Shaquille O'Neal, Mike Piazza and DeLisha Milton's Dunk.net
Launched in 1999, Santa Monica startup Dunk.net was supposed to promote Shaq's shoes and sports apparel with marketing help from a pre-Mets Mike Piazza and WNBA great DeLisha Milton. But within months of founding, Dunk.net laid off its entire staff and replaced the CEO with a marketer tasked with resuscitating the company. Didn't happen. Now Dunk.net is owned by a domain squatter.

John Elway, Michael Jordan and Wayne Gretzky's MVP.com
Back in 2000, chairman John Elway and board members Michael Jordan and Wayne Gretzy piled their cash together to launch MVP.com, an online store. They pledged to spend $50 million marketing the site over the next year. A couple of years later and several rounds of layoffs later, MVP.com, owing some $120 million folded as a failure into CBSsportsline.com.

Mets reliever Billy Wagner and sports author Burton Rock's ChatWithAStar.com
After writing a bestselling book about Yankees outfielder Paul O'Neill and his father, author Burton Rocks convinced Wagner, another New York baseball star to help fund ChatWithAStar.com, a celebrity blog portal, featuring such well known voices as Miss USA 2006, Tara Conner. The site, launched with a party at one of Jay-Z's bar in 2006, no longer exists. We're still holding out for the company's "blogmobile," though.

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."

A recent Fast Company article on Andreessen's current venture, Ning, went no better. You can practically hear the writer propping his eyelids open as Andreessen goes on, and on, and on, about "viral expansion loops."

What happened to the Andreessen who once ridiculed Windows as "a set of poorly debugged device drivers"? Why, he's gone online. Andreessen's blog is relentlessly entertaining. His verbal fisticuffs with the New York Times are must-reads; the vitriol oozes out of every line. And he posts just infrequently enough to keep us hanging on every word.

The only surprise, really, is that Andreessen took so long to start blogging. This world was not made for him. In the Web, he created one to suit.

(Photo by mathoov)

The transformation began when Amazon plunged into auctions. Amazon's dotcom-era server-and-database combo was staggering under the complexity. Engineers gambled on a Net-centric idea. Bingo. "We were building these services for ourselves," says [the Amazon employee] who wrote the Amazon Web Services business plan. "They could be valuable to other people." 10,000 new developers are signing up monthly, with the total closing on 400,000. The idea that AWS is about wringing extra bucks out of Amazon's data centers? "That ship sailed."AWS's 2007 revenue: $100 million. Other companies building data centers: Salesforce.com, EMC, IBM, Google. Bezos: "I'd be surprised if no one else does this. It's a really good idea!" Ace up his sleeve: Commodity business prices plunge toward the cost of production. "We've never had 35 or 40 percent margins."

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)

Poor photo-search technology, obviously. If only it had spent millions of dollars laboriously tagging its morgue with metadata! That's exactly the kind of service one semantic Web success, SchemaLogic, provides for the Associated Press. Before, we all wished you'd stop telling us how the Semantic Web was Web 3.0. Now you can make your case with Ashley Dupré nude pictures — and we're all listening.

• "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."

he situation was absolutely NOT about censorship in ANY way... Go Daddy's concerns were about how the RateMyCop site was far exceeding the amount of server usage for which it had contracted.

This customer paid for a shared server plan. The connections to his site were six times more than an entire 'shared server' accommodates. While he was paying for a service that cost $14.99 a month, his site actually required a much more extensive set-up.

Basically, he was paying for compact car, when he really needed a semi-truck. The customer was not willing to work with our staff to resolve the issue.

While the "censorship" allegations certainly make for an edgy "story," they simply had nothing to do with this situation.

Best,
Elizabeth L. Driscoll
Vice President, Public Relations
The Go Daddy Group, Inc.

And Rose's classy reaction, after he realized Thatcher had taken the pic?

Kevin, you're Internet famous! Why so sensitive? Besides flipping the bird to Thatcher, Rose then sent this Twitter after our initial post about Rose and Allison went up Saturday night. No hard feelings!

(Photos by Bryan Thatcher — 1, 2)

Instead, they're entranced by Amazon Web Services. The only notable statistic? That Amazon Web Services consumed more bandwidth than Amazon's own websites. Well, one would hope so, since one of Amazon's chief services is renting out bandwidth.

TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld acknowledges that "most of the things that tend to interest us here at TechCrunch about Amazon are not yet material to its finances." But that raises the question: Why are they of interest? Amazon likely already enjoys massive discounts on its bandwidth; setting up a system to rent some of it out does not likely improve its cost structure. It does, however, win Amazon priceless PR from gullible bloggers. And it creates uncertainty about what business Amazon is really in — uncertainty which provokes optimism among investors, who can argue Amazon's more than just a bookseller and bid up its shares accordingly. That profit Bezos can take home to the bank.

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

Web 2.0 is supposed to be so easy a baby can use it — hence the color scheme. But when the experts try to plot out what it all means, stand back. Here's Tim O'Reilly's early attempt, What is Web 2.0:

Dion Hinchcliffe upped the ante in March with a post titled, Web 2.0 Software Models Evolve as the Conference Season Begins in Earnest. My takeaway: There's a conference season?

I suppose I need to include this one:

Enough already. I went back to O'Reilly's original post. The guy is sincerely brilliant, he just spends too much time editing advanced programming manuals. I started erasing parts of O'Reilly's diagram until I got down to what I think is the minimum for Mom:

Any questions?

Open Source — let's see your source code.

OpenDoc — let's get rid of Office.

OpenID — let's see your users.

Free Beer — Web 2.0.

I realize this news is going to traumatize a lot of gadget nerds, especially Gizmodo editor Brian Lam, with whom I've had a running back-and-forth on the Googlephone. I'll save Lam the trouble of writing one of his "Yes, but ..." retorts. Let me nutshell it for you: It's not about the hardware, it's about the operating system and customization and integration with Google's apps. Nonsense.

Here's what it's really about: Fear. Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin got spooked in early 2006 when they heard that Microsoft was putting its Windows Mobile operating system on 90-plus smartphones that year. So they threw a rumored $100 million in Google shareholders' hard-earned cash on a crash Googlephone project.

Cooler heads have prevailed, though. Yes, it's smart for Google to optimize its services for cell phones. But they don't need hardware or software to do that. Nor do they need exclusive deals with carriers, though those might help a bit with distribution.

The Googlephone, however, has worked like a charm in two ways: First a threat. The Googlephone was a useful fiction, a way to scare carriers and phonemakers into cooperating with Google, and spook Microsoft into cutting its licensing fees for Windows Mobile. To perpetuate that fiction, Google apparently went as far as ordering up some prototypes from HTC — an elaborate Potemkin village of gadgets.

Second, the Googlephone functioned as a fantasy. A very useful fantasy. Like the Apple rumor mill, the cottage industry in Googlephone speculation served as free, crowdsourced market research. Gizmodo, Engadget, and the rest spun countless feature wishlists out of Larry and Sergey's phone folly.

Too bad it was all for naught. There is no Googlephone, folks. Move along.

And for those gadget-heads who were taken in by all of this, and are now disappointed, here's a thought: If you think you feel crushed, how do you think Microsoft and the wireless industry will feel once they figure out that Google has played them for the fool?