Yesterday at the Gawker-owned Valleywag blog, contributor Paul Boutin reported on, then expanded upon, a phrase he says is going around the Silicon Valley: “the 250.” According to Boutin, the term is

a cruelly sarcastic euphemism used in real-life conversations for the small, cliquey group of self-appointed Web 2.0 insiders who seem to spend their days blogging and Twittering about one another. The gist is that The 250 are the 250 people who matter to The 250.

I don’t know about you, but that sure sounds to me like the “Gang of 500,” coined by Mark Halperin for ABC’s once-influential The Note. Its usage has fallen off in the past year; the phrase doesn’t appear in The Note’s archives since Halperin left to create Time’s The Page. I can’t be sure Halperin isn’t still using it, at least until Time introduces The Search.

In any case, these insidery nicknames are innocuous enough if a little annoying. As if the Beltway and Valley cultures aren’t insular enough, apparently we also have to give the elites of this elite an arbitrary fixed number to serve as a nickname.

As we’re all well aware, it’s said that DC is Hollywood for ugly people. But maybe this is wrong. Equating the District with LA is a bit presumptuous on our part. It might be more accurate to say that New York City is Hollywood for busy people. Or that Hollywood is New York for flaky people.

We shouldn’t pretend the Beltway is in their league. No, the Valley is our proper analogue. Heck, even Northern Virginia has its share of high tech companies. But then, they’ve got an Apple and a Google and a Cisco and we’ve got… AOL, which is relocating to NYC in hopes of turning itself around. I guess that means the Valley is DC for people who are good at math. Which I suppose means DC is the Valley for poor people. So, maybe our 500 doesn’t beat your 250 after all.

Have PoliticalMavens.com delivered to your inbox in a daily digest by clicking here