Perhaps you guys can help me understand something.

Word comes today from a most credible source that the failure of smaller banks may soon lead to more consolidation and mergers in the banking industry. One analyst told the New York Times that 200 to 300 small banks might fail in the near future, and be forced into mergers, presumably with larger entities.

This is a solution?

Didn’t we just see what happened to Citigroup (C) and Bank of America (BAC)? Aren’t both now being deconstructed due to unsuccessful, if not heedless, acquisitions? Haven’t empires from Rome to ITT fallen into rubble as a result of getting too big, too fast? And haven’t we seen ample evidence of that fact as recently as this morning, as the implied value of AOL ratchets down in the wake of a Google writedown (GOOG)?

This is not to say, as some have contended, that all mergers and acquisitions are bad. When two strong entities come together, it’s a beautiful thing. But ugly monsters made out of dead body parts yield the expected results, usually ending when a group of townspeople with pitchforks chase the poor creature into a barn that is then burned to the ground.

Certainly the merger of these bankettes, which are now suffering from being in the same room with the commercial real estate market, is preferable to their failure.

But is the future truly served if the muscle of capital does its usual thing, providing fees to all the lawyers, MBAs and other financial types as they once again set up great hulking behemoths destined to lurch over the cliff in the next high breeze?

Word comes this morning that AOL will purchase Bebo, the social networking site, for $850 million. This works out to about $21 per user. I believe also that the founders of the site will leave, each taking with them enough money to choke a horse.

Now, Bebo is a great company and I’m sure is worth every penny that AOL is paying for it, and the strategic benefits to both are very clear. Still, it’s got to give you pause. None of these social networking sites — or YouTube, either, for that matter — is producing the kind of revenue, let alone profit, that would justify the enormous prices for which they have been selling.

This leads to one inexorable conclusion: it is possible to now sell a business for a virtually infinite multiple of cash flow.

I believe that I, Bing, represent just such a business. And smaller investors, with less capacity for debt in this challenging market, could acquire me for a much more reasonable sum.

I am right now developing a prospectus for my friends at Allen & Co. They are unaware of this as yet, but it’s coming along nicely, and if Herb would return my calls I’m sure I could get something started. We could get a fishing expedition going almost immediately after they leak news of the potential deal to a number of their close associates in the media.  A whisper here, a murmur there… and Boom! We’d be off and running.

Lacking that documentation at the moment, the details of the transaction are still a bit murky, but the outlines are clear enough.

Assets of the new BingCo include the growing community surrounding my content, which is clearly monetizeable, with excellent demographics and psychographics, along with unparalleled stickiness. The business itself has very low overhead, consisting of two founders, one being Mr. Bing himself and the other being a public relations professional whose identity he prefers to remain a closely-guarded secret.

Growth potential for the distribution side of this valuable, non-fungible content is enormous, as big as the world wide web, in fact, and includes thousands of sites that will take advertising-supported content for free. Naturally, advertising growth is still a challenging issue, but that’s equally true of all sites that are selling for nine, ten or eleven figures, with most of those figures being a zero.

Liabilities are also few, and consist mostly of the founders’ inability to get anything done after about 7 PM, for a variety of reasons we need not go into here. The company, as yet, is privately held, so there will be no Board or regulatory approvals necessary.

The price of this growing, thriving enterprise has yet to be ascertained, but like all user communities it has nowhere to go but up. At this moment, there is very little revenue, even less profit. All there is is a brand and a number of people who sort of recognize it.

Let’s start the bidding at $25 million. I figure that should provide the F.U. money the principals have been seeking for many years.

Over the weekend I was annoyed to get one of those idiot chain emails from somebody who has me on their list for some reason – a person I do not know, a status I intend to maintain. It’s bad enough when you get one of these things on your office email and can see immediately what’s going on. But when you’re reading a chain email on a Blackberry? You have to scroll down until your thumb gets tired, passing by long fields of addresses and then more addresses and still more Fw:s until you get to the core email, which turns out to be a stupid piece of nonsense like this one:

Dear Friends: Please do not take this for a junk letter. Bill Gates sharing his fortune. Microsoft and AOL are now the largest Internet companies and in an effort to make sure that Internet Explorer remains the most widely used program, Microsoft and AOL are running an e-mail beta. When you forward this e-mail to friends, Microsoft can and will track it (If you are a Microsoft Windows user) for a two week period. For every person that you forward this e-mail to, Microsoft will pay you $245.00 For every person that you sent it to that forwards it on, Microsoft will pay you $243.00 and for every third person that receives it, You will be paid $241.00. Within two weeks, Microsoft will contact you for your address and then send you a check.

