NYMetro: The Way We Boom Now ---from below post-...self-described late adopters
[what's the web?..what's a blog?..what's RSS?] like Kurt Andersen

I phoned some of my bubble-mates from 1999–2001 to find out if this seems to them like déjà vu all over again. “It feels very similar,” said Fred Wilson. He was a founder of Flatiron Partners, the New York venture-capital firm that led the funding of Inside—at the moment the bubble started to deflate... He now runs a $125 million fund. He was on his cell phone, driving from San Francisco down to Mountain View. “The money flowing like water, VCs hypercompetitive, the entrepreneurs with grandiose visions. Everybody’s coming out of the woodwork. I’m a rock star again. It scares me a little bit.”

John Battelle, the founder of The Industry Standard, spent his first post-bubble years teaching and writing. Now he’s started a company called Federated Media Publishing that sells ads for a curated portfolio of high-end blogs. He seems as excited about his new business as he was about the Standard and his aborning media empire at the turn of the century. “I have,” he told me, “the same tingly feeling I had with magazines.” Boo-ya? Or yikes?

The vocabulary and doctrine are different, of course. To call a Web business a “dot-com” in 2006 would be the equivalent of calling a black person “colored.” Rather, people thrill to ideas incorporating the “architecture of participation” and “collective intelligence” and companies with “lightweight business models” (Craigslist has eighteen employees).

The reason for nearly the new revenue is the birth of a real online advertising industry. The advertisers have followed the people, and the people have come because high-speed Internet access has turned the typical Web experience from clunky to lubricious. The huge financial difference between now and the nineties is the absence of IPO mania.

Google and all the rest of the thriving survivors, came into existence during the last bubble. Euphorias are not entirely wasteful, or all bad. As Fred says, “It takes bubbles to make interesting things happen. There’s benefit to this kind of environment.” But “when the amateurs get in,” Fred says, that’ll be a sign of the next beginning of the next end, that our latest bipolar swing has turned pathologically manic."