INTERNET: The way things are. Sorry to rip a huge chunk of comment from Kottke's comments in A whole new internet? (kottke.org), but it's all true, after the dot com bust, companies panicked and only gave out money to develop sure-fire ways of getting a return on investment, while developing ideas and creative staff was not on many lists.

Read more: "When the dot com economy was crumbling in 2000 and 2001, I remember thinking at the time that although everyone I knew was out of work (myself included), that is was a good thing for the long term. One of the more pleasant side effects of the dot com boom was that billions of dollars were spent training indivduals how to design web sites, program, write, etc. In the years following the bust, when all those people were suddenly unemployed or stuck in high-paying jobs that they didn't care for very much but needed to pay the bills, they responded by starting to tinker around with all sorts of neat things, just for the hell of it. Because they could, because they wanted to, not because they had an artificial deadline to reach or some arbitrary client requests to satisfy."