Sara Winge, a vice president at O'Reilly Media, posted a message asking her boss to confirm his plans to speak at a Stanford event in June for a fee of $25,000. (It's since been deleted, but it's still archived in Twitter's search engine.) Since she'd posted about getting a drink earlier in the day, we're thinking that she might have forgotten to use Twitter's direct-messaging feature.

The subject, the "future of manufacturing," hardly seems like an area to which O'Reilly, who helped popularize the term "Web 2.0," might lend his expertise, but hey, times are tough and money is money. On an O'Reilly website, Winge is described as the "maestro of the O'Reilly media message." And yes, the message is clear: O'Reilly is a mid-tier blowhard for hire.

(Photo by kubina)

Web 2.0 was a bubble that never inflated — a shimmery illusion that popped well before we stopped talking about it. Precious few people got rich from the notions its proponents championed, such as user-generated content and social networks.

Calacanis was the only person of note to cash out on the blogging craze, selling a set of blogs to AOL for $25 million. That was a paltry figure in the grand scheme of things, but enough to set him up in a comfortable home in Brentwood and buy him a $109,000 electric sports car. And enough to make him a Web celebrity, with thousands of followers on Twitter and friends on Facebook — the quantifiable metrics of fame preferred by those who are not really famous.

The startups of the Web 2.0 era have proven similarly vacuous in their success. Skype, the Internet-calling service, sold for $2.6 billion to eBay in 2005; the auction giant wrote off $1.4 billion of that purchase last year. YouTube, sold to Google for $1.65 billion, is an acknowledged failure, with product managers scrambling to bedaub it with enough advertising to merely pay for its bandwidth bills. And the IPO market that powered the '90s bubble? All but invisible. The most recent big offering was in August for Rackspace, a boring company which hosts servers, and its stock has since fallen by half. With Wall Street on its knees, no one expects another IPO soon.

Will there be another bubble? Technology moves in cycles and is prone to investing fads, so yes, almost certainly. But there is nothing that looks set to inflate it. Cleantech, the next big hope of Silicon Valley, requires vastly more capital than Internet startups, and capital is now in short supply. (Falling oil prices, too, discourage the development of green energy.) While Internet users are devoting more attention to social networks, advertisers are staying away. Calacanis's venture, Mahalo, is a spiffed-up rehash of the kind of Web directory Yahoo built in 1995; he's now cooking up a new, secret project — which suggests that the loquacious entrepreneur realizes his original plan fell short. He may be onto something, if only in admitting failure. If this bubble fell short in making the likes of Calacanis rich, they have their own paucity of ideas to blame.

1. Find software that sells for $20,000 a copy. Don't try to come up with something new. If there isn't a product already, it's because there isn't a need. With something "new" you have to convince businesses or organizations they need it. An example: automated parking garage software.

2. Pick products supporting million-dollar companies. Those companies spend lots of money convincing customers they need their products. Then the customer will get quotes from everyone and might end up buying yours instead.

3. Build the product but only with the core features. Make a "lite" version initially. Use that money to continue to make it less "lite" and higher in price.

4. Get your name out in the industry. $20K software is certainly going to be "niche" software, with not a whole lot of customers out there who buy it. Get your company name out there so everyone knows you sell your systems and could be an alternative to what they already have.

5. Present yourself as consultingware. Be there on call and devoted to them and how they're using the product.

(Photo by Manuel Faisco)

After a strong resurgence in 2005 and showing strong staying power through 2007, lately most of the people I've seen use it fit into two categories: 1) people over 40 who have finally had the word passed down the cool chain from their younger friends and coworkers. 2) the "douches" originally being described themselves.

• Web 2.0.This marketing term was old when Time magazine made "You" the person of the year in 2006. CNET reporter Caroline McCarthy might have just killed it for good.
• Bubble. We can't be in a recession and a bubble at the same time, people. Pick just one economic theory to overhype, please.
• Influencers. This term is on the tip of every social media marketer's tongue as they look to find that one Facebook user who will spark a forest fire for the clients' brands. Problem is: Uncountable variables set the conditions for a forest fire. The spark is just the most visible. And research shows influencers aren't the real firestarters.
• MicroHoo. Microsoft-Yahoo is what, seven characters longer? This word is only OK if Jerry Yang and Steve Ballmer both become Jeves Bang or Stevey Yallmer. Which I don't think is going to happen. Unless more weed is involved.
• Dead simple. From now on, this phrase should only be used ironically. As in: "IsMikeArringtonADick.com makes it dead simple to find out if Mike Arrington is a dick."

Swaggle is a group SMS doohickey from Hive Mind's Jordan Schwartz that makes Dodgeball and Twitter look overly complicated and self-involved. It's kinda like the phone tree your elementary school or little league team used to maintain, without all the fuss of having to maintain a public identity.

And leave it to a subversive sticker tycoon to come up with Metanotes. Srini Kumar's new venture gives you a big, flat space to pin web ephemera, to-do lists and other stuff to share with friends (or strangers). Like a corkboard at the supermarket or the flier kiosk at the student union.

Simple, free, and easy to use — these kids just might be on to something. If only Facebook app developers were so clever. (Photo by AP/Mel Evans)

• "He got fired because he was more interested in joining The 250 than doing his job."
• "I didn't blog about my deal, because I don't care what The 250 have to say about it."
• "He's writing a book? Great, I'm sure he'll sell at least 250 copies."

