I posted this today on the Cluetrain Mainfesto list:

As a Cluetrain fan and a long-time list lurker, I’ve hesitated to
jump in as the slings and arrows of this crowd are sometimes hard
to follow…and I have felt too unplugged to keep from getting
shot down in the cross fire.

That admission aside, I wanted to say that my few days off around
the holidays have led me to grow nostalgic for last year’s
coverage of the Y2K bug.

At least with Y2K, there was a date-specific when all the dire
predictions of Apocalypze could end. That is not the case with
the current year-end saturation coverage of the dot.com
crash-meltdown-depression.

When will the bubble burst on these news stories? At some point
in the near future, the “fuckedcompany era” must end as we all
conclude that it is not significant to our lives anymore that
dumb businesses managed by dumb individuals and funded by dumb
investors die. Even smart businesses managed by smart individuals
and smart investors die. Businesses start and die every day. They
always have. They always will. I am old enough - and have been
fortunate enough - to have succeeded significantly and failed
miserably and frankly, the failures have done more for me than
the successes.

That such business creation and contraction have been carried out
in the public marketplace with exuberant amounts of cash at stake
under the scrutiny of mass media makes it more interesting, but
it does not make it “news.”

At some point, this coverage too must past as so much of it (like
the Y2K coverage before it) completely misses the point.

The real impact of the Internet will come when coverage shifts
from “the deal flow” onto “the idea flow” that permeates lists
such as this and books such as Cluetrain and on weblogs and, in
my humble opinion, sites like smallbusiness.com, where grassroots
knowledge is being unleashed in ways we cannot yet comprehend.

Many years ago, I heard Paul Saffo explain a cycle of technology
hype (which more recently, the folks at the Gartner Group
borrowed and named “the hype cycle”) in which he graphed the
inevitable over-promise, resulting disappointment and long-term
impact of important technological advances. The roller-coaster of
explosive hype, a disillusioning trough of despair and the
underestimation of the technology’s positive longterm impact can
be seen playing out as the marketplace and media and beleaguered
participants try to make sense of the current
“crash-meltdown-depression.”

As tiresome as the over-hyped “boom” story was, the “crash” story
is long due for a correction.

Let’s move on.