Irrational Exuberance Defined: "In memory of the tech wreck that occurred 6 years ago today when the NASDAQ closed at 5048 (intraday high of 5132), I would like to nominate JDS Uniphase as the poster boy of the era. Consider the following idiotic justification for writing off $40 billion of goodwill that was part of the footnotes of the 6/30/2001 10K:

The goodwill resulted from our acquiring strategic companies when valuations were high.'However, while we purchased highly valued shares, we were also in effect exchanging our highly valued shares at the same time so that none of the transactions resulting in the creation of large goodwill amounts resulted from a corresponding outlay of our cash. Had these transactions been done at different times when valuations were lower with exactly the same share exchange ratios, the goodwill amounts would have been considerably smaller. However, waiting for lower valuations may have reduced their strategic value or otherwise have allowed competitors to buy these companies thereby, eliminating an opportunity to strengthen JDS Uniphase.

"JDSU was $138 on 3/10/00 (adjusted for stock splits) and closed at $3.80 yesterday, almost triple its 52 week low of $1.32." —footnoted.org

We won't have achieved true bubbleness until a company once again spends $40 billion on acquisitions. Which will later be written off as "goodwill". (Thanks again to Valerie Thompson for the pointer.)

Jamis McNiven, of Bucks Restaurant fame, enters Web 2.0 travel fray with "LandFrog": "You know things are hot in the Web 2.0 world when Jamis MacNiven, the colorful owner of Bucks Restaurant in Woodside, starts hitting the pavement along Sand Hill Road pitching a social-networking travel site." —SiliconBeat

Another Winner!: "Alright! We've got ourselves another winner! Congratulations to Writely—the latest winner in the Web 2.0 Acquisition Lottery! Sorry to all the other web-WYSIWYG editors out there for losing out on this time. Don't fret, however, another round for deals with AOL, MSN or Yahoo! will have begun today, I'm sure. Step right this way folks, you too can play! Don't delay!" —

Maybe I should code up an AJAX mailmerge.

Poor Web 2.0 fools: "Mike Arrington has been away talking about some of the latest developments at Salesforce.com. Unfortunately, Salesforce.com doesn't tend to qualify as being 'cool' in Web 2.0 circles probably because they don't have tags and they're making too much money. That's so old school." —Phil Sim

I'd rather be cool like Warren Buffett than cool like Tim O'Reilly.

Bubble 2.0 ?:

—Loic Le Meur (Six Apart)

NBC Universal to Buy iVillage for $600 Mln: "NBC Universal has struck a deal to acquire the iVillage network of Web sites aimed at women for $600 million." —Designtechnica Articles

Wow.

How to Deflate a Housing Bubble: "I have no doubt that this strategy—of homebuilders seeking to make up in volume what they are losing in price—will have the most salutary and beneficial impact on the current housing situation in the United States, which, in the New, Always-Upbeat World of Free Speech, I should describe as not a bubble but more a nice warm bath." —Jeff Matthews

"A little too frothy": "If you're in the paid search business, there's good news and bad news here. The good news is that there appears to be a lot of irrational bidding going on for ads. In the short run, frothiness is great for the ad sellers. The bad news is that frothiness naturally corrects itself. " —Rough Type (Nicholas Carr)

Social Networking and Blogging: Who Cares?: "It was fun in '95, '96, and the next few years. Then it wasn't fun and now it's fun again. Life, as we all know, is a combination of fun and hard work. But for 2001, 2002, 3, 4, it was really just not fun; it was just all this hard work." —Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM VP of technical strategy and innovation

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."