"Consider a blog like TechCrunch, which chronicles the new breed of Internet start-ups known as Web 2.0 companies. The blogger behind it, Michael Arrington, is sufficiently influential that entrepreneurs in search of a write-up will make pilgrimages to his house to give product demos.

The fond hope of these entrepreneurs is that among his 12,000 readers will be a venture capitalist or (better yet) someone with a checkbook at Google or Yahoo. (Companies can be born, hire executives, unveil technology and get acquired without ever leaving this closed community.) And Mr. Arrington also has the social standing to be able to throw big Gatsby-like parties for as many of the 12,000 as were able to find out they were taking place and cared to show up."

The Great Gatbsy was one of my favorite books back in University, where I studied it in my American Literature course. The comparison is unfair in some respects, but in terms of Mike being the hub of Silicon Valley in this Web 2.0 era - as Gatsby was (fictionally) in the Jazz era - it has a certain literary appeal. Especially as I had the pleasure of being a guest in the Arrington mansion for two weeks in October.

From ch 3 of The Great Gatsby:
"There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before."