Steve Rubel’s post “The Web 2.0 World is Skunk Drunk on Its Own Kool-Aid” last week was certainly something that took me a while to digest. I read about it in Robert Scobel’s tweets half an hour after it was published, but for some reason I couldn’t touch it until today, even though I had to think about it ever since…

He wrote “Let’s face it, we’re skunk drunk and it’s because of money. It’s almost like we all need to enter Betty Ford Clinic 2.0 together”… “The bubble really began in earnest on October 9, 2006 when Google bought YouTube. That’s when every person with an entrepreneurial itch woke up and smelled the hype and money. Prior to then, startups were more focused on the entrance, not the exit”… “I miss the days of 2004 when the class that includes Flickr, del.icio.us and others started. They really were about changing the web, not making a quick buck (they did so only because they added value)”, and he closes with “However, most of the rest of today’s net startups are only after the almighty dollar and while that’s capitalism, it saddens me because it has done little but breed hubris.”

This post caused immediate and very mixed reactions in the bloggerssphere…

Richard MacManus wrote in his post Poll: Are We Still Changing the Web? “the Web is still changing - despite the seeming lack of new innovative startups”, and he mentions innovative technology happening in the mobile web space and how social networks are showing signs of opening up.

Ok, so there is still innovation going on, but what is the driving force behind it?

John Heilemann wrote in his post Web Bubble 2.0 “Well, maybe it is a bubble. But out in Silicon Valley, they don’t think of that as a bad thing at all.”… “A year ago, the burgeoning social-networking outfit Facebook was nearly bought by Yahoo for $1 billion; today, the price tag is $15 billion”… “More than 1.3 billion consumers around the world now use the Internet, and the global growth curve is steep. Meanwhile, the main source of unbridled mania in the nineties, IPOs, are a nonfactor this time around. Instead, the boom is being driven by giants with riverine profit flows and vast reservoirs of cash”.

Howard Lindzon wrote in his post Social Networks… Why Not Undervalued? “To think that Facebook is the ultimate, or even biggest winner of this era of social networks is lazy thinking. There is too much leverage from so little to think that billions more investor capital won’t pour in to this space in the next 20 years”… “What niche will trigger the next big social networking craze and trend? That’s what you should be thinking about as an entrepreneur. The tools have never been more available and starting a company never been cheaper”

And then there was this article in the New York Times where PayPal founder Levchin says that he wouldn’t consider his latest start up Slide.com a success until it is worth “at least $1.54 billion”, and about his thoughts before he started Slide.com “I knew I wanted to be a CEO, I just didn’t know the CEO of what”… “I’d run any company; it’s completely irrelevant to me, It’s really about this drive to win”.

Good, I would like to add my 2 cents here, I think Steve Rubel is aware of the fact that the situation now is completely different from the dotcom crash, and he doesn’t claim there is no innovation going on at all anymore, but what he says is that the motives have changed, and this results in an increasing number of start ups who are only after the big bucks. Most commentators read who disagree with Steve simply refer back to there is still a lot of money to make with internet startups.

Meg Whiteman recently said that what we saw in the last ten years was only a warm up for what is coming in the next ten years, and I agree, but at the same time I think the once so beautiful idea of the world wide web has changed, it has turned into a money making machine, a successful one though…

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Great, while I am still working on 4 posts, there is already other stuff going on I would like to talk about… I guess it is a full time job to read all the feeds about what’s going on in the world of web 2.0 every day, and it requires a second full time job to write about it.

Interesting topic, journalism, currently I am reading Keen’s “The Cult of the Amateur”, Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law at Stanford Law School wrote a great post about it in his blog.“And then it hit me: Keen is our generation’s greatest self-parodist. His book is not a criticism of the Internet. Like the article in Nature comparing Wikipedia and Britannica, the real argument of Keen’s book is that traditional media and publishing is just as bad as the worst of the Internet.”

