As the Iranian election aftermath unfolded in Tehran–thousands of demonstrators took to the streets to express their anger at perceived electoral irregularities–an unexpected hashtag began to explode through the Twitterverse: “CNNFail.”

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Over the last few months, there have been countless stories of cutbacks at companies large and small. Real people are losing jobs. For some, that means losing their homes or being forced to change careers. Lately, we’ve been hearing the stories of many of the people on the receiving end of the hits recently sustained by the tech industry. But there is another side to layoffs that doesn’t get told very often. That’s the story of the people who do the laying off, those who make the decisions about who stays and who goes. Do they deserve our sympathy or our derision?

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The opening party of Boston-based Northbridge Venture Partners’ West Coast office in San Mateo, Calif., could not have come at a more awkward time. With the U.S. stock market sinking fast and rumors of venture capitalists being unable to access funds committed to them, I did not expect the shindig to be a happy affair.

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In 2001, the first dot-com economy collapsed. New companies couldn’t raise funds to continue operating. Existing companies couldn’t go public or get bought. My employer (Red Herring) folded, as did hundreds of other businesses. Almost all companies with speculative growth-based (as opposed to revenue-based) business models died off. And Aeron chairs flooded the market.

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Every time I get invited to a new microblogging service, I cringe. Because once I try it (which, of course, I will; I can’t help myself) and develop even a small network of people on it, I can’t really leave. I don’t want to be rude to people I’ve started to communicate with. And then I get mad.

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If you follow me on the nanoblogs, you may have seen me complaining recently about getting pitched on new Web apps that I find either derivative or confusing. Or both. Now, in any entrepreneurial ecosystem, a big proportion of the ideas that people come up with will be bad, and many of those bad ideas will become actual products. But at the moment, the ratio of bad Web products to good (or even interesting) products is worse than usual. Here are a few reasons why. …

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Perhaps you heard Wednesday’s news about the price of crude oil once again reaching all-time highs, and, like me, you’re wondering how that’s going to affect gas prices at the pump as you fill up for your Memorial Day weekend trip.

Rest assured, you’ve got the likes of Milt Krantz on your side.

Krantz, 71, a retired social worker from San Jose, Calif., is also a designated gas-price spotter for GasBuddy.com, one of a handful of increasingly busy sites for finding cheap gas in your vicinity.

“It’s a little something I can do about the price of gas,” said Krantz, adding that the payoff for his efforts is the feeling that consumers are working together to make a difference. “We’re in it together.”

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Last week I discovered I was using Twitter too much. After an hour online with Twhirl, I got this message in the app: “Limit exceeded, paused 5 min.” The error condition cleared up shortly, but the next morning, after just a few minutes, it came back and did not resolve. I had to go back to accessing Twitter via the Twitter.com site, where I still had access.

I had been bitten by a deficiency in Twitter’s API (application programming interface), which allows alternate interfaces like Twhirl to work at all. The problem, it turns out, is temporarily fixable for end users, but Twitter is going to need to re-code its API to make the Twitter platform for third-party apps and services more robust.

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Maybe two years ago, I hosted a panel discussion on the emerging Web 2.0 economy, and I asked my panelists if we were in a bubble. Because it’s clear to me that we are. Not that it’s a bad thing, mind you. This is how technology evolves: like life itself, in blooms and crashes. And I think we should all acknowledge where we are in the cycle. Anyway, one of my panelists, SoftTech venture capitalist Jeff Clavier, was adamant that this was no bubble. Now Mr. Not-a-Bubble is trying to convince start-up companies that their income, if it’s in the $300,000-a-month range–a range that most companies made up of three guys and a credit-card-funded Amazon S3 account would kill for–is “noise” that distracts them from their potential.

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