Normally I get my news for Live Friday from 100+ RSS feeds, but this week I found that a deep dive into Business 2.0 (my favorite internet publication--it took the place of Industry Standard which went away years ago) gave us much more interesting topics that the kinds of PR and brand new announcements that hit the blogosphere. Business 2.0 tends to cover companies that are getting real traction, so you can avoid wasting time on all the hype that is out there. I think I'll use Business 2.0 a lot more in the future when planning Provo Labs Academy events.

If I were an active investor in internet stocks, I would read everything that Bambi Francisco has to say, especially about the large internet companies. She has amazing prescience. I've been reading her for columns for years. Today she has an excellent post at AlwaysOn.

I heard about Rocketboom last year, a simple, short-format daily news video broadcast that has attracted millions of views. They have a growing archive, of course, and they use a simple web 2.0 tagging system to identify the topics that are covered in each broadcast. (See the Rocketboom Alexa chart.

A couple days ago I blogged about Omniture's (OMTR) market cap being half that of Web Side Story (WSSI). I based my blog post on Yahoo Finance. They put Omniture's market cap at $102.7 million today. Fortunately, two of my readers have commented that Yahoo Finance was wrong. The number of outstanding shares is not 14 million, but 40-50 million.

So if Yahoo Finance is correct, Omniture has a market cap of $106 million on trailing twelve months revenue of $51.2 million. Their quarterly revenue growth rate (year over year) is 104.4%.

I'm so happy for everyone associated with Omniture for successfully completing its IPO today. The shares opened at $6.50 and ended the day up slightly at $6.53 per share. Visit Yahoo Finance for more. This high tech IPO is a big deal for Utah, which needs more IPOs. And Omniture now has a war chest to help it maintain its leadership position in the web analytics space.

Alexa chart for Answers.com

This site has a ton of great content (encyclopedias and other reference works), a simple search engine, and a tremendous growth chart.

IVIL: Summary for IVILLAGE INC - Yahoo! Finance

iVillage's market cap is $568 million.

Another article states: "For the year, iVillage earned $9.5 million, or 12 cents per share, on sales of $91.1 million."

Projected revenue next year is between $105 million and $113 million.

Companies that are leaders in their space seem to get nice multiples on Wall Street.

I love MyYahoo, where I have 72 different portfolios consisting mainly of stocks that I do not own in categories that I have defined. So for example, I have a Music & Audio portfolio where I track Audible.com and several other companies. Yahoo makes it very easy for me to track stock prices and news about each company.

Today I created a new portfolio that is a hand-picked subset of stocks listed by Yahoo Finance in the Internet Information Services industry.

I chose Ediets.com, ECollege.com, Audible, TheStreet.com, iVillage, LookSmart, BankRate, Edgar Online, The Knot, and ADAM.

No company likes anyone to break news for them. Companies like to control their own news and get their own press coverage. The blogosphere is upsetting to corporate executives everywhere. Many bloggers have lost their jobs over what they have written. It's an interesting time.

Against that backdrop, I felt compelled the other day to mention that MyFamily had layoffs and no media (and only 1 blogger) had reported it.