Departing
Washington Post technology writer Leslie Walker reviews her reporting of Internet business over the last eight years and comes across an interesting folder labeled "big bad bets."
Essentially, it's about tech startups with loopy ideas that attracted crazy amounts of VC cash back in the heady mid-to-late Nineties. Anybody remember Beenz and Flooz, the guys who tried to create
Internet "currency"? Or CueCat, the cat-shaped bar code scanner that wanted to bring magazine readers from print ads to Web commercials (err, not here). What about iWon.com? The sweepstakes Web site
that planned to give $10 million away to people who clicked on its links? That one's still giving stuff away today, as part of Barry Diller's InterActiveCorp. As fun as it is to remember
flash-in-the-pans, Walker says the most telling thing is the number of old themes that appear today. One is consumer-generated content. When you look at how much ($3 billion!) Yahoo put into
GeoCities--widely considered the first social network--News Corp. got the market-dominating MySpace for one-sixth of that. And what did Yahoo ever do with GeoCities anyway? In 1998, Walker points out
that the 10 fastest-growing Web sites "were ones where users create the content," and this is long before "blog" was even a word.
Read the whole story at The Washington Post »
