We've been kicking around the boom, bubble or bust thing for the past few days, and just when I started to believe that we had not actually forgotten the hard lessons we learned from the last bubble and bust, I read this article in the NY Times. If there was one perfect example of the bubble mentality of the late nineties, it is the story of Blue Mountain and the E-Card.

Here's the part of that article that matters most:

Excite@Home, the ill-fated online portal and high-speed Internet service, bought Blue Mountain for $780 million in 1999, partly for its ability to give advertisers a way to reach a wide swath of the Internet audience. Excite sold Blue Mountain two years later for $35 million to American Greetings....

If we truly see a resurgence of E-Cards, then we know the dirty bubble is lurking somewhere. I realize that an E-Card in and of itself does not create a bubble, but the mere fact that E-Cards are mentioned in a major newspaper is a bad omen that should send us running for the hills.

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bubble, e-cards