Bubble watch: "Not with a bang, but a slow hiss: The housing market deflates." —How the World Works

WTF 2.0: "What part of 'Version 2' don't these people get? Doesn't anyone remember the web bubble and bust from the v1.0 days? Remember what happened when Alan Greenspan finally looked around and said, essentially, 'WTF is going on here?' Are they really that eager to duplicate that experience?" — Russell Beattie Notebook

I'd give $100,000 for a picture of Alan Greenspan wearing a WTF t-shirt.

Ri.dic.u.lous: "Alright, I know you really really need to know this so I just have to oblige. Presenting - tada - social bookmark manager #4,523: Scuttle. OK, now how many of these sites do we need? This is getting ri.dic.u.lous." —Steve Rubel

Happy days are here again?: "Economic indicators are perky now, but the day of reckoning still awaits." —How the World Works

Happy days are here again!
The skies above are clear again!
So let's sing a song of cheer again
Happy days are here again!

The Rebirth Of Enterprise Focused Chat?: "It really does seem, these days, that all those old internet ideas that failed are suddenly coming back—sometimes making the same mistakes they did the first time around." —Techdirt

This makes me all sentimental thinking about my days at ichat. How much did AOL pay for Mirabilis again?

The Strange Case of the Blind Investor at Market Top: "Remember a brief six years ago? 'The Mysterious Case of the Irrationally Exuberant Dot.com Investor' by an astute Yale economist. The market lost $8 trillion, still hasn't recovered it's peak, while investors sink into amnesia." —MarketWatch

Boom Times: "I experienced the dotcom bubble from pretty close up. This isn't like that... at least, not yet. But the fun is back in Silicon Valley. People are willing to dream crazy dreams, and dare to think they can change the world." —Kevin Werbach

I'm going to start calling him Kevin "We're Back".

YouTube is not a real business: "I could set this ...

YouTube is not a real business: "I could set this up in a weekend with two kids in high-school and a couple of cases of Red Bull." —Jason Calacanis (Weblogs, Inc.)

Reminds me of a Dave Barry quote that showed up in the Fortune Feed this morning:

"I played lead guitar in a band called The Federal Duck, which is the kind of name that was popular in the '60s as a result of controlled substances being in widespread use. Back then, there were no restrictions, in terms of talent, on who could make an album, so we made one, and it sounds like a group of people who have been given powerful but unfamiliar instruments as a therapy for a degenerative nerve disease." —Dave Barry, "The Snake"

In Japan, Day-Trading Like It's 1999: "'This is a real turning point for Japan,' said Yoshiyuki Sayama, a researcher at the Kinzai Research Institute who has studied online trading. 'Japanese are learning how to take care of themselves financially. They are finally getting a real taste of capitalism.'" —The New York Times

Sometimes capitalism tastes really great. Sometimes, no so great. Bon appetit!

Another $12 million for Six Apart: "Six Apart, the San Francisco-based start-up behind TypePad, MoveableType and Live Journal has raised another $12 million in Series C financing." —Om Malik

Feeeel the dilution.

How The IPO Market Got Its Buzz Back: "Investors' appetite for IPOs isn't limited to Chipotle. With 32 offerings priced since Jan. 1, up 14% from the same time last year, 2006 is shaping up to be the busiest year for new issues since before the tech crash." —Yahoo! News

Yeah! Fast-food Tex-Mex! Yeah! Okay, so it's not exactly VA Linux. But at least you were able to get some shares of CMG, right? Right?

Office building boom picks up: "Three Austin office projects are poised to break ground as the office market sees the biggest surge of development since the tech bust began in 2000." —Austin American-Statesman

Overbuilding means cheap office space for startups. And other companies too, I suppose.

wankr beta: "If you're an idiot VC who is willing to throw money at any website that features the words 'collaborative', 'social', 'tagging' or 'AJAX', then please get in touch with us at: wankr@flat3.org. Please set the subject to 'I have more money than sense'." —wankr

Nice. Thanks to Tony D'souza, among others, for the pointer.

iVillage Feeding Frenzy: Bids Could Come Lower, Says Report: "A $700 million price would imply an enterprise value of 24 to 29 times iVillage's EBITDA for 2006..." —PaidContent.org

The fact that iVillage actually has earnings (at least BITDA) blows me away. In fact, the fact that they're still a going concern blows me away. I mean, seriously, "content, commerce, and community"? How Bubble 1.0!

Boom town: "Is Dubai, in fact, the fulcrum of the future global trading and financial system? Is it, in embryo, what London was to the 19th century and Manhattan to the 20th? Not the modern centre of the Arab world but, more than that, the Arab centre of the modern world." —Guardian Unlimited

Not since William Gibson's Disneyland with the Death Penalty have so many geeks been so enthralled by totalitarianism. [Holy cow! Has it really been thirteen years since that article came out? Oh man, I feel old. -ed.]

