If one stands back for a moment and takes a hard look at at the evolution of the Net, it seems perfectly clear that all of us Net surfers and Net entrepreneurs are simply entering a new cycle on the Net and each cycle is an improvement, of sorts, on the previous one.

Yes, Chicken Little was the one who went around lamenting "The sky is falling, the sky is falling", when it really wasn't. And there are those in the Internet business who lament "the crash of April, 2000," when Net stocks took a dive. Perhaps they don't recall "the crash of August, 1998" when the Nasdaq also took a dive, and many called off their grand Net strategies, retreating into the bond market. No one, presumably, gave them a quick refresher course on the meaning of the word "cycle", but then again, you probably wouldn't think of it as a cycle if it wiped you out before you got to the rebound, or upswing portion of it.

If one stands back for a moment and takes a hard look at at the evolution of the Net, it seems perfectly clear that all of us Net surfers and Net entrepreneurs are simply entering a new cycle on the Net and each cycle is an improvement, of sorts, on the previous one.

Let's start with the more or less universal, current wail of the most sophisticated Net pundits: " The glory days and gold rush times of the Net are finished. Think survival. See if you can move back in with your parents. Dig in for the long haul, as the former Net high flyers crash from the sky around you, hunker down, think small, count your pennies and hope to be mistaken for a prudent, nickle squeeszing accountant type." Put succinctly: "The Internet sky is falling."

Or, as one pundit, John Carroll, put it in the July issue of Business 2.0 , "It's those Nasdaq-plunging, start-up collapsing, venture-capitalists-fleeing, god-I-need-a-vacation-and-some-tequila-not-in-that-order blues". He goes on to give some guidelines for survival, assuring those in this position they will survive but perhaps in a somewhat altered state.

The state one emerges in is, arguably, a natural part of evolution, a cycle which applies, not just to the Net and to the stock market, but to all forms of life. Today, it's back to basics; tomorrow it could be something else, something we can scarcely imagine yet.

Net denizens have watched the Net evolve from a sleepy, global village where academics and engineers hung out, to a "Eureka, we can communicate with everyone on the globe", enthusiastic, amateur ham-radio-Bulletin Board-turned Web-enthusiast hot spot, to the entry of the Big Boys -- the Time - Warner, CNN, Hearst, News Corp league - sometimes known as the Dark Days for the amateurs, and certainly the end of throwing up a dot com and simultaneously having a lot of fun. Serious money and serious competition, not to mention truly awesome stakes, inevitably call for serious concentration:the attention level of an Indian firewalker and the concentration of a Tibetan monk. In other words, the Net came to be about serious business.

Today, the Net is the ultimate change agent, constantly evolving, delivering new business models and radically different paths to success at eye blinking, sometimes heart stopping, speed. Now, many Net business models have 6 months or less to launch, fire up, succeed and evolve or die.

The hottest trends today focus on the B2B, business to business, marketplace. These involve end to end transactions where a company accesses an online market place, and can stream product availability to websites users, who stream back a purchase order, and on the same web site, perhaps, get financing and shipping on the product, while the purchaser completes an electronic transfer of funds to the seller's account.

In essence, there are 3 general types of marketplaces: procurement systems allow companies to trade; branded communites,which have private marketplaces which share data then link to public exchanges; and one time auctions which use rented software to provide their marketplace platform. And this Internet space is hot: more than 1000 Web marketplaces have been announced in the past year, in dozens of catagories from Aerospace to Telecom.

According to the July Forbes.com, the B2B universe breaks down into Buyer or Supplier Exchanges, Neutral Exchanges, dominated by neither buyers or sellers, Business Process Outsourcers, which manage non-core functions such as human resources or payroll, and MRO-Catalog Hubs, which aggregate and provide a marketplace for the supplies used in maintenance, repair and operatons.

As time goes on, it is expected that many of these hubs will interconnect into mega-hubs, so that a food hub might connect to a restaurant hub which would connect to a maintenance and operation hub and so on. At least, that is one Net vision.

But we have already learned one thing about the Net. It will continue to evolve. B2B marketplaces may be the New thing, but inevitably, one day, there will be a new, New Thing. Only the best of the breed will survive. The cycle of creation and destruction will continue with traditional businesses and new Net business models, alike, being constantly created, then deconstructed, transformed, reshaped, then reenvisioned and recreated. It is the survival of the fittest, all over again, only this time it's on the Net. And, this, as Martha Stewart says, is a good thing.