Six Apart grabs $12 million more; cocktail circuit says bubble is growing

Updated: We were just saying you shouldn’t believe anything about this VC world unless you scrutinize it (see post above). We’ve heard from very good source that this Six Apart funding is not done, and will take a couple of more weeks to wrap up.

Six Apart, the creator of blogging products like Moveable Type and Typepad, has raised $12 million in a third round of venture capital, according to IDD Magazine. Intel is rumored to be in on the deal. (Update: Om is sleuthing the deal.)

There’s also a discussion about how Wall Street doesn’t look ready to take any of these so-called Web 2.0 companies to the public market anytime soon.

This follows lots of gossip Friday night at the Techcrunch party about whether there is a bubble now in the Web 2.0 world. Robert Scoble, the Microsoft blogger, took of his shirt in the cold for a “naked” conversation, and writes afterward that there is indeed a bubble. At former Tribe CEO Mark Pincus’ party, last Thursday night, the bubble was also dominating discussion. Someone said, about all the financings, but no IPOs: “There’s a lot of foreplay going on, but no one goes home to have sex.”

The answer is yes, there is a bubble, because…

VCs are throwing a whole bunch of moolah at services with incremental improvements at best in things like blogging software, blogging search, blogging news-ranking, online multimedia content, etc. It is a limited bubble, because the amounts are $15 million and less, compared to the $100 million to $400 million-plus being thrown at Web sites (online grocer WebVan, for example) in the late 1990s.

Meanwhile, there’s another little bubble expanding in the private equity industry. Private equity firms are those which invest large amounts of money into more mature companies. Paul Kedrosky points to a BusinessWeek piece about how some firms are paying as much as $300,000 to fresh MBAs.