By Jackson West

We’re fasting for Lent 2.0, so no news from the Gang of Four this week.

Thanks to the internets, the backlash can start before the bubble even starts to really inflate. Ted Rheingold resuscitates an old meme to make fun of contemporary hype. Doesn’t mean that team Dogster isn’t taking advantage, teaming up with Disney to market a DVD release. One way to ensure that the movement stays true to its principles is to pen a manifesto. Or just start working on the next big thing, whatever that may be. I’ll be here in the corner, laughing about it all.

Rupert Murdoch is possibly looking at SpyMedia? And now Viacom wants to play the social network game. Since, you know, that AOL-TimeWarner deal worked out so well. The New York Times is also devoting some grey matter to this whole ‘web’ thing. It’s funny to watch the popular people so desperate for the attention of the cool kids — however old they may be. While Tower Records tries to staunch the flow of blood from the wound that is online music distribution, the BBC, at least, seems to ‘get it.’ God Save the Beeb. Rather.

We can’t wait for the rags-to-riches story of the homeless blogger, updating his CV from a streetlight and getting a job in Silicon Valley. All after studying up on AJAX or shooting a film on a cell phone, probably. Speaking of nomad-enabling technology, crackberry addicts can breathe a sigh of relief — instead of an outage costing them $844 in lost productivity, RIM and NTP have reached a settlement at just over $600 million.

The cutest nerds in San Francisco were all at the Adaptive Path fifth anniversary party, no doubt drawn by the taco truck and bubbling chocolate fountain, and at least one couple was caught canoodling

The fight between Oracle and SAP is getting more entertaining by the day .. Superstar blogger Anil Dash weighs in on the new TrackBack standard. Also, Prince .. Dave Winer presents the new OPML 2.0 specifications .. Kevin Burton wishes more Web 2.0 apps would play nice with Mac users .. and MAKE finds a bunch of cool pieces of cheap commodity electronics, like MP3 players, GPS loggers and USB interfaces.

Jackson West writes for SFist. He writes about Web 2.0 and other topics for GigaOm.