"According to researchers in Palo Alto," Wilson says, "1 percent of Wikipedia users are responsible for about half of the site's edits." Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales believes the same; he told the Times, "the vast majority of work is done by this small core community." So Slate buys the party line. But these are fake statistics: The Palo Alto study counted the number of edits. If I add five hundred words to an article about fortune cookies, that counts the same as if I rename a category. All this proves is that a small set of wonks are organizing Wikipedia.

The masses are still writing it. Aaron Swartz compared the number of letters added to several articles and found that most articles are written by people with little other Wikipedia experience. That is, most of Wikipedia comes from people who dropped in and added a chunk of text. All the edits? Those are just Wikipedia diehards rearranging the other users' contributions. (A more thorough study confirms Swartz's conclusion.)

It's obvious, really. Why does Jimmy Wales believe that only 500 people wrote everything of import on Wikipedia? With 2 million articles on the site's English version, that would mean each core user wrote nearly 20,000 articles in the seven years since the site launched. That's eight articles a day per user, and clearly physically impossible. Is Wales unaware of this math, or is he so bent on maintaining Wikipedia's respectability that he can't admit how innovative it is?

So much for Wikipedia being in the hands of the few. But Wilson also aims at Digg, saying the site "is largely run by 100 people." The top hundred Digg users submitted almost half of the stories that went to the front page, he points out. Of course, Digg recently adjusted its algorithm to lower the influence of those Diggers.

Wilson tries to spin this: "The super Diggers published an open letter of grievances and threatened to boycott the site," he says, implying that the hundred top users were in united revolt. But the actual threat only came from four users. That's hardly enough to threaten the site.

As Wilson notes, founder Kevin Rose talked to these four Digg users and reached what Wilson calls a "shaky truce." What exactly is shaky? Rose and CEO Jay Adelson merely explained what they had just done and how it would encourage new users to contribute. They didn't actually concede anything to the four users.

Isn't Slate supposed to be the reasoned, second-guessing news source? Then why does Wilson assume Rose has any fear of his top users? Talking to these users wasn't Rose's way of saving his site. It was a cunning move to make these users feel important, and get his message out to the entire Digg community. Rose came away doing just what he wanted and making everyone thank him for it.

Wilson even reaches for unsubstantiated arguments against Digg; he points to rumors that the site hires secret moderators to delete stories. Rose has denied this publicly several times; it's hard to believe he'd lie about this one aspect of the site when he's been so open about all others.

It'd be easy to blame this story on Slate's need to be contrarian, but the message here was so conservative and mainstream, it seems it's just a plain old bad story, bad enough to be retracted. If only we could vote on that.

That fact alone wouldn't bother us so much if we didn't then have to sit on our hands as Diggers bestow link love on all kinds of racy material from more "respectable" sites. For example, recent front page winners on Digg included a link to Terminator fuckbots that we featured here a while back (before it became a traffic bonanza for our geeky brothers at Gizmodo—and don't even get us started on that doggie sex toy post .) The point is that we often engage in some good, relatively harmless fun that the Digg community obviously enjoys, yet we aren't allowed in the the front door because we're "one of those" sites.

Now, we don't expect folks to start linking to our daily hardcore Flesh Flicks videos or anything ... but surely there must be some middle ground where porn lovers and folks with generous workplace filters can live in harmony. True, there have been several attempts to emulate the Digg model for adult sites, but they've all come up short.

Still, people love Digg and Digg lovers like sexy stuff. They helped earn a reprieve for that Fox News Porn parody after it was famously banned, other links submitted with "porn" or "extremely NSFW" in the headline do just fine ... and if you check out the "Best Of" lists from any of our sister sites, the most popular items (with or without Digging) are frequently sex related. So why can't we play along too?

Of course, cynics might say that this very post is just another shameless attempt to bait Digg and score some sweet hot pageview love of our very own. (And they'd be right—too bad we can't Digg this link.) Just don't tell us that you didn't want to share that Jesus fuck doll ad with all your friends in the 2.0 world. Even if stuff like that is probably what got us banned in the first place.

· Digg Terms of Use (digg.com)

Update: Those techie suck ups at Valleywag respond to our reasonable request.

Related (sorta):
· "Hotdoll: The Sex Doll for Dogs" (the most popular story of 2007 @ Gizmodo)
· In SF, Third Breast Is More Common Than Third Eye (io9)
· "The Top Five Reasons Digg Is Completely Useless For Finding Anything Related To Music" (Idolator)
· "All You Need to Know About Digg" (Gawker)
· "Denton to pay bloggers based on traffic" (Valleywag)

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Previously: Is Fox News Too Hot For TV?, Hot Hexadecimal Dildo Porn: Digg This!, Dig for Porn, MoSexIndex, Splutr: More Social Porn, Fantasti.cc Videos: Community Rated Smut, Porn 2.0: Haven't We Been Here Before?

Ignore the endearing Flash animations and the cloud puff creature spouting, "Genius, we love you. So we wrote you this haiku. Refrigerator," while relaxing in a jacuzzi. Once you get pas that, it's just a job site with message boards and other helpful nonsense. Bill and Steve, take a memo: Nothing about Web 2.0 is supposed to be actually useful.

KP is hiring a new partner to invest in "consumer Internet" companies, VentureBeat reports. A leaked job description (Word) indicates the firm is very much still interested in the Web. The new hire will focus "wireless, network and IT infrastructure and consumer Internet activities." But the job isn't for everybody.

"The successful candidate," reads the job description, "will likely spend substantial time with Ted Schlein, Ray Lane and Matt Murphy." To stand that trio, it's no wonder the new hire will need to be "humble," possess a "sense of humor," and — crowdsource my coffee now, pledge!

(Photo by tracy the astonishing)

*then put on another shirt please