"It's great for Daily Candy and exciting for the industry," said Sascha Lewis, a founder of flavorpill, a publisher of e-mail newsletters about cultural happenings. "But what we have to do today is keep the lights on. You've got to learn from the lessons of the past. All that is just noise until things happen."  Not so long ago Silicon Alley was all but obliterated. Dozens of companies went out of business during the burst of the technology bubble, and the economic slow-down following the 9/11 attacks took still more. Employment in information technology in New York City plummeted to around 35,000 at the end of 2005 from around 50,000 in 2000, according to the New York State Labor Department.  Along the way any semblance of a digital community in New York dissolved as well. Launch parties gave way to pink slip-parties and then to no parties at all. The Silicon Alley Reporter, a trade publication, folded, and the New York New Media Association, a focal point for the tech community during the boom, quietly closed its doors in 2003. Nerds went underground.  "In 2002 it was definitely embarrassing to say you were doing Internet stuff," said Mr. Heiferman, who founded the Web advertising firm i-Traffic in 1995 and Meetup in 2002. "It seemed so passé."  A number of factors have contributed to the rebound, investors and online executives said. Start-up costs and overhead for running a consumer-oriented Internet company have plummeted, as hardware prices have fallen and packaged or open-source software has taken the place of the programming departments that once had to build sites from scratch.  New forms of targeted advertising from companies like Yahoo and Google have allowed small companies to sell adds online without sales staffs. And large established companies with hefty marketing budgets have been spending more on online advertising.  But perhaps the biggest change on the Alley has been the shift from a culture of profligacy to one of financial discipline. While first-generation Web entrepreneurs once boasted of mountains of venture capital, massages for staff and Aeron office chairs for all, the current crop of Alley executives can't let a conversation go by without pointing out how utterly miserly they are.  "I was crazy cheap," said Dany Levy, the founder and editor in chief of Daily Candy, explaining how she built her business. She said she has long urged employees to print on both sides of a sheet of paper, and that she bought candy for her company's media kits in bulk from Duane Reade just after Halloween, when it was on sale.  In the SoHo offices of Thrillist.com, a three-man start-up that aims to be a kind of Daily Candy for men, Ben Lerer, 24, one of its founders, said his business plan "is all about saving every possible penny." He said he and his partner, Adam Rich, 25, pay their sole employee, a writer named David Blend, "beer money," a claim Mr. Blend disputed.  "Actually it's half my beer money," Mr. Blend said.  During the dark years, some first-generation Silicon Alley companies held on by laying off employees and cutting costs. Rufus Griscom, the chief executive of Nerve, the sexy literary site and Web community, said he employs half the number of people he did in 2001.  Other true believers started pared-down companies from the rubble of the bust. Mr. Lewis and Mark Mangan, for example, were partners in an e-commerce company that sold furnishings and accessories and went belly up in 2001. As part of their marketing campaign, the two published a weekly e-mail letter about cultural events, which they called flavorpill. They continued to publish the newsletter from their part-time jobs  Mr. Mangan as a Web developer and Mr. Lewis as a D.J.  and organically built an audience before pitching big companies for advertising business.  Since then, flavorpill has run ads for American Express, Audi and Anheuser-Busch. The company now publishes nine e-mail letters with 300,000 subscribers, and it has been profitable for the last three years, Mr. Lewis said. Last year revenues were close to $2 million.
Though few new-media entrepreneurs would say it loudly for fear of jinxing themselves, Silicon Alley is buzzing again.