Interesting piece on Techcrunch today about PhotoBucket - a hosting and publishing service for consumer videos and photos. The have just announced a $10.5 million Series B round with Trinity Ventures, largely on the strength of their 15 million members and their claim to drive drives 2% of total U.S. Internet traffic.

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'.

Every day I wake up and check my RSS subscriptions, I read about another social network that has been funded with someone else's money. Even the majors are tooling up. Both AOL and the BBC have announced iterations, almost invariably sold internally as being "MySpace Killers".

"Social" has become a popular prefix lately. And for good reason. It seems to have a positive impact on valuation multiples. Social media, social networking, social mashups. There is no doubt that Newscorp's acquisition of Myspace last year, combined with the hard evidence of gigantic consumer traffic shifts to social media platforms - is a powerful siren song to would be entrepreneurial activity.

William Gibson said it famously in Neuromancer - "the street finds its own uses for things". Playing with some of the current favourite Web 2.0 toys this week - flickr, youtube, MySpace, del.ici.us, feedburner, typepad - I realised how easy it was for users to appropriate these platforms for their own creative purposes.