Two quick blurbs from the WSJ today that I wanted to highlight (paid registration required, unfortunately). The first was their coverage on the 2nd tier of social networking services like Piczo, Hi5, and Xuqa (a company I had the privelege of informally advising in their very early days). The upshot of the article was the fact that these companies are starting to emerge from the shadow of MySpace and Facebook, both in terms of user traction and revenues. It will be interesting to see how the things shake out over the next 6-12 months as partnership and M&A activity starts to heat up in this sector.

The other was a commentary piece which appeared in the Opinion section. Johan Norberg’s editorial is a broader defense of capitalism, from a free-market think tank point of view, but its core is an ode to innovators and entrepreneurs which have served as the engines of progress for technology-enabled prosperity modern society enjoys. For those of us who live our daily lives amongst technology startups, we sometimes lose sight of this fact but it’s sometimes nice to take this long view and appreciate the progress entrepreneurs have helped bring us all.