I got a concerned e-mail from a relative recently asking, “what is the intent of dot.communist? Is it considered subversive and monitored by the FBI?”

Oh, boy.

Okay, so I guess a little history is in order. “Dot-communist” was a term I coined sometime during the summer of 1997 to describe the mentality that surrounded venture capitalists and the pure-play Internet startup crowd in the summer of 1997, when I was labs director at Information Week and covering the burgeoning Internet bubble. Subsequently, and independently, the term was used by others in the media and in the Internet community–I claim no intellectual property rights.

Around that time, I started a personal web-zine called “the dot-communist” (before I even knew what a weblog was) documenting my descent into the “new economy”, first at CMP Media and then at a small publishing company joined at the hip with a late-in-the-ballgame Web startup. I populated the site with occasional rants about the stupidity of those running what would become known as “dot-bombs”, and the way that they suckered in people to exchange their intelligence for relatively meaningless scraps of paper called stock options.

History, as most people know, bore out my pessimism. And it gave me plenty of material.

Subversive? Well, maybe. But I think the FBI has better things to do than find out how pissed I am about the latest baseless business process patent, or about the 11 new security problems in Windows.