Richard, you could very well be right... But it seems to me that the chances of pushing through so many changes in regulations and creating private markets has a small chance of succeeding given the level of mistrust towards Wall Street. We don't want to be completely out of SOX, but we need a SOX that isn't such a burden on young companies. It would go a long way towards improving the IPO flow. And I'm surprised there was no mention of this issue in the report.

Tom - Think you have called this one wrong. The SEC under Cox tried to reform SOX. It was likened to "catching javelins from Senators." The recommendations are actually quite clever - they seem to be advocating choice which is what we used to have before Regulation NMS homogenized the market (the NYSE was an auction market back then and NASDAQ was a dealer market). We need more choices to support exits.

Albert, you make a good point but is the point of SIlicon Valley really about the weather? I live in San Francisco and my district has unremarkable weather. I've never heard anyone tell me they come out here for the weather. Surely people come here for the opportunities, the chance to do something on a global scale.

About the Quarterly Results Show Plunging Print :
is it god or bad when fell 29.6 percent compared to the period a year earlier ?

I cant believe that they mean it very seriously

"sign of an improving economy and that fourth quarter losses should be lower than in the most recent quarter."

I would it call self-caused
:)

On that point of the weather, you wouldn't have to worry about Hawaii because it is inconvenient to live so far away from everything else, so the weather is overshadowed by that negative. And if you've ever lived in florida, you'd know that the weather there is utter crap -- always humid with no seasons. Silicon Valley weather is so much better.

Laura, often the embargo is determined by the print side. For example, the New York Times newspaper first run is published at midnight or 9pm Pacific time. That's a common embargo time.

I ditto Diane's comment. I think the issue is really surrounding the emergence of real-time and even uber-short lead times of bloggers and websites that can break the story much quicker than a print outlet can. What's the protocol there?

I've never been able to understand the contradiction of being smart and independent, and yet somehow completely (not just partially) smitten by the dreams and fantasies conjured up in branding. The latter appears to cancel the former. But I may be wrong.

Ktyson: Yes, exactly. Between the two of us we could come up with way more interesting trends and issues than the man helming the world's largest and most interesting Internet company. What the heck is going on?

Thanks Meredith, some excellent points...

"There is more to be gained from developing an unique editorial stance than there is from pressing the publish button a few minutes earlier than anyone else."

What about the spread of 3d environments in more normal work and play spaces online?

What about the growing irrelevance (except as annoyance) of operating systems?

What about the replacement of the os with a universally standardized browser functionality?

What about real AI?

What's Google really thinking? Is this presentation of Schmidt's some sort of disinformation exercise?

What a joke. His predictions makes Bill Gate's "The Road Ahead" look like the book of Nostradamus.

I will bet that in 5 years, nobody is going to be talking about twitter. (for many different reasons. I have a feeling it's going to be a lot sooner than 5 years) Facebook will be around, but far far fewer people will be using it to the extent they use it today.

Mike Arrington is so arrogant. Everyone I talk to doesn't like that guy. Still Arrington walks around like he's a kingmaker. Someone at the web 2.0 conference told me that he treats people like shit and has burned all his bridges.

Kirsten, thanks for the update on the German scene. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't see our digital bohos in McDonalds no matter how good the coffee :)

Yes, compete.com is not an accurate count. I know it is very low when I compare it to my server logs. But I'm assuming the *relative spread* between Mashable and TechCrunch is accurate.

I'm suspect of Compete.com having recently compared their traffic data with what was really going on with a client's server logs. So, I went to Quantcast to double check. When I typed in techcrunch.com it got the curious message that the site owner has hidden the data from Quantcast. Interesting...

Kirsten, thanks for the update on the German scene. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't see our digital bohos in McDonalds no matter how good the coffee :)

Controlling immigration to save domestic jobs hasn't been working for a long while. You can just export the factories. And now the Internet does a great job in tunneling through any border barriers.

Yes, increasing our job skills is essential. Learning how to learn is the best skill to have. But you have to keep running ahead of technologies that seek to replace human skills and labor -- but we've been doing that since the beginning of the industrial revolution. So far so good...