So, of course, we were busy yukking it up with funnyman Merlin Mann last night at the Web 1.0 confab. Silly us, making fun of the 'monetizing,' 'paradigm shifting,' 'game changing' intellects who took a bunch of great ideas from engineers and developers and turned them into marketing juggernauts, with or without a business plan. Let's just say that VRML, FrontPage, Flash, the <blink> tag, dual ISDN and other ante-dot-bomb technologies were rightly pilloried to a delighted audience. And then we crashed the Google party at the Argent Hotel (translation from French to English: "Money place to stay for a night.")

We managed to meet Andy Baio, testing the Bay Area waters from the southland after his upcoming.org landed a payday from Yahoo (the fake number is $6.5 million -- rumor has it the real number is more like $3 million, but who knows how much of that is stock, regardless). And everyone we turned to was buzzing about Weblogs, Inc. being sold to AOL for somewhere between $20 and $40 million (we'd love to claim the scoop, but by the time we post this, it's already old news).

We wondered why Engadget was planning to expand their offices and add rigorous product testing to their repertoire. Jason Calacanis (Mr. Silicon Alley 100) is apparently flying out to address the crowd tomorrow at Tim O'Reilly's $2,800 a head party at the Argent. All we know is that Anil Dash called it -- we left a comment on a Gawker blog, and were totally subjected to the "yellow-fade" effect. Welcome to Web 2.0, motherf**kers.

Photo by Gen Kanai.