• Microsoft wants to spend more money.
• Ballmer says the "entire leadership team will learn from" a massive stock drop. One would hope for a team that already learned something in the company's 30-year history. But one cannot ask for everything.
• Ballmer says the leadership will work hard. Whoever's left after his next firing round, anyway.
• Look, bitch, when Microsoft says it's gonna spend big this quarter, you don't question, you shut up and keep buying stock.
• Microsoft's going head to head with Google, Sony, and Nintendo. Hope they got a four-way controller and a towel for that bout, 'cause it's gonna be bloody.

Ballmer defends Microsoft's spending increase [Seattle Times]

• Title: The Way We Boom Now
• Subtitle: What this age of Internet euphoria looks like to those of us who were in the game last time around. For one, bubbles aren't completely bad.
• The Internet industry is a bubble again. But it's not a bubble. But it is a bubble...or is it? No. Yes.
• Poster children: Fred Wilson, the blogging VC who fed the first bubble, now chastising the fools who fed the first bubble; MySpace, YouTube, and DailyCandy (sing with me: one of these things is not like the others...); bloggers and podcasters
• Illustration: (Pictured) The backs of two chic Net users, one in 1998 and one in 2006. Message unclear.
• Lead: Kurt Andersen and his friends are prescient but too dumb to notice.
• Bold names: John Battelle, dot-com journalist survivor of Boom 1 and founder of blog ad network Federated Media Publishing; Walter Isaacson, Internet czar of Time Warner in the 90s; Michael Hirschorn, Andersen's former business partner at Inside; Fred Wilson, "rockstar" VC; Jerry Colonna, Fred's co-founder at VC firm Flatiron; Dany Levy, founder of DailyCandy (more on her later today); Michael Wolff, Burn Rate burnout
• Lesson 1: A $100-million dollar valuation for a shopping newsletter is "really not crazy" if Kurt Andersen decides it's not. This is the magic logic of trend stories.
• Lesson 2: If Valleywag dedicates 250 words to a tip, it's worth one sentence to a real paper.
• Lesson 3: Burn Rate author Michael Wolff sucks at forecasting. Also, he calls the Internet "the business."
• Best line: "I'm a rock star again." — Fred Wilson
• Non sequitur: The whole slant is "We've learned our lesson" — but Fred's quoted saying half the boom participants weren't around for the 90s bubble. Where'd they learn this lesson, in grade school?
• WTF: "To call a Web business a 'dot-com' in 2006 would be the equivalent of calling a black person 'colored.'" I tried to verify this, but there weren't any black people around.

The Way We Boom Now [New York Magazine]
Earlier Lazy News: Web 2.0 has a local address [Valleywag]