One of the sicker developments of the internet age is the so-called celebrity dead-pool, sites where those with nothing better to do speculate online about the next world famous figure to suffer an untimely end, winning points based on the accuracy of their predictions adjusted for varying odds to reflect celebrities' ages and life-styles.
It didn't take long after the Nasdaq market crash for a similar website to appear devoted entirely to reporting on and speculating about which dot com companies will be the next to crash and burn.
Any investor foolish enough to be sitting on a portfolio of internet stocks might be well advised to plug into the seething cynicism of F***edCompany.com, known as FC to its regular visitors. Every day it posts a sad litany of reports on the latest, mainly American, dot com companies whose sites have suddenly gone off air, whose workers have arrived to be given their pink slips, whose founders or chief executives have absconded. Visitors to the site can register and, in a parody of the endless stock picking games on American financial websites, nominate the five dot com companies they expect to get, er messed up, next.