The Industry Standard magazine lived a life of extremes and contradictions -- and it was surely a product of the heady dot-com times. The magazine was seeded by straitlaced tech publisher IDG, but run by maverick CEO John Battelle, who brought in outside investors, high-profile journalists and had visions of a major media company on its own. The magazine brought in $200 million in ad revenues in 2000 -- an American record -- but folded the next year when many of those dot-com advertisers went bust themselves.

In the bankruptcy auction, IDG bought up the associated Web sites and brand of the Standard but let TheStandard.com site languish with wire service copy. But now, former Industry Standard online honcho Matt McAlister -- who is vice president and general manager of online operations at IDG's InfoWorld -- has decided to bring the site back to life as a moonlighting project. His plans are modest, with a rotating schedule of guest bloggers over the coming months, but he is clearly optimistic that the Standard still has a place in the media universe.

"The tech industry and the Internet sector are clearly turning around," McAlister told me. "On some level, there's a nostalgia influencing what I'm doing. But regardless of the Standard's history, I'm a believer that we have barely scratched the surface of what this technology and this medium will mean to us in the future. Somebody needs to chronicle that story. ... Could there be a better chronicler of the Internet story than the Standard?"

Crazy as it might sound, there might just be a market for Internet business news, post-boom. "The economy is becoming as Internet-based as it once was petroleum-based," said Slate media critic Jack Shafer via e-mail. "Given the right niche, and the sort of creditable reporting we saw in the Standard, I believe that yes, it could make some sort of return."

McAlister first told me last fall about his plans to revive TheStandard.com, and asked me to be one of the guest bloggers. He told me that there was still traffic coming to the site, despite the fact that most of it was archives or IDG wire stories. After taking responsibility (once again) for TheStandard.com last September, McAlister found that the site was getting 50,000 unique users per month.

As I was the lead writer for the Standard's Media Grok newsletter in its early days, I felt like a week-long blogging gig would be an interesting return to a format I've always enjoyed: round up the news and comment on it. Others feel the same, as former Standard contributors Jimmy Guterman, Rafat Ali, James Ledbetter and Mike Butcher have signed up to blog without pay. There will be no editorial oversight before posting, and bloggers will write to the style that suits them best -- but mainly with links to news and comments.

Guterman, who revived Media Grok as Media Unspun and currently runs a gaming-industry magazine, launched the blog last Monday with a wry tone. "It's 2004 and you're reading new writing on this Web site," he wrote. "Something must be terribly wrong. What year is it? Did you hit your head? Did I? Don't worry. We writers may suffer delusions of personal grandeur, but this modest Weblog is not the first step in some eventual resurrection of The Industry Standard. It's not 1999 anymore."

But the Internet Economy -- a term dubbed by the Standard -- is still alive and well, as every Fortune 1000 company has integrated the Net into their business. The fact that Google can contemplate an initial public offering to raise $4 billion means that dot-com froth still lives. But it's a different kind of froth, with lowered expectations and smaller budgets for advertising. In fact, Google itself has done zero consumer advertising.

The time is right?

The technology business is seeing signs of an upswing, and online advertising has come back strong. But does that add up to a rebirth of all the New Economy magazines that littered our mailboxes? Not exactly. But slowly, they are rising from the dot-com dustbin, and thinking smaller. The Red Herring recently re-launched as an independent online-only publication, with plans to add a print magazine this fall. Now, the Standard is adding its voice to the mix.

James Ledbetter helped launch the European edition of the Standard, and wrote a book chronicling the rise and fall of the magazine, "Starving to Death on $200 Million a Year" (Public Affairs; 2003). The book is an interesting post-mortem on the Standard, and Ledbetter said different people at the magazine reacted differently to the book. "Some loved it, some had criticisms, some wanted to read more about themselves, some aren't speaking to me."

Still, Ledbetter will do a stint of guest blogging for the site because he said he trusts McAlister. His first word of advice for a new Standard: "Don't spend $6 million on a CRM [customer relation management] system you don't need and that doesn't work." Ledbetter said it's hard to say if the time is right for a comeback without first defining "comeback."

"There are certainly a lot of indications that both the general ad market and IT spending are poised to bounce back this year," he said. "So in that sense, yes. But I don't see a quick return to the VC [venture capital] and IPO frenzy of the late '90s, so I'm not sure the startup focus of those publications makes as much sense as it once did."

McAlister said he doesn't really have a long-term plan for TheStandard.com, and that he has no intention to launch a print magazine. His boss, Kevin McKean, CEO and editorial director of InfoWorld, said he has no idea whether the Standard will make a full-blown comeback or not, but he feels that some of the taint of the dot-com bubble has worn off.

McKean told me it would take a solid boost in site traffic and a plan to deliver unique editorial not duplicated elsewhere before InfoWorld would consider putting money into the "no-cost" operation. "At this point, we are floating a small boat on the water, and we're going to see if it floats," he told me. "And if it doesn't float, nobody's lost anything. And if it does starts to float, we'll put a sail on it and a motor, and so on."

Eric Savitz, a former editor at the Standard who's now the West Coast editor for Barron's, said tech publications still have an uphill climb in the market, and he doubts IDG would take the idea very far.

"The advertising market, online and off, is not all that friendly to tech pubs at the moment," Savitz told me via e-mail. "Wired and Business 2.0 are pretty much the last of the New Economy mags. I think there's plenty of news flow to sustain a monthly or weekly magazine on technology; but you'd have to find some highly risk-tolerant investors to get such a thing off the ground. In the case of The Standard.com, it's hard to imagine IDG would want to plow a lot of money into the Standard brand all over again. Matt will need to work miracles to make it anything with original copy -- or at least copy where the authors are actually getting paid."

The blogging angle

Because the Standard had a reputation for solid news analysis, the group blog makes a lot of sense. It's certainly a cheap way to attract writing talent. McAlister said he has the first couple months booked and is looking for other former Standard writers or trusted voices to contribute.

One guest blogger, Mike Butcher, now a journalist and blogger for his own Mbites.com site, said the Weblog format is a perfect way for the old Standard to connect to a new audience.

"The Standard of old broke the news online and took a weekly 'step back' in print to analyze what was really going on," Butcher told me via e-mail. "It could do that again easily and quickly online today, using some of the techniques of blogging. Especially if you think that blogging is more about referencing the news while adding context and comment in a timely fashion. The people who liked the old Standard's ballsy attitude and skepticism never went away, and they are a savvy crowd, well worth targeting with advertising."

Barry Parr, a media consultant who writes the Media Savvy blog, was a big fan of the Standard before, and said he sees a possible opening for a comeback. "The current Internet industry is not well-served by the trades these days, and should be able to support its own book. There are certainly plenty of vendors that have survived and the industry has its own unique needs, so I believe there is an ad market. I'd be surprised if there weren't a big enough market to support a monthly. I wonder whether the brand equity of the Standard has survived the Age of Hype."

Despite its close association with the dot-com boom -- and bust -- the Standard still has a highly respected reputation. When Guterman sent out a note to his former Media Unspun readers telling them about the "experiment" on TheStandard.com, people responded as if the Standard was back in action. Guterman told me he had tried to downplay expectations as much he could.

"It's a blog!" he said. "That's all it is. It's a modest thing, but due to the incredible reputation of the Standard, something as tiny as this still gets this much attention. That's a testament to what Battelle and everyone else put together."