Peter mentions "[I]t’s clear that there’s actual value in clicks-and-mortar, unlike the pure plays we’ve been seeing cluttering up the obituaries." Which is a very good point, as it’s what the company I’m at now has been doing since it started, and why I thought the company had potential. Especially since this company was at the time essentially a content play, it always made sense to me that we had a physical component. (Our music videos are shown in-store at Musicland stores like Sam Goody, Media Play and Suncoast Video.)

But recently, especially in light of Musicland being bought by Best Buy, I’m wondering if, as the pendulum swings towards integration of off- and on-line efforts, are there any pure-web-play ideas or even pure-internet-plays left?

I mean those of us who have been online for decades always knew these channels of info would be integrated into our daily lives someday. But computers and networking and programming and design and all of this crap have always been a hobby of mine, too, and it seems to me that there’s no fun stuff left anymore to build a hobby around.

I don’t mean hardware, either. That scene has been dead for years. I get no joy whatsoever from the never-ending stream of 15% performance enhancements. I don’t even have an interest in building a computer anymore. And all the major software categories now are fairly mature, there’s not going to be some big revolution in word processing any time soon. So what’s the new toy?