I love that old story about Rockefeller saving his fortune by pulling out of the share market when the shoe shine boy started giving him stock tips. To that end, there is a funny debate going on at the moment about 'second derivative companies'.

Fred Wilson coined the phrase, and blogger Josh Kopelman took up the baton talking about the risk of designing products and services targeted at too small of an audience. Amusingly, Kopelman defined that audience as 53,651 - which also happens to be the exact number of people who subscribe to Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch blog feed.

Its been great fun watching new companies springing up, and with a lot of my contacts in the space I certainly enjoy the delusional allure of Web Sequel ideas. Most of my TechCrunch feed friends, for want of a better label, are highly connected, have blogs, email/skype people in the Valley and elsewhere - and get excited about marginal variations of obscure business models.

But my gut feeling is that a lot of what is going on is taking place in a beta version vacuum. Perhaps this is a revolution, or maybe it is just the post modern equivalent of being a beatnik cafe poet talking about one.

All I know is that once you log off from that small insular group - you realise that the vast majority of consumers have very different priorities.

Sixty million on Myspace, and not an iota of Ajax in sight.