Legend has it that Joseph Kennedy, father of a future president, famously pulled his fortune out of the stock market in 1929 after a shoeshine boy advised him to buy oil and railroad stocks. The market crashed shortly thereafter, and the Great Depression ensued.

Fast forward, and it's difficult to find a modern-day Wall Street analyst who doesn't have a Joe Kennedy-esque tale to tell about the recent bursting of what has come to be known as the Internet bubble. Unfortunately, though, many of those contemporary analysts saw the top of that bubble only in retrospect.

Since today marks the four-year anniversary of that March 10, 2000, Nasdaq peak, it's an appropriate time to delve into whether Nasdaq is again in bubble mode, as Hollywood-turned-Internet mogul Barry Diller and many others have suggested. But first, some historical perspective is in order.

Four years ago, the technology-laden Nasdaq traded at 5,048, its highest level ever. It would plunge 25% in the span of a month. It would continue its near-death spiral for almost three years, finally losing 75% of its value and wiping $7 trillion from investors' portfolios. Beyond the fact that stocks were simply overpriced, some of the events, in the order they occurred, that contributed to the painful burst of Nasdaq's bubble were:

1) Antitrust charges leveled against tech's biggest player, Microsoft;

2) A recession beginning at the tail end of the Clinton administration;

3) A disputed presidential election;

4) Scandals involving executives at Enron, Adelphia Communications, Global Crossing, WorldCom, Tyco International, ImClone, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Arthur Andersen and others;

5) The events of Sept. 11 and the subsequent global war on terrorism;

6) Anthrax in the mail.

Add it up, and it equals three straight years of declining markets, something that hadn't happened since the start of World War II.

In hindsight, the entertainment industry's early Internet schemes appear overaggressive. Though difficult to determine exactly what was lost, the Walt Disney Co., for one, suffered an $820 million write-off.

Disney's scattered Internet strategy in the 1990s included the launch of Disney Online, the acquisition of search engine Infoseek and the creation of Disney Buena Vista Internet Group and Go.com. Finally, in part to stop top executives from defecting to dot-coms doling out valuable stock options, Disney CEO Michael Eisner created a tracking stock for its online group, which was eventually dubbed Disney Internet Group. By early 2001, the group had rejoined the parent, 400 people lost their jobs and the tracking stock was no more.

News Corp. had once allotted more than $2 billion for Internet ventures, though much of it was never spent. But at least $200 million was lost when it ventured into the online healthcare industry via Healtheon/WebMD.

As for Viacom, its CBS unit traded ad space for equity in dot-coms, many of which had nothing to do with the media business (remember Wrenchead.com?). Some of the dot-coms Viacom invested in no longer exist. But, a spokesman said, "In most cases, we got our inventory back."

Then there was General Electric's NBC Internet debacle. In late 1999, shares of NBCi traded near $90. In April 2001, NBC said it would buy NBCi for $2.19 a share, a premium to where they were trading: $1.50.

Sounds bad, but at least investors, including employees, got something for their troubles, unlike the myriad entertainment dot-coms -- Icebox, Digital Entertainment Network, Z.com, et al -- that had investors and employees thinking they'd be rich after an initial public offering. Those IPO plans, of course, were among the first casualties of the bursting bubble.

The biggie, of course, was Time Warner, which allowed America Online to purchase it using its bubble-inflated shares. Analysts loved the deal at the time, including Jessica Reif Cohen, the media maven at Merrill Lynch. She identified Time Warner, one year after the merger deal was announced, as a favorite. Shares then traded in the 50s. Time Warner eventually would take charges and write-downs to the tune of about $98.7 billion because of the merger, and today shares of the combined company trade in the teens.

Before the merger, one of Time Warner's big forays into online entertainment was a Web site called Entertaindom, run by executives Jim Moloshok and Jim Banister.

Asked if there were Time Warner executives back then who suspected the merger was a huge mistake, Banister said: "Dude, everybody knew that. We talked until we were blue in the face."

Banister, whose book "Word of Mouse: The Age of Networked Media" is due out by summer, was executive vp at Warner Bros. Online and chief development officer at Entertaindom. When Gerald Levin, Time Warner CEO, was shown what Entertaindom had been up to, Banister said, "It became the precursor for the pre-AOL online strategy, but it was destroyed by the rushed merger."

