Last night I hopped on my bike and headed over to Cambridge for the latest WebInnovators Group meeting. First timers may want to read my coverage of the previous Webinnovator event.

Funny how Michael Arrington at TechCrunch was simultaneously saying Silicon Valley could use a downturn right about now. That’s because he’s burnt out, surrounded by people that just want to use him and he realized that running a popular blog can have a serious downside to your well-being. Welcome to the club Michael. Kara Swisher at All Things Digital has a nice retort. No more tears, Michael.

Silicon Valley is full of energized, greedy and insanely rich people. And then there are the VC’s (that’s a joke people). Speaking of VC’s, what’s up with the talent loss at Masthead? Rich Levandov left for Avalon Ventures and David Beisel, founder of WebInno, left Masthead for Venrock. Supposedly Masthead’s fund is running out of cash.

Boston, on the other hand, is only beginning to re-exhibit the group hallucination/personality disorder we call a bubble. Developers are hard to come by, purse strings are loosening and people are coming out in droves to see the next big thing. If I could invest in incubators…

People kept asking me if I new any .NET programmers, which was troubling as I’m a die-hard LAMP kind of guy. I would smile and hand them one of my new business cards. I enjoy watching people’s reactions to my Moo cards. My only complain is that they could be a bit taller. Then again, that saves trees.

GregPC at Over the River wrote about his pre-impressions of last night’s Webinnovators presenters and side dishes. Go read that, as I’m not going to say much about the side dishes other than to say that the hyper-local social/e-comm plays and the video/photosharing apps are all too similar for my tastes.

DNSstuff.com was the most compelling offering of the evening. They have a clear value proposition, know who their market is, have thousands of paying customers, and to top if off it’s an extremely useful service (I already used it one this morning when my hosts nameserver were acting up.)

Geezeo may have some features up there sleeves, but dialing a number to check my bank balance seems a lot easier than their account-aggregator soution. Concerns about tracking pending transactions derailed the presentation, hope they learn from that.

You Have Not Changed One Bit wins the award for one-trick pony that can be too easily replicated by the competition. How difficult is it for Classmates or Reunion.com to add a before and after photo? Wait a minutes, Classmates already does.

Webinno isn’t really about demo’s, it’s about the networking. Witness herds of developers wandering around co-mingling with polished B-school grads with that Newton-inspired confidence that gets them places. Lot’s of people who know how to Get Things Done.

And then there was That Woman. You know who I’m talking about.

Afterwards a few of us headed down to Dante for apps and drinks.
I had a thoroughly invigorating conversation with GregPC and a SecondLifer about the future of SL, which totally made my week. I was doing virtual environment stuff a long time ago and it’s great to see SL going in it’s current direction. Open sourcing everything to become the lingua-franca of the 3D Internet. There are so many ways Linden Labs can make money even if they give away all their code, it boggles my mind.

Linden Labs picked up Windwardmark Interactive this week. I met the Windwardmark team a few years ago when they presented at a rubber-chicken entrepreneur meeting. All I could think was “what realistic blood!� Nice to see Linden making smart acquisitions to beef up their rezzing capabilities. Linden’s Boston office is hiring.

I definitely want to present at a future WebInnovators event to show people how easy it is to set up a revenue-generating niche site by tying together different applications and content. Originally I wanted to do it as a main presenter, but upon further thinking, I’m thinking a side dish would be best. I’ll start building a website at 6:30pm and we’ll hopefully have our first revenue by 8pm. I think people will get a kick out of watching a site get built in real-time.

See you at the next Webinno.