ConvergeSouth begins today. Of the three conferences taking place this week – this is the one I miss not going to the most. As Ed Cone says, not better, but different. Grassroots. Bottom up. I’m sure attendees will have a good weekend.

Speaking of conferences, Om Malik gives a summary of how this week’s Web 2.0 conference went.

BrightCove, in the wake of a great demo, from what I hear, at Web 2.0, is adding board members. Jeff Jarvis says he’s impressed and might want to join as well. More in the NYTimes.

Related: Wired: Are You Ready for Web 2.0?

Weblogs.com gets acquired by Verisign! More at PaidContent here and here. More at Roland Tanglao and Verisign and Dave himself. Congrats Dave! Whadda week!

Are we seeing a bubble? Sensible folks like Rafe believe this is the case. I don’t know if it’s a bubble. There has not been the same growth in jobs that occurred in the late 90s. Maybe that’s to come. There has been a lot of money flying about. This week’s buyouts and acquisitions have shown investors and larger companies waking up to what’s been growing around them these past five years. Efforts that, in many ways, call back to what the web was supposed to be in the first place, and what visionaries were calling it to be ten years ago – a participatory medium and platform – not a one-way publishing tool. These efforts are no where near where they should be – but you can see evidence of that early promise – and I gotta tell ya – it’s a great time to be doing what I do for a living. It’s exciting to look around at what’s taking place. But am I seeing this from the wrong perspective?

PaidContent: AOL-MSN Start Talking Again On Combining.

Tony Pierce interviews Ev Williams.

An overview of the the Eclipse Web Tools project at O’Reilly.