Anne Truitt Zelenka

Mike Arrington says “Times are good, money is flowing, and Silicon Valley sucks.” Near as I can tell, what sucks for Mike about it is that it’s not just him who’s making money. Other people are too.

Here’s Mike’s argument, I guess:

I don’t know what it is, but the same thing happened in the late nineties before the bubble burst. Lots of startups got funded that made no sense but people got excited anyway. A unique, beautiful and well executed idea was not a story worth talking about until that first round of big, eye-popping capital. People become more anxious, and more likely to snap at someone in anger or jealousy. Rumor mongering spikes, and a crucial balance is lost. It’s no longer about beautiful products and genius developers. It’s about the money and the status, and hot PR chicks and marketing departments.

If you’re in the middle of that kind of behavior and if the hot PR chicks are bothering you, then take a break. I don’t find many people snapping at me in anger or jealousy — but I live in Denver, and I’m not after a lot of money. Give me a chance to play with new technology, a bunch of smart online buddies, some money to pay the bills, and I’m happy. For a lot of us, it’s not about the money. It is STILL about the technology and more money floating around doesn’t change that.

I’m with Rafe Needleman:

But the last thing we “need” right now is a slowdown. It’s impossible to keep up, yeah, and there’s way too much insiderish BS to deal with, but other than that it’s all so freaking great. The things people are doing now just blow me away. Every day there’s something new and brilliant. And what fun it must be to create a new product or business these days. Anything can happen.

It is all so freakin’ great, and if you can stop thinking about money and power and attention for one second, you could see that.

The reason why my two favorite tech news blogs are Read/Write Web and Webware is because they are about the technology not about making lots of dough.

If there’s a downturn, and I hope there’s not, then we retrench. But we’ll still be able to blog, we’ll still be able to keep in touch online, we’ll still be able to do more together than we could apart… and that’s the cool thing about Web 2.0.