You may have noticed that there's a new technology boom under way. Let us call it TechBubble 2.0. It revolves around two axes.

One is Google, which currently dominates everything it touches. It has also caused investors to lose what remains of their marbles. On 31 January, for example, the company announced fourth-quarter profits that had nearly tripled ($1.03bn profit on a 67 percent jump in revenues to $3.2bn) This indicates a year-on-year growth rate of 70 per cent. And yet the main consequence of the announcement was a 2 per cent drop in the share price to $494, which suggests that investors had expected even better results. If this isn't bubble thinking then I don't know what is.

The second axis is user-generated content and social networking. This is the world of blogging, Flickr, YouTube, MySpace and Facebook. It's causing palpitations in multi-media conglomerates as their executives wonder What It All Means. Should they buy into the phenomenon at the inflated prices that these services currently command?

Colossally inflated valuations are an infallible indicator of a bubble. In the late 1990s, dotcom start-ups with 50 employees and zero profits were briefly valued at more than the market cap of Fortune 500 companies. In 2005, Rupert Murdoch paid $649m for MySpace and eBay paid $2.6bn for Skype, a VoIP [internet telephony] company. Last year, Google forked out $1.65bn for YouTube. Such valuations provide terrific incentives for ambitious geeks because the new web services require less upfront investment than the original dotcoms. What is YouTube, after all, other than some smart software for converting every uploaded video clip into a Flash movie, plus server capacity and bandwidth? Skype adds 150,000 subscribers a day and buys almost no hardware because it uses its subscribers' computers to do the heavy lifting.

A recent Google filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission reveals how rich the TechBubble 2.0 pickings can be. YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley received Google shares worth $345m. His partner Steven Chen received $326m. Jawed Karim, the third YouTube founder (who left to study) got $64m for his pains. And Sequoia Capital, the main investor in YouTube, came away with just over $500m. Not bad for 15 months' work, eh?

Will the YouTubes and MySpaces of this world endure? Who knows? In the meantime, the best advice for ambitious geeks is to take the money and run.

Chance to play on Pipes

As Google has thrived, Yahoo has languished. So it's interesting to see that the older search company has stolen a technical march on its rival. A couple of weeks ago, Yahoo released Yahoo Pipes (pipes.yahoo.com), a web service that has caused quite a storm in the geeky part of the blogosphere. Tim O'Reilly, the publisher and technology commentator, described the move as 'a milestone in the history of the internet'.

Pipes is essentially a visual programming environment which enables anyone with a modicum of software knowledge to take RSS feeds from data sources, process them and redirect them. So, for example, someone has created a pipe that takes the New York Times front page, runs it through a content-analysis filter that extracts keywords and uses the results to find and display photographs from Flickr that are tagged with those keywords. Another pipe enables US residents to find homes near public parks.

The significant thing about Pipes is that it is an enabler. It embodies the permissive spirit of the internet, which doesn't care what you do with it so long as you adhere to its technical protocols. Pipes enables its users to become inventors by forging connections between things that are currently unconnected.

Two cheers for Yahoo!