I recently stuck my head into the big tent of the internet business world to find that the fever is back, baby. As fans of this space know, I worked for a number of net ventures in the mid-nineties in what was euphemistically called Silicon Alley — New York’s content answer to the west coast’s claim to be creating pretty much everything else in Silicon Valley. At the waning days of a recession that had seen the print business falter, sites such as iGuide and Total New York represented not just the future but the only game in town.

Of course that game didn’t seem to have any rules, or at best they were being made up as we went. Riding on a rising tide of bogus valuations and overnight success stories, venture capitalists reacted angrily to anyone questioning their business model. The money would come from somewhere and people pointed to the proprietary AOL model (once they’ve come to your crummy site, never let them go) for guidance. Hence all that talk about stickiness.

AOL is something of a dinosaur now, and Google, the success story du jour, has nothing to do with being proprietary. (Their guiding principle is not so much “Don’t be evil” as it is “If you love someone, let them go.”) And since they cracked the code of advertising online, giving people exactly what they were searching for because they asked for it, the company invokes both respect and fear in a way that makes the old AOL hatred seem tepid.

What’s changed now is that VC types want a better idea of how you intend on making money with your site before they’ll invest while the people doing the site building are still trying to find cheap ways to get their content. You know: the stuff that people look at and interact with. The stuff that makes them want to come back. The buzz phrase these days is “user generated content” with YouTube (owned by Google) being the most obvious example. Why create video when your users can do it for you? And with blogs and such, you can let them write most of content on the site, too.

At the then ballyhooed launch of Slate, then editor Michael Kinsley alienated a lot of netizens by saying that when he went into a restaurant, he wanted a trained chef, not an amateur, to make his meal. It was a battle cry for writers and editors who were sick of seeing their skills undervalued. Ten years later, Slate is still around (though Kinsley is gone) while all those little dot coms that mocked him have vanished. Their big idea — that they didn’t need no stinking word people — has been weighed and found wanting, sort of. Perhaps this new phase is just round two with UGC representing just the latest iteration (another nineties word!) of the hope that sites will somehow create themselves and wise web heads can just reap the profits.

The young people who worked for me in the nineties were all listening to Oasis, whose song “Champagne Supernova,” I was told, was as good as anything by the Beatles. Seems silly now though the most song’s memorable line — “Where were you when we were getting high?” — still seems relevant. If you’re not inside the teepee, inhaling the smoke, you won’t see the same visions the rest of the tribe does. And if everyone doesn’t believe, won’t the vision disappear?