Doesn’t make much of a presidential campaign slogan, either. But then it doesn’t need to. Because former Vice President Al Gore doesn’t expect to be a candidate for the presidency in 2008. But he is joining venture capitalist John Doerr as a partner in Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a storied venture capital firm that has backed some of the biggest names in technology.

Gore, who shared a Nobel Peace Prize this year for bringing attention to the issue of global warming, will quarterback Kleiner Perkins’s green-technology investments. “There is a flood of money coming into this area,” Gore told the Los Angeles Times. “A lot of it is undisciplined. When you open the hood and look inside, you see people shrugging their shoulders and saying, ‘We don’t know what we’re going to do.’ “

And that’s where Gore and Kleiner Perkins come in, using green–the Federal Reserve kind–to make green–the sustainable energy kind. Said Gore: “What we are going to have to put in place is a combination of the Manhattan Project, the Apollo project and the Marshall Plan, and scale it globally. It’d be promising too much to say we can do it on our own, but we intend to do our part.”

Web 2.0 will be known as the name of a bubble. And 3.0 would only be a marketing disaster.”
Ross Mayfield’s Weblog, Nov. 12, 2006

Web 2.0 acolytes who shelled out 1,100 euros for admission to Web 2.0 Expo Berlin, which kicks off today, will no doubt be dismayed to learn that the term “Web 2.0″ is no longer an enchanted aegis under which to quest for venture capital. Seems the VC community has finally had it with Web 2.0, its hobbies masquerading as businesses and start-up brands with a reclusive letter “e.”

To wit, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of Silicon Valley’s most prestigious venture capital firms, is reportedly no longer investing in Web 2.0 start-ups. “We have absolutely no interest in funding Web 2.0 companies,” KPCB partner Randy Komisar recently told Silicon Valley Watcher’s Tom Foremski, adding that he’d recently told John Battelle, conference chair of Web 2.0 Summit, that the term is viewed with disdain in the VC community.

As the Globe and Mail’s Mathew Ingram notes, Komisar’s remark is for Web 2.0 devotees “a little like King Arthur telling you he’s really not that hot on the whole Grail thing any more, and you can stop looking now.”

It’s also more than a little ironic. Because, according to a report from Dow Jones VentureOne and Ernst & Young, emerging Web 2.0 companies snared almost $1 billion in venture capital worldwide in the first six months of 2007. That said, very little of it was from KPCB, which seems to have sat most of Web 2.0 out. “I’m personally not doing much in Web 2.0 at the moment,” Komisar told VentureBeat in January. “I’m looking for more fundamental innovations. I’m less interested in the content and media fallout. There are no strong barriers to entry in Web 2.0. If by Web 2.0, you mean companies that build an audience to be monetized by Google, I am not actively pursuing them; though I should never say never. I’m not sure how long YouTube would have remained an independent business had they not been bought by Google. Google has an efficient search engine to monetize large audiences. If you’re creating Web 2.0 products and media, its tough to build anything of sufficient scale to remain independent–you are more likely to end up being a feature on Google, Microsoft or Yahoo.”