Let's back up a moment and look at television programming. Have you ever wondered why a respected journalist such as Dan Rather hosted a show like 48 Hours? Each week, 48 Hours spends a half-hour going over a murder, leaving the viewer hanging between pricey commercials until the very end of the show, before revealing if it was the husband who killed the wife. It panders to folks who like to hear the worst about people, with all the gory details.

More recently, you might ask why a former United States Congressman turned political talk show host, Joe Scarborough, would add longer and longer segments to his show about missing girls in Bermuda, endlessly interviewing the distraught parents, friends, and relatives about whether they think she's alive. The answer, as we all know, is ratings.

Unfortunately, the same is now true of the World Wide Web.

In the old days, one Internet business after another crashed because, as it turned out, they had nothing of value to offer. For example, a company named Ten Square tried to buy access to every gas pump in America to resell services, such as discount coupons for Starbucks coffee. Venture capitalists invested millions. They believed that the Web business, no matter what the idea, would eventually disintermediate the brick and mortar versions of these services -- and so they were in a race for the No. 1 market share position.

But market share doesn't pay the bills. Eventually, when it became clear that no one was interested in reading the gas pump for a 10 cent coffee coupon and the companies had squandered all the investment dollars, things began to hit the fan. It came to a head in April 2000, when a lot of these companies disappeared, all at once.