Back from the dead... again

There's nowt but a note on Barrons to show for it, but something is stirring at the long-moribund website of The Industry Standard. Could it be that, a mere couple of weeks after Business 2.0 bit the dust, another title tied to the Dot Com boom is coming back from the dead?
The Standard was one of the stand-out magazines of the era, a mag that didn't take itself as seriously as others, and wasn't afraid to puncture a few egos in pursuit of the story. Sub Standard, the unofficial in-house rag, was a hysterically funny read - if you could get hold of it. If you haven't read James Ledbetter's account, you'll have missed out.

But besides making tech hacks a bit misty-eyed, what does it all mean?

I'm going to take a punt here and suggest that the current flux in
the market is to do with Web 2.0, which itself has received a real
boost from social networking and search, two areas dear to IWR's heart.
There are positives and negatives to this.

Firstly, Interpretations of Web 2.0 vary, but the finest I've found comes courtesy of bash.org. I'm inadvertently straying into David Tebbut's previous post
here by saying that a phenomena is not uniform, but if someone mentions
Web 2.0, I tend to get suspicious. Web 2.0 is a way of neatly
classifying a type of business or a practice, and it's been thoroughly
hijacked, just as David argues that Quechup is likely to make people
less trusting of social networking apps. This is not to say that Web
2.0 now equals evil. It doesn't, and there are a lot of fantastic
applications out there that deserve to succeed.

On the positive side, it does mean that the market is warming up,
there's more activity and (in theory) a greater need for titles to
explain it all. At the early stages of Web 2.0, there were clear
delineations between ideas and services, but as the market for social
applications has heated up competition for unique features that are actually of interest to punters has got far more intensive.

What does this mean for the rest of us? I've no idea, frankly, but I do hope that a new Standard lives up to its predecessor.