BANGALORE: Four years can be eons in dotcom land. But those who thought dotcoms would fade away like a bad dream would be surprised. For there has been a silent mutation that has undergone.

This was amply evident in San Francisco, the heartland of geeks in the US where every radio commercial still pipes out a dotcom address urging people just not to miss it for the world.

So you have a dotcom to buy your favourite Chevy. If you are thinking of home mortgage, there is a dotcom. There is a dotcom for wine connoisseurs.

Want a personal loan to buy anything which you fancy, there is a dotcom. And believe it or not, if you want to save a tree, there is a dotcom! Apart from these busy commercials (on radio, TV and in print) there is absolutely no hangovers of those hyperactive days when every guy walking on a valley street could be a potential dotcom (as was the case in Bangalore).

There are two things that are happening in the dotcom world. One is more akin to Nicholas Negroponte's "flip-flop" theory (which said all that is wired will go wireless and all that is wireless will go wired). We now see much of the offline activity, which involves human interaction, is going online.

Much of what was dreamed could be done using the Net is going offline. Imagine a seminar which will see much of its publicity and registration happening online and the seminar itself will be held in an imposing auditorium, offline.

But there is an interesting development which has happened while we slept through the tech winter. Dotcoms have seeped into our lives. We connect with the world thanks to a dotcom. We see most of the commercials even here in India refer to a website with a dotcom address. Our governments are going online more and more to increase efficiency. We turn to a website while at work catching news or a cricket score.

Perhaps the greatest success story so far is US entertainment mogul Barry Diller who consolidated a string of dotcoms to run a highly profitable (in dotcom standards!) InterActive Corp (IAC) who in a recent interview with The New York Times said he would not give any forecasts to Wall Street because it is difficult to keep pace with the speed with which his company's growing. The nerve.