I am befuddled by venture capitalists and investment bankers in the new-media business. Talk to them over martinis, and you'll hear them make hard-boiled noises about revenue streams and marketing plans and exit strategies, while explaining to you why your idea has no possible chance of ever seeing the light of day because you're not asking for enough money to make it worth their while to even pull your business plan out of the envelope.

Why, yes, I've been on the receiving end of these conversations. More than once. Why do you ask?

It appeared obvious to me even on the upswing of New Media Madness that too many people were drinking bad Flavor-Aid. No, no no, the Money Gods said. You're just a troglodyte. You don't Get It. It's about inventing the New Paradigm for the New Millennium.

OK. Let's fast forward to that New Millennium. Just in this past week, broadband netcaster Pseudo faded to black. Altavista abandoned its portal strategy to go back to being a search engine. Deja cut a third of its staff and will now do no one's sure what. Disney's Go portal recast itself as an entertainment destination site, instead of an on-ramp portal.

I figure about 1,000 fewer people had jobs in the New Economy as I write this than did a week ago.

Is that a bad thing? A lot of talented people did a lot of hard work to no particular aim. But what bugs me the most is what a waste it all is.

Pseudo put on a lot of killer parties and played a significant role in shining the image of Silicon Alley as a game for the young, pretentious and pierced. What they did not have was any coherent plan to produce content that people actually wanted to watch.

Someone persuaded the mostly late and mostly lamented Digital Equipment Corp. that its Altavista search technology was less important as a technology than as a hub to draw people in. Someone persuaded Deja that organizing Usenet for mass consumption was less useful than doing vox populi product evaluations.

No one ever seemed to ask: How do we make actual money from this? And by the time the question was asked, the answer was: Hummna-hummna-hummna. And millions of dollars were flushed, and thousands of jobs were lost.

And all of it would be pretty comical, except that there are still too many Net businesses that are still running without that vital "income" section in mind, and too much dumb money that's in the game because ... well, just because. The bloodletting, I'm afraid, is just getting started.