For a number of years Wall Street analysts, futurists, and astrologers have been extolling the wonders of the coming Internet era, and with good reason: The Internet surely has value.

Yet finding that value has been a major challenge for just about everyone. Online sites have blown through hundreds of billions of investor dollars and shareholder equity worth trillions of dollars has been both created and lost.

Today's online sites -- even those operating deeply in the red -- are survivors. At least for the moment they are doing substantially better then a number of once-formidable and well-funded online efforts. Such a reality raises a thought: The gleaners are here.

In the biblical tradition, farmers were to harvest their fields imperfectly. Gleaners -- poor people, strangers, and widows -- were then welcome to gather what remained. In this way everyone would have something to eat and nothing was wasted. Gleaning, in a sense, was a kind of humanitarian transfer tax, a decent way for those with food to help those without. (See: Leviticus 19:9 and 19:10 and Deuteronomy 24:19)

Today we have something similar. Rather than gleaning in the fields we now have salvagers in office towers and high-tech industrial parks, an activity open to rich and poor alike.

What's happened is that enormous numbers of dollars have been invested in online and telecom activities during the past decade. Alas, the theory of "spend it all and the people will come" has been shown not to work. Stringing fiber-optic cables does not mean everyone wants such technology nor that so much capacity can possibly be used. As to the Internet, in an environment with an endless amount of electronic real estate, there are few prime locations and sites rarely make money unless connected to a bricks-and-mortar business.

The result is an opportunity for the swift, the insightful, and those with cash on hand.

• There was a time when Excite.com was one of the largest sites online, a business bought for $6.7 billion in 1999. By 2001 -- just two years later -- it was sold again, this time for a mere $10 million at a bankruptcy sale. Today Excite.com is still one of the largest sites on the Web, ranked 35th for traffic by Alexa.com. (See: In Rewritten Internet Fables, the Late Bird Gets the Worm, The New York Times, December 27, 2001)

• Until recently, the most-interesting new form of real estate improvement has been the data center, also known as lit buildings, server farms and telco hotels. These massive structures were designed to serve as Internet and telecom centers where huge numbers of computers and phone lines could be operated in a secure environment. You could build one for $50 million -- or you could wait like Freddie Mac until excess capacity sets in and then buy the same structure for just $5.5 million. (See: All Over the Area, Data Centers Assume New Identities, The Washington Post, May 14, 2002)

Are more goodies out there? You bet. The gleaning has begun -- just look for the furniture auctions, equipment sales, space re-lets, and whole buildings for sale at high-tech industrial parks and office towers near you. Operators are standing by....

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