Flutterby™! : e-commerce revitalized?

Also via Scripting News, a New York Times editorial: The Dot-Com Bubble Bursts: The current sense of despair in the dot-com universe may be as overdone as last year's euphoria. The Internet, after all, really is a transforming technology that has revolutionized the way we communicate. Now I'm not sure the stock market has yet deflated enough to bring parity to the world, but I've also been spending a bit of time outside of my usual retail haunts this midwinter merchandising season, especially since one of my favorite music stores is in the process of liquidating its stock so I've had to go to mainstream music stores, and I find myself flip-flopping and becoming an e-commerce believer once again. The real problem is that the towns in which we reside aren't built to be lived in; because of suburb sprawl we don't have the downtown commercial districts which once were communal spaces, instead we've got malls, which we have to drive to, and which we have no sense of ownership over. Oh well.