Time to spread some fear, uncertainty and doubt in the Valley! Here's why the Bubble Threat Level currently stands at Yelp Trademark Red:

• Yelp leads the new round of bubbliciousness with a $10 million injection from BenchMark Capital, and the social review site still isn't turning a profit, despite monthly traffic of 1.5 million unique users (which probably translates to over 3 million pageviews) on a commercial site primed for targeted ads. It's fun to see a bad business go down; it hurts to see a good business kill itself with excessive cash. [VentureBeat]
• Upcoming search engine Powerset, which impressed even me with its tales of "natural language search," makes search maven Danny Sullivan roll his eyes. [Search Engine Watch]
• Even the behemoth Wal-Mart, which foolishly entered social networking earlier this year, gives up after just three months. If they can't afford to run a dot-com, who can? [Ad Age]
• Only cranks believed that MySpace is worth $20 billion. But one of those cranks is one of the site's founder. [MySpace Report]

Photo by Yelpdotcom [Flickr]

That's right, I'm talking about the Bubble.

Today's Bubble Threat Level is Elevated. The causes:

• The Valley's best on-camera snarkers just sold out to the bubbliest podcast company, PodTech. Blogger Robert Scoble, who just left Microsoft for PodTech, hired Eddie Codel and Irina Slutsky of Geek Entertainment TV. Some say it's their wit and experience, but everyone knows it's just because Eddie's got great tits. [Laughing Squid]
• Mark Cuban, who sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion, is calling the Internet overhyped. This is like Paris Hilton saying there are too many fake celebrities. [Mark Cuban]
• Cartoonist Hugh MacLeod has invaded Chicago with his wine-shilling art. [Flickr]

Photo: "it was this big" [vvt on Flickr]