No sooner had the meme begun to spread that TechCrunch should now be known as "F---ed Company 2.0" than a new iteration of the fin-de-tech-bubble site appears. It uses the full four-letter word in its title, so if bleakly comic uses of harsh language offend you, don't click here.

Times are tough, and Silicon Valley is feeling the pain, but things are different this time around. For one thing, the general level of schadenfreude is much lower now -- there's a sense that we're all in this one together, and there was no huge wave of 2.0 IPOs to make day-traders rich. The death-watch is real enough, but it's largely for companies you never heard of, on which venture capital firms will lose money but you probably won't.

Here's what I wrote two years ago as the 2.0 market started to froth:

Have no doubt: Money will be wasted, hucksters will huck, and suckers will bet wrong; bad companies, dumb ideas and me-toos will get funded. But I see things working out differently this time, given the armies of real users that today's applications serve.

Besides, the last generation of burned investors must have learned something from the experience. I mean, it's not as if they all went out and created a new bubble in housing or anything.