Tragic Death of Bubbles in the Ghetto

Last month I was so interested in the idea of death clocks I rewrote the "Startup Death Clock" idea and put it on a page on hn-books.com. I love the idea of a startup death clock, because, as we know from reading headlines, everything is dying.

It is the death of Microsoft. The death of Apple. The death of Palm. The death of Richard Dawkins. The death of Bing. The death of the Relational Database. The death of the printed book. The death of the web. The death of the PC. The death of the telephone. The death of IE. The death of the web. RSS is dying, and you should be worried.

There was so much death in tech headlines that finally some wag asked "Is everything dying?"

The Startup Death Clock idea was a good candidate for a rewrite, because Startup Death Clocks are a ghetto, along with lots of other stuff you might not suspect.

Rails is a ghetto. Shared hosting is a ghetto. Healthcare Informatics is a ghetto. Website design is a ghetto. Facebook is a ghetto. The business section of a news paper is a ghetto. Python is a ghetto. And today, PHP is [was] a ghetto.

As for the ghetto itself? Obviously dying. What else could it be doing?

When folks keep investing more and more energy and effort into these title cliches with less and less return? That's a bubble. We are obviously in a dying ghetto title bubble. We hardly ever mention bubbles either.

It's a tech bubble. A higher education bubble. An app bubble. A Hong Kong real estate bubble. A PhD bubble. A Web 2.0 bubble. An online advertising bubble. A gold bubble. A China bubble. A civilization bubble. A bond bubble. And finally, a bubble in people calling bubbles.

Even if bubbles are a ghetto, bubbles, dammit, are in no fear of dying, The news from the ghetto of the death of bubbles has been greatly exaggerated.

Please, Mr. Headline Writer-Guy -- pretty please -- find something else besides ghettos, bubbles, and dying to write about. They're overused. Give them a rest.

kthanksbye