In this week ramping up to the holidays, good cheer–unsurprisingly–was hard to find. 2008 may well be remembered as the year the econalypse stole Christmas.

Yahoo (YHOO) was bereft of cheer, for sure. BoomTown covered its long-dreaded layoffs and published Jerry Yang’s complete memo to Yahoo staff about the painful process, which began on Wednesday. Ex-Yahoos from all corners of the company declared their preferences (and vented) to BoomTown about the as-yet fruitless search for a CEO to replace Yang, who laid himself off last month. But wait–Digital Daily pointed out a singular moment of misplaced cheer–akin to fiddling while the proverbial Yahoo burns–as the company, uh, celebrated the holidays with a bafflingly lavish year-end party last Saturday–four days before its massive layoffs began.

Digital Daily covered a lot more bad news this week–even some for Apple (AAPL). Belkin, historically the largest exhibitor at January’s MacWorld, announced it won’t be at the convention this year. In addition, registrations for the annual Macfest are down 20 percent since last year. Fairchild became the latest in a long procession of semiconductor companies to lower estimates in the face of dwindling demand, and IPO activity dropped 50 percent in 2008, according to Ernst & Young’s year-end Global IPO Update. What’s that word? Oh yeah, schadenfreude. In a cold bit of circumstance, almost any company can feel a little bit better by comparing itself to Nortel (NT), which lost an astonishing 97 percent of its value this year.

MediaMemo wrote about CBS’s (CBS) appointment with the piper–it spent $1.8 billion on CNET last year, and started paying the consequences this week. The re-org of the entire CBS Interactive group is laid out in Quincy Smith’s memo to its staff. Hulu was hurting this past week, too. Its traffic dropped sharply in the absence of Tina Fey/Sarah Palin viral videos. There was at least one happy anomaly in this week’s news, though: Microblogging site Tumblr brought back memories of the heady early days of Web 2.0, announcing a $4.5 million-dollar round of funding from Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital.

On the Mossberg front, Walt is on a holiday break, but Personal Technology is not. Nick Wingfield sat in for him this week with a column about digital projectors, which are getting smaller and more portable. And in anticipation of Mac-themed holidays for Windows PC users, Katherine Boehret discussed reliable methods of getting data from a PC to a Mac.

Clearly, the so-called IPO window has been slammed shut by the capital crisis. Indeed, data from Dealogic show that 298 IPOs were postponed or withdrawn over the past 11 months–quite a few more than the 167 that met that fate in all of the 2007. And those companies that went through with their offerings didn’t fare so well. Almost 50 percent of new issues fell on their first day of trading, and aftermarket performance was poor, according to Renaissance Capital; the average new issue was down 38 percent by year-end.

“Performance of 2008 new issues in the US was abysmal by historical standards, although not surprising given the steep decline in equities,” says Renaissance. “The average first day pop was a paltry 2%, down from the more than 10% average first day return investors became accustomed to in each of the last five years. A whopping 58% of all new issues traded down in their market debut, the worst first day showing in at least a decade and almost four times the IPO market’s 10-year average.”

Little wonder, then, that the U.S. went three months without an IPO during the second half of the year–the longest dry spell since the recession of the 1970s.

When will the IPO market return? Tough to say. Renaissance says there’s a lot of pent-up demand by potential issuers to raise equity capital. But they’re not likely to test the IPO waters until the financial markets stabilize.

Web 2.0 will be known as the name of a bubble. And 3.0 would only be a marketing disaster.”
Ross Mayfield’s Weblog, Nov. 12, 2006

Web 2.0 acolytes who shelled out 1,100 euros for admission to Web 2.0 Expo Berlin, which kicks off today, will no doubt be dismayed to learn that the term “Web 2.0″ is no longer an enchanted aegis under which to quest for venture capital. Seems the VC community has finally had it with Web 2.0, its hobbies masquerading as businesses and start-up brands with a reclusive letter “e.”

To wit, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of Silicon Valley’s most prestigious venture capital firms, is reportedly no longer investing in Web 2.0 start-ups. “We have absolutely no interest in funding Web 2.0 companies,” KPCB partner Randy Komisar recently told Silicon Valley Watcher’s Tom Foremski, adding that he’d recently told John Battelle, conference chair of Web 2.0 Summit, that the term is viewed with disdain in the VC community.

As the Globe and Mail’s Mathew Ingram notes, Komisar’s remark is for Web 2.0 devotees “a little like King Arthur telling you he’s really not that hot on the whole Grail thing any more, and you can stop looking now.”

It’s also more than a little ironic. Because, according to a report from Dow Jones VentureOne and Ernst & Young, emerging Web 2.0 companies snared almost $1 billion in venture capital worldwide in the first six months of 2007. That said, very little of it was from KPCB, which seems to have sat most of Web 2.0 out. “I’m personally not doing much in Web 2.0 at the moment,” Komisar told VentureBeat in January. “I’m looking for more fundamental innovations. I’m less interested in the content and media fallout. There are no strong barriers to entry in Web 2.0. If by Web 2.0, you mean companies that build an audience to be monetized by Google, I am not actively pursuing them; though I should never say never. I’m not sure how long YouTube would have remained an independent business had they not been bought by Google. Google has an efficient search engine to monetize large audiences. If you’re creating Web 2.0 products and media, its tough to build anything of sufficient scale to remain independent–you are more likely to end up being a feature on Google, Microsoft or Yahoo.”