Dot-com nostalgia: Whatever happened to ...

When I lived in London in the early 1990s, I worked in the music industry for The KLF and got a chance to get very familiar with the British music press. One of my favorite publications was Q (which I still read now, online and in print) and one of my favorite features was "Where are they now?", which chronicled what happened to bands and the artists in them after the early flush of fame (or notoriety) had evaporated.

Since then, the rock star treatment has been extended to the darlings of the dot-com world. While many of my colleagues fawn over Twitter and Second Life, I have always wondered what happened to the first generation of dot-com pioneers. What happened to the once cutting-edge services? Did they all fold, or evolve into something else? What did the founders and management do wrong, and what did they do right? Where are the figures from that era?

When I started work at The Industry Standard earlier this year, I started to think about how this story could be covered, and thought back to the model established Q column. Why not follow a similar format for the early dot-coms? So, today we launched Where are they now? It took a lot of work, and I have to thank the two writers, David Cotriss and Mark Henricks, as well as several behind-the-scenes folks at The Industry Standard, for getting this off the ground. Here are the ten profiles:

• eToys
• Webvan
• Pets.com
• Boo
• TheGlobe.com
• Entertaindom
• Excite@Home
• Kozmo
• Garden.com
• DrKoop.com

We're going to be turning it into a regular series, probably starting late in June. Let me know if there's any earlier dot-coms that you'd like to see profiled ...