I was talking to a fellow austinite tonight about the energetic, entrepreneurial, and borderline exhuburant atmosphere within our city when it comes to business, technology, and dare I say it the dreaded dot.bomb.

She led me to this pointed post by micro-persuasion about the state of things. It’s been a bit since I’ve perused Steve’s site but this commentary, along with his other recent articles are telling insight into the state of interactive, the hedging of wall-street technology investors and potentially precarious times we are heading into.

I do think we thankfully have more of a balanced perspective, and enough folks that got the financial crap beat out of them in 1997-2001 that we’ll weather the storm. God knows I’d been to many of the circa 1998 parties at places like IXL, and lived practically next door to marchFIRST in gramercy park only to watch things go from dot.com hipsterism to complete ghost town.

The primary difference here, is that in those days most of “us” bought into our own bullsh*t. Now most of us are much smarter and know to be VERY wary of what is going to work long term. We’re aware that the new versions of google, amazon, napster, and itunes are just around the corner, and the smallest of startups (ala blurb, etsey, volusion) could can potentially f*ck up a traditional business model in a matter of a 6 months.

Where I somewhat disagree with Steve is that while we may have learned a bit of a lesson from the first round of internet up-the-arse-dom, old media, wall street, and baby boomers haven’t.  Quite a few in this set are helping to fuel a digital jim jones kool-aid revival.

Enlightened advertising agencies, corporate clients and the traditional media may be investing in a bolder web 2.0 future, but may also be  bringing us back to the future. This crowd was sheltered from the interactive storm years ago. With the exception of the likes Time Warner/AOL (who beyond the AOL debacle also helped to spawn agency.com), few understand the details of what’s going on with the web. They don’t have the deep scars from bubble,  or see the threats and possibilities of a “I’ll kill your business model with open-source technology” era.

So instead, they run after a few bright shiny objects. Clients are misinformed, paying 100’s of thousands of dollars for myspace pages, and watching the ticker tape parade for Facebook.

The roots of this are in-part niavete, and also a cultural dynamic. Corporate decision making around media technologies is fueled at the lower ranks by youthful “hype” for tech (Gen Y), the middle aged GenXers that through pop culture and ADD addled observation seem to “know” this stuff without really participating in these new technologies, and with  baby boomers throwing cash at things while not understanding or caring to know about web 2.0, just simply a desire to cash in. They expect and judge these properties in a mass “quick hit” way that mass media would yield . I’ll explain further rationale for this in a future post, but in the mean time interpret these findings from Forrester as backup.

People like randall, bob, chris, russell and ted will hopefully keep us from a repeat of that world of sh*t. Vets that have the street smarts, and new creative minds to sit by and let the mass experimentation and hedging of next generation web’s future happen, while also having the benefit and experience of sitting on both sides of the technology/media fence to make sure we don’t go all head up the arse like we did 10 years ago.

Regardless of this passenger seat corporate psychology, let’s just be cautious and smart on where we go from here. And do so in a way that’s optimistic that the current web tipping point is much bigger that 1997, bigger things are to come, and not be so scared of a repeat of history.

Else we will miss an opportunity to create something that astounds everyone all-over again.