Remember the good old days of the dot com bubble? You know, when companies would charge well into six figures for a Web site that amounted to a coupla dozen pages of html along with some Photoshop 101 designs?

Web sites have gotten a lot more sophisticated since then and prices have fallen to (more or less) reasonable levels. The fast and furious days of the bubble seem but a distant memory.

Then comes the news that makes us all feel 10 years younger: Recovery.gov is being redesigned at a cost of $18 million. Your tax dollars at work.

Here’s the official press release. ABC News covers the story here, while you can read all the snark you can handle over on Slashdot.  Adam Curry and John C. Dvorak deconstructed the story pretty well on No Agenda 112.

Why does the Recovery.gov site exist? The site itself explains with this excerpt from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009:

“The Board shall establish and maintain … a user-friendly, public-facing website to foster greater accountability and transparency in the use of covered funds. The website … shall be a portal or gateway to key information relating to the Act and provide connections to other government websites with related information.”

I hope the redesign of Recovery.gov will include accountability and transparency in the way $18 million is being used to redesign a Web site. That’s a case study we all want to read.

That’s how much time the average U.S. Internet user spends on Facebook, according to Nielsen NetView.

While I think it’s probably time to dispose of the term “PR” and replace it with “media relations,” the seven fundamental elements of public relations outlined in this PR-Squared blog post deliver a lot of common sense.

… are condemned to repeat it.

The phrase comes to mind because back in 2007 the paid-content experiment known as Times Select came to an end. At the time, Colby Atwood, president of the Borrell Associates media research firm, said:

“The business model for advertising revenue, versus subscriber revenue, is so much more attractive. The hybrid model has some potential, but in the long run, the advertising side will dominate.”

Nevertheless, Editor & Publisher reports that the Times is considering two options for returning to the paid content model.

Would this be yet another step on the road to the death of the Times, or could paid content serve as a financial life preserver for the old gray lady? I’m thinking the former, but the way we all consume news and information is changing so rapidly, I don’t envy those at the Times who have to consider and make these sorts of decisions.

In this case, it’s the Smothers Brothers. In this case it’s a Looney Tunes cartoon.