Another excellent resource, particularly for on-line marketers, is eMarketer.com.

http://www.emarketer.com/

And here's a second method of keeping informed. Subscribe to E-zines. An E-zine is an internet version of a magazine. They lack glossy photos and fancy typefaces, but they can provide you with valuable information on subject of your choice. There are e-zines published on just about any topic you can think of. Here are a couple of e-zine databases. Take a look and subscribe to several e-zines you think might be of value to you. Then you'll have timely information arrive weekly, bi-weekly or monthly, right in your e-mailbox. Subscribing is easy, e-zines are free and you can unsubscribe at any time.

http://www.newsletteraccess.com/

http://www.ezineseek.com/

A third way is to utilize a portal (start page) with a news feature you can customize. For instance, I use excite, which offers a NewsTracker Clipper Service that allows you to enter key words. The tracker will find articles for you so you don't have to search all over web to find them. You can track entire industries (or your individual competitors). A real time-saver. Here's excite's URL:

http://www.excite.com/

Now Internet businesses were expected to come up with business plans that looked like those from real world and which included real numbers, real timelines and real results. No longer were bankers looking through rose-colored glasses. That pink ink really WAS pink (or, more precisely, now that we look at it a little closer, more red than pink, actually).

Suddenly money wasn't being thrown at Internet entrepreneurs' feet. Suddenly loans were being called up and businesses shut down. Suddenly investors were watching stock prices dwindle ever so inexorably, day by day. Suddenly investors were losing life savings and vowing to never again invest in new economy.

REALIGNMENT

After big bang, landscape was strewn with carcasses of one-time high-flyers, brought down to earth by nothing more earth-shattering than simple gravity.

But like blades of grass emerging from scorched earth following a bushfire, small, conservative, money- parched, lower case e entrepreneurs got to their feet.

Unburdened by crippling debt and understanding all along that an Internet business is no different from any other business - revenues must always exceed expenses after all - their businesses survived great Internet shake-out.

For so long bemoaning to themselves, "How are we supposed to compete with big guys?", suddenly a new realization ... "How are they supposed to compete with us?". How are "big guys" able to target niche markets way we can so effectively and yet generate kinds of bucks necessary to fund their infrastructures; how can they possibly provide true customer service on a genuinely personal level, as opposed to employing an army of autobots? How can they possibly be nimble enough to turn on a dime in response to changing dynamics that occur on a seemingly daily basis? What their failure tells us is, quite simply, they can't.

So, although we're all paying price of Internet backlash, over time new norms will be established. The pendulum has now swung to both extremes - goldrush arc and backlash arc. A pendulum, though, finally comes to rest dead center.

So, hold your nerve, position yourself and your business in that center, where you've been all along, and you'll be ready to take your place in NEW new economy which will soon emerge.