Apple had been on a serious tear as of late — rising almost 120 percent since the beginning of the year. All good things must come to an end. In the last four days, AAPL has shed 20 percent of its value. As Saul Hansell of the New York Times would tell you, this is a good thing if you don't already own shares of Apple. This drop isn't because of anything related to Apple. All of Nasdaq is down, thanks to fallout from the subprime lending crisis and the value of the dollar and oil prices and that gnawing fear in the pit of your gut that this is going to end badly, just like it did in 2000.

Tech bellwethers are dragging the Nasdaq composite down. So much for tech's immunity to Wall Street's subprime crisis. The Nasdaq suffered its largest two-day decline in more than five years. Cisco's cautious outlook is blamed as the trigger for the broad selloff. The network equipment manufacturer has fallen more than 12 percent in two days since its announcement. Research In Motion has also fallen more than 12 percent. Apple declined 10 percent. IBM has tumbled nearly 5 percent. And even Google is down nearly 3 percent. Do I hear a bubble starting to hiss air? [WSJ]

Kleiner Perkins partner Randy Komisar freaked you out a little when he said the firm was done with Web 2.0, didn't he? ""We have absolutely no interest in funding Web 2.0 companies," he told Silicon Valley Watcher. Well, don't worry. Kleiner Perkins, which backed Amazon.com, Google, AOL, and, um, Friendster, remains in the game.

For a while now, social-networking features have been to bubbly new websites what power windows, cupholders, and vanity mirrors used to be for new cars. Even GM can glue reflective plastic to the back of a cardboard visor. Likewise, a new site's service might not be actually useful, but it nonetheless feels obliged to offer the same bells and whistles as competitors. In other words, it allows you to sign up for spam, upload your picture and connect with other suckers. The latest example?

Google's share price cross $700 this morning. Of course analysts at Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, AmTech Securities and Pacific Crest have all already raised their price targets to $800 or above. [Seeking Alpha]

While some of you sickos are rooting for Bubble 2.0, venture capital is just now getting over the last one. According to the National Venture Capital Association (PDF), five-year returns only turned positive again over this last quarter. The Financial Times turned the news into a pretty chart.

According to Google Translate 泡沫 is Chinese for "bubble". Chinese search engine Baidu is up another 3.5 percent today to $378.35 — with a market cap just shy of Facebook's notional value at $12.8 billion. The FT Tech Blog notes that Baidu has a forward P/E ratio of 94 — that is, a comparison of its price to next year's earnings — trouncing Google's P/E of 54. Another Chinese search engine, Sohu, reported strong earnings today and anticipated future growth across the Chinese market because of advertisers' interest in the 2008 Beijing Olympics. A chart of Baidu and Google's stocks year-to-date is above.

Supermarket magnate Ron Burkle recently valued Al Gore's Current TV at $2 billion, the New York Times reports. You'd think that Burkle, one of Current's backers, would know when the produce is not quite ripe. By contrast, NBC Universal recently purchased the nine-year-old Oxygen Network for $925 million. Note that ComScore reports Current's site as averaging only 152,000 unique visitors a month. Sure, we should probably expect this kind of thing after Microsoft set Facebook's value at $15 billion. But still. I know the guy won a Nobel Prize and all. But anybody else starting to doubt global warming?

Ah, the subprime-mortgage crisis. Don't you love it when bad news is so good? Sure, the prolonged quasi-epileptic seizure of the credit markets has driven consumer confidence to its lowest point in two years, with 2 million borrowers behind on their mortgage payments. But why let that get you down? Especially when things are going so well in tech. Take enterprise search firm Autonomy as your model. They're gloating like Google.

Writes HotorNot founder James Hong on BitTorrent's party this week at Fluid, where rapper Sean Kingston took the stage:

"I assume there will be carcasses strewn across the road." — Sequoia Capital VC Michael Moritz, forecasting the future of the Web industry at Web 2.0 Summit. On the cheery side, he says things are not as frighteningly frothy as they were in 1999.

"We're an enabler of Web 2.0." — Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen, at the Web 2.0 Summit, describing his software-tool company's supportive role in inflating the bubble. In the morning, Chizen will make phone calls to conference goers to explain that Web 2.0 didn't really mean what it said last night.

Always willing to lend a helping hand, Gadget Lab's Rob Beschizza created a Web 2.0 startup and press release generator. You know, so if your first Red Bull-fueled pitch crashes and burns, you can quickly con your way into a second audience with that VC. Sure, the idea may not be original — Web 2.0 generators are all the rage: A sales pitch, slogan, name, logo and website can all be yours at the click of a button. On the other hand, it's hard not to applaud an attempt to remind the world of irrational exuberance. And if you really want to have fun? Send the nonsense to Valleywag's Paul Boutin and watch him contort himself into knots trying to translate it into English.

Apparently startups are getting bought for more and more money? And some people think it's a bubble? And some think it's not? That's what the International Herald Tribune tells me. If you need to explain to Mom why you're worth $10 million on paper and ten bucks in the eyes of jealous TechCrunch readers, show her the Herald Tribune's tidy summary.

First cheese, now this. Are extravagant pastries the latest sign of a bubble? To celebrate Google's one-year anniversary in its New York Chelsea office, seven Google chefs built a scale-model cake of their block-long building. 5' long, 3' high and 2' wide, if this isn't a monument to excess, we don't know what is. Then again, maybe we're just bitter that we didn't get invited to the party.

"Venture capitalists are still living in 1999." — Peter Thiel, the PayPal founder, Facebook board member, and VC, on today's investment climate. [BusinessWeek]

Could Google hit $2,000 a share? Henry Blodget thinks so, but I'm not so sure. That would value GOOG at $750 billion — roughly the same as Microsoft ($279 billion), General Electric ($431 billion), and News Corp. ($70 billion) added together. And that's assuming that none of those companies grow at all — a highly unlikely proposition. Could Google be the first company worth a trillion dollars? Maybe, but I'm not placing any bets in the "first-to-a-trillion" Valleywag office pool. Remember how well predictions of a trillion-dollar market cap worked out for AOL Time Warner? (Photo by AP/Paul Sakuma)

The new editor at TechCrunch, Erick Schonfeld, has gotten a little IPO-crazy in these heady days of Bubble 2.0. The best guess we've seen on a Huffington Post valuation is $60 million which, for a media company, is a drop in the bucket. We can't remember a tech or media company going public with a valuation anything like that. Huffington Post is the most unlikely IPO candidate since Wired in 1996 — and Wired had substantially more revenues and a real magazine business. Maybe we were onto something with the whole cheese thing. More likely? An acquisition.

An attendee at the EmTech conference reception Wednesday afternoon — okay, okay, my boss — noted that he hadn't "seen that many kinds of cheese at a party since 2000." Today the Financial Times observed that in 1998 the Federal Reserve was forced to cut rates because of credit issues and the biggest boom in history followed. So, is all this merely boom-times deja vu or a real indication of the state of the tech economy? All I'll say is if you missed your chance to cash out the first time around, the cheese barometer says to act now, before the opportunities become a bit too well-aged. (Photo by junehug)

Today's Fortune iMeme confab in San Francisco began with a five-minute demonstration of how to properly sit in the Herman Miller Aeron chairs set up for conference attendees. [SFGate]