The Web. That vast network of fascinating fact, fiction, opinion, sound, vision and communication. Lovely, isn't it? So cool, so fascinating, so addictive, so damned sexy. So... dull?

I'm a journalist by trade, and an occasional Web developer, programmer and - don't laugh - businessman. So, given that my everyday work involves the Web, you'd think that I'd be racking up the online hours like there was no tomorrow. That's what I thought. But then a colleague asked me to name my three favourite Web sites. And I couldn't.

After a lot of thought, I came up with a search engine, a street-finder site and a repository of CGI scripts. And even those I don't use often. Most of the stuff that I bookmark is never visited again. It's briefly interesting, but soon becomes tedious. If I want news, I listen to the radio. If I want to be entertained, I go out with friends. If those friends are too far away, I phone them. If I want to learn, I read magazines and books. If I want to relax, I read novels (I think comics qualify as graphic novels...).

OK, perhaps for me it would be a busman's holiday to spend all day browsing, but in reality the Web just doesn't live up to its hype. It can't. True, it's the most fantastic communications and information tool for probably the last 100 years, but that's all it is. There's no magic. It all relies on humans to provide the actual information.

In this respect the Web is nothing more than it was originally designed to be - a networked library (although it's much easier to find what you're looking for in a library). And, although libraries contain some fascinating and incredibly useful information (and a fair bit of drivel), they aren't, by any stretch of the imagination, cool, trendy or sexy.

Millions of PCs were sold on the back of the Internet boom. Before that, kids had to pretend that computers were educational in order to persuade their parents to buy the latest games PC. But with the Internet, with all that fascinating virtual world - Cyberspace, the Information Superhighway, all the other grandiose expressions - you couldn't possibly be keeping up with the Joneses if you weren't online.

That, I think, is what really made the dotcom collapse inevitable. You can bang on all you like (and I do) about the excesses of vulture capital greed, non-existant business plans and unskilled staff. But ultimately, people believed that the Internet was just so fantastic that it had to become a fundamental part of everybody's life.

But it's not. It's a tool, nothing more and nothing less. Some sites are buying tools, some, like this one, are information tools, others are entertainment tools. Anything else is vanity publishing and cannot be commercially sustained once people become bored.

And it gets worse. Employers are increasingly restricting Web access to those few who actually need it while at work. And cheap, broadband access at home is a long way away for most of us. So daytime traffic - and therefore revenue - could actually drop, rather than rise, over the next couple of years.

Many companies believed that making money from the Web would be like taking candy from a baby, but nobody expected the baby to grow up so quickly. I suspect that the 3G phone companies may be in for a similarly rough ride.