Suddenly, it’s mating season in the tech sector. Xerox (XRX) is paying $6.4 billion for a piece of the cloud, Adobe (ADBE) is hooking up with Omniture (OMTR) and Intuit (INTU) with Mint, and that may just be the start. As Om pointed out, this is good news for startups and entrepreneurs, especially those with money tied up in late-stage investments that aren’t likely to go public soon.

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Ever since Netscape started storing cookies in its browsers, there has been a Jekyll-and-Hyde nature to the web. The Jekyll web promised a more personalized experience, with sites serving ads for products and services that you would actually be interested in–ads that are more like useful information and less like glaring interruptions. The Hyde web wanted sites to stalk you, recording little bits of data about your online life until they knew more than you’d be comfortable sharing even with some friends.

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Come Wednesday, it will be Apple’s turn to discuss its results for the first three months of 2009. But among the crowd of Apple (AAPL) watchers, the discussion has been simmering for months, with the tone shifting from pessimism about recession-whacked sales to cautious optimism–especially as the stock has rebounded 58 percent and skeptical analysts have revised previously bearish outlooks.

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A provocative story from Reuters Monday ruminated on which companies are likely to replace Citigroup (C) and General Motors (GM) in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Its conclusion: Google (GOOG) and Cisco (CSCO) are the most likely contenders, with Apple (AAPL) and Visa (V) having a less likely chance.

It’s a safe bet that those two troubled companies–trading below $2 a share–will get the boot, potentially along with Bank of America (BAC), which is trading below $4. All are plagued by concerns that bankruptcies or government takeovers would wipe out shareholders. Talk of a reshuffling of the Dow has been heating up of late.

Does Google belong in the Dow? I think it does for a few reasons. According to Dow Jones’ explanation of the indexes composition, “a stock typically is added only if it has an excellent reputation, demonstrates sustained growth, is of interest to a large number of investors and accurately represents the sector(s) covered by the average.”

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It’s a classic PR play: When you start to look like the bad guy, call out a bigger bad guy.

And it seems to be the strategy that the Securities and Exchange Commission–besieged by accusations of lax enforcement before and during the credit crisis–is using in going after Mark Cuban for insider trading.

It’s too early to say definitively whether Cuban is guilty of insider trading in Mamma.com (now called Copernic), a search also-ran whose management has, in Cuban’s own judgment, “a checkered past.” On his blog, the normally voluble Cuban simply accused the SEC of acting on “win-at-any-cost ambitions” and a process that “was result-oriented, fact be damned.” Still, it’s not looking good for him at all.

The SEC’s complaint against Cuban outlines some pretty compelling evidence: Cuban bought 6.3 percent of Mamma.com in March 2004. Three months later, the company CEO told him it was issuing a controversial, and heavily dilutive, private placement. “Well, now I’m screwed,” Cuban told Mamma’s CEO.

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Few people have good memories of the dot-com crash that crushed companies and ravaged stock portfolios between 2000 and 2002.

But as we slide into an even more dire correction, a silver lining is starting to emerge around those earlier bad times. By pushing a lot of froth out of the system several years ago, the dot-com crash has spared us from a true “Perfect Storm” of an economic crisis in 2008.

There are a lot of crises converging this year, most notably home foreclosures, weaker consumer spending and financial excess. But thankfully, a vast tech bubble isn’t among them. True, Silicon Valley was ground zero for a major financial earthquake seven or so years ago, but that shock also let off seismic energy that could have worsened the jolt now shaking the foundations of the world’s economy.

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I blame David Hasselhoff.

Everything was going fine for the Web–the financial world had been unwinding its overleveraged excesses for nearly a year with nary a ripple into Silicon Valley–until the launch of HoffSpace, a social network revolving around the oogachaka-ing, burger-wagging actor.

Some bloggers called it a bizarre nightmare. Others decried it as the end of social networks. They were probably joking. But they were right.

Hoffspace showed once and for all what the Web sector had fought so hard to admit: These social networks had finally expanded a niche too far. No longer was it possible to argue that one day social-networking sites would be anywhere near as good at making money as they were at expanding, fractal-like, into a gray goo of trivial matter.

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