Here We Go Again...

Why am I not suprised by this?

“It appears as if the venture capital industry is slowly ratcheting up investment levels for the first time in four years, and these increases seem to be directed in a prudent manner,” Mark Heesen, president of the National Venture Capital Association said in a press release. That might have been true, but the recent trend of big money investments shows that prudence might be giving away to old-fashioned avarice.

Om Malik makes clear why the next dotcom delirium is inevitable:

Before they can go out and raise cash for new funds, many of the firms have to invest the remnant money from their circa 2000-2001 funds. Otherwise, Limited Partners might be asking them the difficult question: Why should I give you more cash when you are sitting on a pile already? A good example would be Oak Investment Partners, which raised $2.56 billion to become the largest venture capital fund ever.

In other words, there is simply too much greedy money in the system, some of it left over from the last VC feeding frenzy at the trough, which in the coming days absolutely must be spent, whether or not it makes sense. Did anyone say bubble?

Stumbling after Stumbling upon StumblingUpon

A few months ago I, ahem, stumbled upon StumbleUpon, which I learn has just joined the growing dotcom 2.0 feeding frenzy with some six-figure angel funding.

The idea behind StumbleUpon is simple: you rate pages that other "stumblers" have found and recommended. This feeds back into the pages that are fed to you, as do other pages that you've stumbled upon independently, and rated. All standard social software stuff, with a hint of Google's PageRank thrown in for good measure.

It's a great displacement activity, and when I first stumbled upon it I spent some time wandering around other people's stumbles. Some were genuinely interesting, but as time went on, despite all my approving and disapproving, there weren't proportionately more sites that interested me, just a constant succession of occasional pages that on their own would have been mildly amusing. Ultimately it seemed that there was no pattern in the carpet, just more and more stuff - a kind of drip-feed Digg.com.

Maybe the novelty of stumbling wore off, but I fear it is something deeper: that it's not a very efficient way to find matter that is really of interest - as opposed to vaguely entertaining. For that, the usual news channels - and a judicious selection of hard-working blogs (like paidContent, whose posting told me about StumbleUpon's company of angels) - seems a far more reliably productive way to gather information and sites. To say nothing of Google's PageRank, or even Digg.com - which you can at least skim-read very fast.

So who's stumbling here: me or the stumblers?

Wiki Wiki Wikia

Following one of my random wanders through the blogosphere I alighted recently on netbib. As the site's home page explains, this is basically about libraries, but there's much more than this might imply.

As a well as a couple of the obligatory wikis (one on public libraries, the other - the NetBibWiki - containing a host of diverse information, such as a nice set of links for German studies), there is also a useful collection of RSS feeds from the library world, saved on Bloglines.

The story that took me here was a post about something called Wikia, which turns out to be Jimmy Wales' wiki company (and a relaunch of the earlier Wikicities). According to the press release:

Wikia is an advertising-supported platform for developing and hosting community-based wikis. Specifically, Wikia enables groups to share information, news, stories, media and opinions that fall outside the scope of an encyclopedia. Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley launched Wikia in 2004 to provide community-based wikis inspired by the model of Wikipedia--the free, open source encyclopedia founded by Jimmy Wales and operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, where Wales and Beesley serve as board members.

Wikia is committed to openness, inviting anyone to contribute web content. Authors retain their own copyrights, but allow others to freely reuse their content under the GNU Free Documentation License, allowing widespread distribution of knowledge and ideas.

Wikia supports the development of the open source software that runs both Wikipedia and Wikia, as well as thousands of other wiki sites. Among other contributions, Wikia plans to enhance the software with usability features, spam prevention, and vandalism control. All of Wikia's development work will, of course, be fed back into the open source code.

In a sense, then, this is yet more of the blogification of the online world, this time applied to wikis.

But I'm not complaining: if that nice Mr Wales can make some money and feed back improvements to the underlying MediaWiki software used by Wikipedia and many other wikis, all to the good. I just hope that the dotcom 2.0 bubble lasts long enough (so that's why they used the Hawaiian word for "quick" in the full name "wiki wiki").