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Readers of the New York Magazine (ones who don't read Slate, the New York Times Styles, Forbes, the San Francisco Chronicle, or Wired) now know there's a boom on. Writer Kurt Andersen spends three pages (well, the last page is two lines, like the last page of a dictated-length term paper) telling the same story as the other papers, but with the cluelessness with which the New York media glitterati always approach the Internet. It's like seeing USA Today redo a trend piece, but without the humility. So spare yourself the read and use the Valleywag Lazy News Edition.

  • 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]