I went down to city hall yesterday to participate in a hearing on net neutrality. I realize the NYC city council has no oversight on this issue but the lobbyists were coming out in force so I figured I might as well show up too.

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I was sitting at the pool in Portoroz Slovenia this afternoon and had an interesting experience. I grabbed the weekend edition of the International Herald Tribune after the Gotham Gal had finished off the crossword and started reading the opinion section.

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Like many teenagers, Josh Wilson, the 13-year-old son of the New York venture capitalist Fred Wilson, has on occasion visited the Internet’s peer-to-peer file-sharing services to download music and television shows.

But recently, as Mr. Wilson recounted last week on his popular blog, A VC, Josh has started streaming television shows from Netflix (NFLX) under the family’s $24-a-month subscription plan and listening to licensed, ad-supported music videos from YouTube on his iPhone.

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James Altucher penned a column in today’s WSJ titled The Internet Is Dead (As An Investment). James is a fund manager and well read columnist on investing and he is entitled to his opinion. He puts his money where his mouth is. But so do I and since we continue to invest heavily in the Internet, I thought I’d take the opposite side of this debate.

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David Hornik–a partner at August Capital Management LLC, which boasts raising the year’s biggest venture capital fund with its $650 million balanced-stage fund–weighs in on the challenges facing the VC industry, including what Union Square Ventures co-founder Fred Wilson has called “The Venture Capital Math Problem.”

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This happened a bit with Google (GOOG) early this decade and it was certainly part of their decision to go public (reluctantly). Now it is happening to Facebook, and has been happening for some time.

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Jason Calacanis just put Twitter in business. How? He offered $250,000 to be one of 20 users in Twitter’s “Suggested Follows” for two years.

Twitter is growing so fast that being on the “suggested” list for new users can generate more than 10,000 followers a day. Jason thinks the slots will soon be worth a Super-Bowl-like $1 million a year, as companies compete to be able to send real-time messages directly to millions of followers.

Or not.

Dave Winer complains that the Suggested Follows list is unfair. Twitter investor Fred Wilson seems to agree:

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Facebook’s announcement that they are opening up API access to user’s status updates (and more) is big news. The status update has become the ultimate social gesture. You could see this coming if you were watching carefully. All last year, Facebook, who is the leader in social networking and will continue to be as far as I can tell, focused on morphing the user experience, first to the news feed and ultimately to the status update as the primary user experience.

But Facebook did not invent the status update. I honestly don’t know where the status update started but for me it was AIM where I first was asked to leave a short note telling people what I was doing. I’ve heard Jack Dorsey, the inventor of Twitter, talk many times about his inspirations for Twitter and one of them was the status message in AIM.

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I’m all for transparency and mark to market. As Roger Ehrenberg has blogged about consistently, investors need to know what the underlying securities are worth inside banks, brokerage firms, insurance companies, hedge funds, private equity funds, and yes venture capital funds.

The FASB (which governs accounting standards in this country) recently issued a new rule called FAS157. I’m not going to get technical on you, and the accountants in the community can weigh in via the comments if they feel the need for more rigor in this discussion.

In layman’s terms, FAS157 says that you have to value your investments at “fair market value.”

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Jeff Zucker, head of NBC Universal, was famously quoted earlier this year warning that the media industry had to work so “that we do not end up trading analog dollars for digital pennies.” It’s a great line and an even better observation. But I think it’s inevitable and it’s going to happen no matter how hard they try to avoid it. Analog and digital, it turns out, are polar opposites. Analog has physical costs which lead to scarcity-driven business models. Digital has zero marginal cost (or near zero), which leads to ubiquity-driven business models.

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The Treasury, the Fed, and Warren Buffet have been the only buyers in this meltdown and have been largely focused on financial companies. Meanwhile the rest of the market has gone down 30 percent year to date and very few, if any, stocks have been spared. What do we look for next? Does the market just keep going down endlessly? What will bring this to an end?

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Fifty to a hundred thousand high-paying jobs are going to go up in smoke in NYC before this is all over. It’s a mess for this city, tax revenues are going to be down, real estate prices are going to be down, restaurants will fail, etc, etc. We’ll get through it for sure, we always have, but it’s going to suck for a while. As my friend Mo said, “I sure wish Bloomberg would get another four years because we are going to need him.”

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Yesterday evening I took a quick look at Techmeme and saw that the top two posts at that point in time were Tim O’Reilly and my responses to Mike Arrington’s Yahoo post. I clicked through to see Tim’s post and noticed that Tim had done the same thing that I had done; simply cut and paste the comment I had left on Arrington’s post onto my blog. It was interesting to see that the top two posts on Techmeme at that moment in time were in fact comments to another blog post.

I then twittered that thought and went to dinner.

Here’s the thing. I get comments every day on my blog that are as good as any blog posts I see on the Web. And they are stuck behind the comments link. They need to be on the front page, not on the back page.

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War! What is it good for! Absolutely nothing! Say it again!

Are wars really good for business? Is tech entrepreneurship in recession heading toward depression? The battle between Microsoft and Yahoo is reaching its climax (if not already). However, there are some very interesting and unique perspectives from two blog posts that jumped out at me–Kara Swisher and Fred Wilson. Kara has the funniest headline saying “Jesus Is Coming” with the storyline about the inside scoop on the “dance” between the two. What strikes me with Kara’s post is that Yahoo might already be defeated in the “brain drain” that they have been experiencing. Even if Yahoo survives, is it already dead on the vine?

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So now, in addition to this blog, my tumblog and Twitter, I have to pay attention to what’s going on in FriendFeed. So it’s gone from being an aggregator of attention to a demander of attention. Good for them. That’s the way to play the game on the Web.

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