Silicon Valley lore has it that in 1996, when prominent technology venture capitalist E. Floyd Kvamme tried to arrange a meeting with presidential candidate Bob Dole, all he got was 15 minutes in a holding room at the San Jose airport.

Much has changed since then. The headquarters of Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO) are now requisite stops on the campaign trail, and money made from technology companies flows freely towards Washington and Sacramento.

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To kick off his keynote speech at SES, a marketing conference in New York, Guy Kawasaki asked how many people in the audience were on Twitter at that moment. Hands shot up across the packed ballroom.

“Yeah, that’s what I was afraid of,” he said.

The former Apple (AAPL) marketer and current venture capitalist, book author and Web site operator was there to tell attendees how he uses Twitter and interconnected social media tools like Twhirl and TweetDeck to generate buzz and monitor what others are saying about him.

An unabashed fanboy when it comes to the service, Mr. Kawasaki called it “the most powerful marketing tool that I’ve seen since probably television.” Toward the end of his talk, he added: “I love Twitter as much as I love Macintosh. And I love Macintosh.”

He also made enough provocative statements to guarantee that he’ll be retweeted–the Twitter equivalent of forwarding an email–all day. One of the first was his advice that to be successful on the site, you need lots of followers. “I believe that Twitter is a numbers game,” he said.

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Here’s all you need to know about the current sad state of the venture capital business: For the first time in 30 years, a fiscal quarter ended Monday without a single initial public offering for a venture-backed firm. Not a one. The machinery that, at its best, nurtures innovative businesses into viability (and at its worst blows money on overhyped fads) has ground to a halt.

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TheFunded, a site that lets entrepreneurs rate and comment about venture capitalists, has drawn a lot of attention from folks eager to learn salacious gossip about bad VCs.

Over recent months, though, there’s been an odd development: Certain posts by entrepreneurs critical of VCs are being quietly removed and then replaced with more favorable comments. On its face, it looks like a whitewash. Or maybe it’s not so troubling. You decide.

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