Regards. Charles S Bailey General Manager
Field Operations,
1-800-842-2332 Ext.. 1085 or 904-1085 or RNX 292-1085

Thought this was a scam myself, But two weeks after receiving this e-mail and forwarding it on. Microsoft contacted me for my address and within days, I received a check for $24,800.00. You need to respond before the beta testing is over. If anyone can afford this, Bill gates is the man. It’s all marketing expense to him. Please forward this to as many people as possible. You are bound to get at least $10, 000.00.

The email was a lot longer than this, and it clearly had the desired effect because before it got to me it was sent by bulk to no fewer than a hundred different dweebs in four separate forwardings. So now I have all THEIR email addresses and they have mine. Is that a good thing? I don’t think so.

I’m as interested in $245 from Microsoft (MSFT) as the next guy, of course, but it only took one Google (GOOG) to ascertain that this is an urban legend/scam that’s been around for ten years, maybe more, and always with the same exact text that made it around this past weekend. There was no article in USA Today. Bill Gates is not giving away any money, not to us, at any rate.

Perhaps the inclusion of AOL in this idiocy should have been a tipoff of some kind. Who, writing at this time, would include that particular portal in an enterprise of this sort? Nah. They’d goof on Facebook or MySpace or Schlump or some other next-gen destination.

The bottom line is this, guys: Don’t send me any bogus chain emails from here on in, okay? I have other things on my mind. And I’m still waiting for that $80,000,000 check that former king of Nigeria is sending me. That should arrive any day now. I sent them all my banking information. I wonder what’s taking so long?

I’m pretty new at this blogging thing and it’s clear to me, even as a newbie, that some blogs get noticed and some just sort of lie there on their backs, peeing like babies on a changing table into the brisk digital wind.

The ones that really punch through are those that employ tags that pop up later on the important search engines like Google, Yahoo, and AOL.  You know about tags. Look at the top of this page and you’ll see a bunch of them.

If you choose your tags right, everybody pretty much in perpetuity who searches for that word or phrase just might end up being directed to the entity that generated the tag that contained it. Hence this posting, in which I will now attempt to drive traffic to this site by indiscriminately tagging a host of words that might serve that purpose.  Linking doesn’t hurt either. But it’s not as good as tagging. So I’ll do both.

A friend of mine who also has a blog notices that when she posted an item about a gluten-free diet, for instance, she was suddenly hit by a bunch of people who are interested in the subject. Diets in general get a lot of action every day on the web, as does anybody who has anything to do with food, including Rachael Ray, Bobby Flay, Emeril, like that.

Food is very closely aligned to health, of course, since we are what we eat. That’s why topics like heart disease, diabetes, Addison’s Disease (which struck President John F. Kennedy, who was rumored to have been involved with Marilyn Monroe), arthritis, Alzheimers, among many ailments, are of interest to people, who look up the subject on a variety of sites like the always-excellent Wikipedia and those more specialized.

Of course, the tags that have the highest potential are the ones that involve the celebrity names in just about every field that people want to know about, from the Dalai Lama, who dominates the spirituality game right now (along with his friends and competitive acolytes Steven Seagal and Richard Gere), to Oprah (both as an entertainer and as a force for good), all the way to the celebu-tarts who get more column inches than the War in Iraq (or Operation Iraqi Freedom as it’s still known known by the Multi-National Force and some of the media). You know who I’m talking about, right? Paris! Britney! Lindsay! People go for this sort of thing to sizzling hot aggregator-gossips like tmz and eOnline, where Ted Casablanca continues to report without fear or favor. 

There are so many more! Elvis! Shakespeare! Arnold! Al Gore! Warren Buffett! Barry Bonds! Hitler! Stalin! Bono!

That’s enough for now. If you found your way to this site because you followed any of these tags here — welcome! Take a look around! Hope you find us sticky!