• How info tech blogs can be also used to make money with advertisement has been demonstrated in the US with e.g. TechCrunch. The recent TechCrunch party in San Francisco attracted the whole Online Marketing and Web 2.0 crowd, it seemed. Now GigaOm (investor is True Ventures) and Guy Kawasaki (Federated Media) got money to leverage their readership, too.
• Apple has also now announced the recall of 1.8 million Sony batteries. Dell had recalled 2.4 million just a few days before Apple and suggested to agree on vendor independent standards for laptop battery manufacturing. Both vendors' costs will be in the $100 million range whereas Sony is talking about even higher numbers (6 million recalls so far) and is being questioned by the Japanese government on the incident.
• AOL showed a strong sign of life this week when they announced deals with a multitude of film studios (20th Century Fox, Universal, Sony Pictures) to sell movies online for $10-$20 a piece. While AOL is otherwise in free fall with regards to losing visitors, this announcement shows that the movie/video business is a Time Warner domain that they understand. Could well be that this is the life saver for AOL.
• Nokia announced -next to others- that they will not participate at the Cebit next year. This comes after they already decided to also abandon the IFA in Berlin. Nokia said that they plan to go less to general public events but do more of their own events or join forces with partners. Our two cents: Once you have build your brand a more targeted approach to differentiate it makes sense. We have, by the way, also seen that Nokia Infrastructure is doing interactive things like a knowledge game on their website. E.g. they have a game on their site that lets people build a greenfield telecom/data infrastructure in a developing country. Great idea!! All the would-like-to-be operator CTOs (and the real ones?) can have fun.
• Seth Godin a week ago published his new book called "small is the new big thing" which is basically a collection of "nuggets of wisdom" from his blog site. One nugget example he published on another blog site to market his book is " The top five mistakes entrepreneurs make when they market". Maybe its about time that I buy one of his books now too.

We have written about a possible Web 2.0 hype here already. With the folding of Fold.com (it's their real name) Techcrunch started a tag list called Deadpool hoping that it will not grow too big.

I think at the least we will see lots of consolidation going on. E.g. commercial blog sites will continue to be gobbled up by aggregators such as one of our favorite blogs Engadget, whose owner Weblogs, Inc. has a total of 90 blog sites under its belly.

Further, you hear VCs starting to talk about the difficulty in finding good investments. E.g. David Hornik from August Capital comments in his blog:

To give you a sense of the interesting challenge venture capitalists face when investing in new media companies today, one need look no further than this list itself. At August Capital, we have funded 4 of the companies on the list: LiveJournal, Technorati, Trumba, and VideoEgg. Considering only those companies that made the list, on average, our four portfolio companies face 33 -- yes, that's right, 33 -- competitors in their respective verticals. That is mind blowing. And this list does not even include Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, IAC, Fox, Vivendi, Ebay and Amazon, all of which are likely competitors of each and every company on the Web 2.0 list. As the venture community continues to look at Web 2.0 companies in the coming months and years, this list is an invaluable piece of perspective .

Naturally we will see lots of folding, consolidation and a very few set to make it big. Why worry about that, isn't it what it was all along but now all under the one buzzword, Web 2.0? Summarizing and simplifying it all under one name has disadvantages too. So no need to fight about who created the buzzword Web 2.0 at the end.