Fortune writer Adam Lashinsky thinks there's something eerily familiar about the last-dot com bubble, which started and ended in Silicon Valley, and the current one. He writes: "Those who watched its giddy rise and sickening fall remember the predictable way the collapse began: in denial." There was this belief that whatever was going on in the economy wouldn't affect the innovation that was happening in Silicon Valley. Well, it turned out that the very thing that was wrong with the economy was what was going on in Silicon Valley. Of course, things are different now. The economy isn't tanking …

No, comScore's Google paid click data in January was not an anomaly. According to the latest report from the Web measurement firm, February was just as bad, as Google's sponsored links rose just 3 percent to 515 million over a year earlier. And because the data doesn't take into account that we had an extra day in February this year, overall growth was probably flat--again. So what gives? Analysts claim it's the economy: a tanking housing market, higher oil prices and slumping consumer confidence mean that people are shopping less online--and if they're shopping less online, they're clicking on fewer …

Staggering numbers, puny revenues: thus describes the social networking conundrum. Even Google founder Sergey Brin has thrown his hands up in the air: "I don't think we have the killer best way to advertise and monetize the social networks yet," he told analysts during an earnings call in January. According to a Wired magazine report, MySpace and Facebook, the undisputed top two of the social networking pile, have achieved an annual rate of growth of over 500 percent since 2005. LinkedIn, a social network for working professionals, has increased by a rate of 182 percent over the same period. And …

"Grand Theft Auto" publisher Take-Two Interactive told shareholders on Wednesday to reject Electronic Arts' $2 billion hostile bid, saying the offer was too low. The company's board said it was exploring other options, including a sale or partnership with another game publisher. It also wouldn't rule out some other combination with EA, the game industry's largest publisher. However, Take-Two said that no further decision would be made until after the April 29 release of "Grand Theft Auto IV," which many expect to be the game sector's biggest seller of the year. The publisher also adopted a new 180-day shareholders' rights …

Wednesday was a day of mixed news for Google: comScore data showed February to be another flat month for search revenue, but YouTube's dominance of the online video market continued to grow, according to Nielsen Online's VideoCensus. In February, YouTube served a whopping 2.9 billion of the 6.3 billion videos served on the Web, or 48.5 percent of the global total--up from 42.9 percent in January. The video-sharing site had 70 million of the Web's 116 million unique video users--a 60 percent share, up from 57 percent in the prior month. Also, YouTube's share of overall time spent viewing videos …

Yahoo on Tuesday joined News Corp.'s MySpace, AOL's Bebo, Friendster, LinkedIn and ten other companies by joining the Google-led open social networking initiative, OpenSocial. As part of its entry into the Google network, which offers technical specifications that let software developers build applications that run across any social network, Yahoo also became a founding member of the OpenSocial Foundation, along with Google and MySpace. The nonprofit group will be devoted to maintaining a neutral, community-based forum for building applications. An undisclosed range of assets will be assigned to the new entity by July 1. Emerging market leader Facebook is …