aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Thursday, October 06, 2005

Bubble-mania

No doubt a couple months from now I’ll be blogging about the Web 2.0 podcasts I’ll be listening to then. Scott Rosenberg’s there now:

John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly opened the second edition of the Web 2.0 conference this afternoon with an exchange along these lines: Battelle said that last year, the mood at the conference was simply, “We made it”—we survived the Internet industry’s dark winter. This year, he said, it’s more like, “Something really important is going on—let’s not screw it up.” O’Reilly added: “We are definitely running the risk of another hype cycle.”

I’d say it’s no longer a risk, it’s a reality… it’s probably too late, John and Tim—the hype-cycle wheel is already in spin, up, up, up.

Talk about bubbles and spinning up, AOL’s buying Jason Calacanis’ Weblogs for $25 million:

Calacanis was an interesting guy. He had the dotcom pre-requisites. Amazing drive. Sassy PR machine. Huge ego. Manhattan pad… He liked to play the quintessential Silicon Alley guy.

Calacanis tried to make money out of SAR, but it died a death with 9/11… He eventually turned it into a VC web site, VentureReporter.com. He might have made a bit of money.

A few years later, without much else to do, he started Weblogs Inc. It was not long after Nick Denton, formerly of Moreover, had come up with Gizmodo.com and Gawker.com. A great rivalry ensued, each playing off the PR of the other. Everyone wrote about them, from the WSJ to, well, little me.

Now, as Rafat Ali reports - exclusively (perhaps it’s because he used to work for Jason?) that Calacanis has now gone and sold his blogging company for an estimated $25m.