I read an article on C|NET News about a Harvard University professor, Dale Jorgenson, who said we are not in the middle nor are heading towards a new dot com crash. Professor Jorgensen gave a presentation in Aspen, Colorado in which he explained why he feels another dot com crash just won’t happen.

The character of innovation in the U.S. economy has shifted drastically. It’s shifted from IT production, which predominated in the boom, to the successful utilization of IT.

As much as I agree that we have evolved from being IT obsessed to being IT conscious, the fact still remains that many of today’s projects that utilize IT (such as social networks) produce results that are also working against stability. There are many IT utilizations today being sold for amounts reaching hundreds of millions of dollars, and new, sometimes ridiculous ideas, get financed with equally ridiculous amounts of money. Sounds familiar? People are getting more and more obsessed by creating something new in the Web 2.0 environment that would generate ad space which in turn would generate a huge revenue (millions of dollars, while giving proportionately little value). An explosion of social networks and rich content, each similar but slightly different than the other, while bringing numerous advantages (new development platforms, business models, technological advancements), also brings a few disadvantages (large number of similar web sites, with only a few bringing true value, while the others simply generate ad space). Heading for another advertising heaven frenzy, similar in result, but different in trajectory? I think we very well may be.

Basing an assumption that everything is swell because we have shifted from IT obsession to IT utilization may not be enough. There are only so many new revolutionary things that can happen during a web evolution cycle. I already touched on this in this post. Each time the cycle ends (presuming this theory holds water), there is a more or less drastic change or accumulated effect that will shift the web evolution trajectory (think of it as a growing zig-zag pattern), and each time we will have accumulated knowledge that will spawn new developments in the next cycle. C’est la vie or rather c’est le web!

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