Dan Gillmor’s latest column excoriates venture capitalists and other dot com insiders for foisting weak companies with poor prospects onto the public markets in order to make lots of fast bucks. He’s right of course, but everybody knows it was all a big scam now. Where was this column a few years ago when the heavy duty con jobs were being run? If you’re not in this industry, I have some bad news for you. Everybody on the inside knew that a huge majority of the dot coms were nothing more than a bad joke. Back on May 16, 1999, I noted that Priceline.com had a higher market almost equal to American Airlines and Delta put together, and saw that as a sign of impending collapse. Now that Priceline is trading at about 2 bucks a share, things are back where they belong.