There was also an interesting post by Nate Anderson in ars technica about the recent federal decision where Judge Henry Hurlong, Jr. said that a journalist turns out to be anyone who does journalism, and bloggers who do so have the same rights and privileges under federal law as the ‘real’ journalists.

Well, the point is, it is amazing how fast information is distributed nowadays, usually I know about something new going on in our industry within less then an hour, thanks to all the feeds that are available out there, but it is still up to me and my responsibility to make the decision whether to believe in the latest news or not, and it always was, even in times of the “old media”.

Yesterday for example there was this article in the New York Times about Walmart selling a PC for $200 with GOS as OS, optimized for Google applications, and I thought “wow, this is gonna hurt Microsoft”. So I submitted the story to digg. Five minutes later I read in Twitter the following: Went to Walmart today. No Google/Everex/Linux PCs to be found. Register biscuits totally clueless about the whole thing. Go figure. Got the point? Amazing, instant information distribution…. I love it…

Another interesting thing that happened yesterday was Google hitting the $700 mark and becoming the 5th most valuable company on the planet. I love Google, and when they where at $430 and took a loss down to $360 some of my friends said that this is the beginning of the end, I said I think they will go up to $800 - I told you so… Lets see how Maka-Maka kicks in (will write about it later today), and how the new Google-MySpace deals works out, $800 is probably not even the end… waiting for my favorite company to surpass Microsoft, currently Google’s market-cap is $219 Billion, Microsoft’s $346 Billion, so getting close… Uhm, I am not a Google groupy, or am I?

More I-told-you-so’s: VMWare is also doing great, when I said this will be huge they were at $70, now it is $122, and they are about to outperform Google…

Ok, that was in brief what struck me yesterday, now I can start to work on the articles I actually had in the queue…

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Yeah, playtime for Marc! Got my Seesmic account… this is probably not the best video ever but it’s my first one…in Germany we say all good things are three, so I have two more attempts…

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Today Scoble said in one of his tweets “hello snitter goodbye twitterrific!”, Ok, I was just about to install Twitterrific, but than lets give Snitter a test run. Well, nice, but it has this strange black bar on the left side, and when I click on a link nothing happens, so Snitter seems to be a little buggy…

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Ok, things are getting back to normal here in San Diego, and I am back blogging my 2 cents… My dad was visiting me this week, for the first time since I am here, that was really bad timing for a visit… well, we still had fun…

So today I spend my whole day doing my homework, reading feeds about what’s going on in the world of web 2.0 - I really hate that term. Things are moving fast, just a few days is really a long time in this industry…

So, first I was checking Loic Le Meurs Blog trying to figure out what’s going on with Seesmic, I still don’t have an account (hey Loic, can you hook me up, please? I promise, I will have some interesting stuff to post), and I am getting anxious because we are going to the web 2.0 in Berlin beginning November and I wanted to post from there, telling the world what’s going on in good old Germany. Actually I already wanted to have a computer set up with Seesmic at the Bakersfield Business and Technology Expo this coming Tuesday, but Berlin, this would be really awesome. Seesmic is like a Video Twitter, so I am really excited to get a chance to test this.

I know, first I said this Twitter thing doesn’t make too much sense for me, but after playing with it for a while I changed my mind, it is really a cool way to communicate with each other, or to listen to what others have to say. Anne Zelenka posted a list why Twitter is a good thing, and Nat Torking also had some good points to add, yeah, you guys are right, I got it and I couldn’t agree more.

Well, while waiting for Seesmic I thought I’ll check out what else is going on, and Bingo, Robert Scoble had what I was looking for, there I learned about Utterz. Scoble is writing about Jeremiah Owyang testing Utterez. Utterez is a mobile blogging engine, the cool thing is you can tie it into your blog, and post voice messages, pics and videos from your cell.

Besides that I found another very interesting thing, Duncan Riley posted about Gooruze, a platform for online marketers, of course I created an account right away. Nice place to get news about SEO. Wow, what a day…

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