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Getting Naked in Silicon Valley — At about 1 a.m. this morning I was sitting on Michael Arrington's couch talking with the few people who were left over. Topic of conversation: "is this a bubble?" — Yes. Next question. — What kind of bubble is it? — Not an economic one.
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TechCrunch leads Silicon Valley Web renaissance — I went to the TechCrunch event Friday night, celebrating the publication of Naked Conversations by Shel Israel and Robert Scoble. — Many friends, acquaintances and new faces (pictures here). The party atmosphere reminded …

Naked Conversations Launch Celebration — Robert Scoble and Shel Israel launched their new book last night at Michael Arrington's house in Atherton, California, with a crowd of 200+ bloggers, press, social media and Web 2.0 types. — The Foldera guys. Note Oliver on the left also writes MobileCrunch with Michael Arrington.

Carded — One indication that Bubble 2.0 is getting out of hand: I was walking down the dark Atherton street to Michael Arrington's house for the latest TechCrunch meetup/party, and a guy approached me from across the street. Before I could tell who it was — practically before I could see him, actually — he said, "Rafe Needleman!

Techcrunch5 - Morning Time in the Valley — While on the west coast for a number of meetings and projects, I was invited to the Techcrunch5 party celebrating Shel and Robert's book launch as well as testing the limits of Michael Arington's neighbors. I wasn't aware you could pack 500 people in a house with only two bathrooms, cool.

Naked Conversations Interview/Launch Party — Holy Techcrush, were there some folks at Mike Arrington's house last night. Great launch party for *the* book on business blogging, Naked Conversations by Robert Scoble & Shel Israel. I did a podcast interview with them this morning (which I'll detail more later).

Stormhoek wines first tasting
Discussion:
Nik Cubrilovic

The Click That Broke a Government's Grip — BEIJING — The top editors of the China Youth Daily were meeting in a conference room last August when their cell phones started buzzing quietly with text messages. One after another, they discreetly read the notes. Then they traded nervous glances.

How to Suck Up to a Blogger — Blogging has flipped traditional PR on its head. It used to be that ink begat buzz. Life was simple then: you sucked up to the Wall Street Journal, one of its reporters wrote about your product, and the buzz began. … Nowadays buzz begets ink.

Attention Thieves — I've developed a new spray that detects bulls**t. I can't talk too much about the technology until the product launch, but I will demonstrate its usefullness by spraying it on this post by Sam Ruby: — Note that there's nothing left to see.
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Here we go again — "Syndication politics are every bit as twisted as any soap opera you'll see on daytime television. Only without the sex. And with a bunch of bearded fat guys in place of the pretty models. " ( Dave Walker) — As a bearded, person of size, who is involved with RSS, I guess I have a right to chime in here.
Discussion:
The Social Software Weblog, mathewingram.com/work, Tinfinger, BlogBridge and Supr.c.ilio.us

Blargon — Every walk of life and field of endeavor generates its own insiders' lingo. Those of us in the MSM — that's the superannuated, archaic mainstream media — have our own jargon, of which the first sentence of an article is the lede, the early edition is the bulldog and the guys working …
Discussion:
TeleRead

BlogBurst Can Save Big (print) Media — Pluck demo'd a new product called BlogBurst at our party last night. The service is live but Pluck has not pushed it out for publicity yet. — BlogBurst is a service that takes topical content from pre-approved blogs and provides it to publishers (online newspapers, etc.) for republication.
Discussion:
Search Engine Journal, Somewhat Frank, Jeff Clavier's Software Only, ben barren and Micro Persuasion

PlayStation 3 costs $800, sez Merrill Lynch mob — If there are some people out there rightnow who are in the know when it comes to what the hell is going on — we mean really going on — with Sony,it's those investment firms. But even barring their research analysts getting all kinds …
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PlayStation 3 to be delayed? — The North American launch …
Discussion:
I4U News

FM Blog Ad Network — I subscribe to more blogs than I should, but one I read with relative frequency is Fred Wilson's - A VC, Musings of a VC in NYC. I am not alone as he has more than 30,000 such people - an incredible number in the fragmented world of blogs.

A Interview with 180Solutions' CEO — What follows below is some of the material that ultimately got cut from my magazine piece on botnets and spyware for space considerations. Here's what I wrote about my visit to 180solutions and subsequent interviews with several company executives:
Discussion:
Spyware Confidential, Guardian Unlimited, Sunbelt BLOG, A Revolution is the Solution and Clickety Clack