slogan - it sold hot boxes too. It's back in that game." —James Governor's (RedMonk)

The network is the computer and Network is a dog. Therefore the computer is a dog. QED.

Wired Magazine: Barometer of Industry Health?: "I started to leaf through the latest Wired magazine last night when it suddenly struck me it was a nice, hefty, advertising-packed 296 pages. This took me back to the height of the dot-com boom when magazines such as Wired, Business 2.0 (which went bi-weekly), Fast Company and the Industry Standard regularly published heavy, back-busting issues. " —Mark Evans

Which in turn took me back to 2000, when Vignette ran four (4) full-page ads in the same issue of Wired, each with its own androgynous model and the vague yet pedantic tagline, "E-business ideas that turn on your brain."

Doerr talks up Web 2.0: "At the TechNet Innovation Summit in San Jose, Calif., John Doerr, a partner at venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, talks to ZDNet Editor in Chief Dan Farber about how he thinks this is a period of 'intense innovation' that will empower consumers."—News.Com