Silicon Valley's brat pack is back: "Venture capitalists, panicking after the bubble burst, did their typical herd-mentality thing. They funded only mature, experienced teams. Now, it's difficult to find a recent company backed here in Silicon Valley not run by a 20-something." —SiliconBeat

Sadly, today's 20-somethings were teenagers during Bubble 1.0, and probably couldn't tell you who Jim Barksdale is. Youth is wasted on the young.

When You Make the Cover of Time: "The shark has been jumped." —John Battelle

Vonage—An IPO filing like it's 1999: "Critics say profit-challenged Vonage is going to have a tough time convincing Wall Street it's a good investment." —News.com

Vonage IPO: "Vonage has been raising and spending money like a drunken sailor, hell-bent on growing its customer base. It's a classic Web 1.0 land-grab play. There is no doubt that Vonage has a real business; the question is whether it's a really big business." —Kevin Werbach

Are the sustainable differentiation is...?

The Real Estate Dot Com Bubble?: "Just as it's become clear that the housing bubble of the last couple of years may finally be in decline, has anyone noticed a glut of real estate related dot coms? The latest to hit the scene is Zillow, which tries to accurately predict the value of your home." —Techdirt

"You got your real estate bubble in my dot-com bubble!" Two great tastes that taste great together.

Newroo the latest start-up to help bring order to news; the Web 2.0 peak is nigh: "We must now be nearing the peak of this Web 2.0 boom. Remember how many pet food dot-coms there were in 1999? Remember how many diskdrive companies there were a decade or so before, and how many PC companies there were as investors scrambled to fund them—as part of a mad land-grab and before people figured out which one was best? It is the same now with all these cool, jazzed Web 2.0 companies, whether you are talking online news aggregrators, RSS plays, online advertising, blog search, customize e-commerce, online classifieds—you name it." —SiliconBeat

As Steve Perry once said, "Wheel in the sky keeps on turnin’... I don’t know where I’ll be tomorrow."

"I No Longer Fear Hell for I work in Venture Capital" —Sand Hill Slave

Truly inspired. Most highly recommended. Subscribe now.

NextNY = Bratpack 2.0^NYC: "Oddly enough, I did the math and there have been more launch parties than actual startups.  Alright... fess up!  Who launched twice?" —Charlie O'Donnell (Union Square Ventures)

This may be Web 2.0's first true innovation: the all-launch-party startup (cf. The Onion's all-foyer mansion).

An Idea So Bad It Got Shut Down... Now Gets $50 Million: "There's still no clear reason why MovieBeam makes any sense at all. It didn't make any sense at all when it was announced two and a half years ago, and there's been little improvement. We actually assumed that it had been taken out back and shot last year when Disney shut down all the tests—so it's a bit surprising to see it spring back to life with so much cash." —Techdirt

Maybe Disney and Cisco just iterating quickly on Allen Morgan's used dot-com investment thesis.

First Tuesday resurrected in London Archives: "Now the First Tuesday event is making a comeback under new management and a new name, Second Chance Tuesday. Its website crassly invites Londoners to come and 'party like it's 1999'. The pull of nostalgia is irresistible , it seems." —alarm:clock euro

That's not crassness, that's the indomitable British spirit!

"Binomial Marketing Experiment" and Other Euphemisms: "Sounded like Overstock, but I still didn’t quite believe that a web retailer with negative operating margins had bothered spending money on a Super Bowl ad." —Jeff Matthews

The Jeff Matthews vs Overstock bout is entering its 39th round and the action shows no signs of letting up. Riveting.

IPO Silly Season Returning?: "Company is less than a year old? Check. Company has almost no revenue? Check. Company is in a highly competitive space with little to no differentiation? Check. Company has huge losses over its short life span? Check. Company is almost totally dependent on one supplier who could cut off its revenue supply easily? Check." —Techdirt

Underwriters made off with millions? Check. Buyers on the open market all consisted of underwriters' clients? Check.

Silicon Valley Shrugs Off Google Hiccup: "David Hornik of August Capital sent a very succinct message that sums it up nicely. ‘I suspect that every one of my startups would be thrilled to miss their earnings by only making $1.92 Billion in the quarter,’ he says. ‘Google’s performance remains spectacular, so I can’t imagine that it will negatively impact the startup climate.’" —Om Malik

"Sure, we're a public company, we missed our numbers, and our stock took a 10% hit, but who cares? We're worth so much it doesn't even matter!" Bubble on, Hornik!