The Real Tech Bubble: Without a doubt, there’s a bubble in Silicon Valley. That bubble is the number of tech publications debating whether there’s a bubble. Fortune is the latest to get its licks in — better late than never! — with a splashy cover story that comes to a wishy-washy, maybe-maybe-not conclusion. The bubble talk is about as tiring as the debate over whether Google is a media company. In other words, the answer is in some ways yes, in other ways no. There’s a fair amount of irrationality in some investment activity, for sure, but that’s about all. The rest is just a parlor game. Fortune
Tweet of the Day: Forrester Research analyst Josh Bernoff thinks Twitter should stop pussyfooting around and just start running some serious ads. This is a prime example of the reticence Silicon Valley tech platforms have when it comes to acting like typical media companies.
The End of Mass Media: The Economist sees the end of the mass media era, which it rightly notes was a historical anomaly. The hue and cry over the news business generally comes from the point of view of the legacy organizations, namely newspapers, that built structures utterly dependent on mass media distribution and economics. The digital era has irrevocably changed all that. It’s telling that a snooty, fairly hidebound organization like The Economist (168 years old) is preaching that news organizations need to get off their high horse and stop acting like journalism is some special art practiced by a priestly caste. The Economist
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