Banister asserts that higher-ups within Time Warner back then weren't paying enough attention to the fury Internet companies were causing on Wall Street.

"When we told Jerry (Levin), and any executive that would listen, that AOL's market cap exceeded the market cap of CBS, they didn't believe us," he said. "But it is as it is. They just had to check it out. Lo and behold, AOL ends up buying Time Warner."

About the time that Levin, Steve Case and Ted Turner took a stage to inform the world of their merger intentions, Michael and Zehava Stroud founded iHollywood Forum. One of dozens of companies cashing in when Hollywood executives couldn't spend enough time -- or money -- attending conferences about the Internet, iHollywood Forum differs in one important way: It's still around.

About 350 people attended their first conference in January 2000, while a conference two months later drew 900, including celebrities like Melanie Griffith and others who had launched online ventures.

"We had people lined up outside the hotel and the fire marshal wouldn't let anyone else in," Michael Stroud recalled about one iHollywood Forum conference. "One guy was yelling, 'I'm from CAA. You have to let me in.' "

Registration was online only, but many studio execs were so intimidated by the Internet back then that they'd have their secretaries call and insist on registering via fax machine.

"It was this amazing period of huxterism," Stroud said. "Silicon Valley brats were bragging how they'd eat Hollywood's lunch."

IHollywood Forum still runs nine conferences a year that are well attended. A recent one exploring ways that the pornography industry uses the Internet to make money had Hollywood executives paying cash and refusing name tags.

In Nasdaq's heyday, analyst Tom Taulli was with the firm Internet.com. He was a semiregular analyst on CNN and was quoted often in such publications as the Wall Street Journal. He knew the market had topped when a young restaurant host recognized him as the author of the book "Investing in IPOs."

"It was an expensive restaurant in Washington, D.C., and I was there to meet a Bloomberg reporter," Taulli recalled while launching into his own Joe Kennedy-esque parable. "The guy who seated me -- he must have been 17-years-old -- and he said, 'Man, I've made so much money off IPOs.' And he wouldn't stop talking about it, all the way to the table."

"There's a lot of things I said that turned out to be false," Taulli said of his investment advice back then. And since the bubble burst, he has had death threats. "I drank the same Kool-Aid," he said. "I have tax losses for years to come. Pretty much everything I was involved in went to zero."

In 1999, Taulli said his top stock pick was the Internet music company MP3.com, which went public at $28 a share and immediately rocketed past $100. It had settled back into the $30 range when Taulli recommended it. Eventually, the company was purchased for $5 per share.

"Ouch," Taulli now said of that particular stock pick. Though he added: "Online music clearly will be huge. People will pay for it. The trend is real."

As for talk of another Nasdaq bubble brewing, several analysts have been debunkning the theory on TV and radio of late. Among them is Tobin Smith, a regular panelist on the Fox News program "Bulls & Bears." Smith turned wildly -- and publicly -- bullish on even risky technology stocks early last year. He recommended loading up on shares of XM Satellite Radio at $4 and of Sirius Satellite Radio at 70 cents. Those who followed Smith's advice earned a 600% profit on XM in about 14 months and about 400% on Sirius.

Smith chastises those in his profession who -- in doing penance for having recommended to clients that they purchase overpriced technology shares during the bubble -- have since been overly cautious, encouraging those who follow their advice to sit out Nasdaq's recent 50% move higher. He rails that some of those same analysts who recommended technology four years ago at sky-high prices now say that a much cheaper Nasdaq is bubbly. Indeed, Microsoft and Intel, just to name a few of many examples, historically have traded for 50-75 times earnings. They're now at less than 35 times earnings.

"It's amazing," Smith said. "Look at the top 10 market caps in March 2000, and many are 90% lower today. To say we're in a bubble today is ludicrous. The fundamentals support the valuations here."

Among Smith's top picks in the entertainment-technology sector are AU Optronics, a maker of LCD television screens. He also has a least favorite pick in the space: TiVo.

The digital video recorder company "is the trailblazer that's being passed by the cable box," Smith said.

TiVo shares fluctuate like a yo-yo, declining precipitously each time investors worry anew that the company's relationship with DirecTV might end. The bulk of TiVo's new subscriptions stem from DirecTV, and since News Corp. took control of the satcaster, some on Wall Street are predicting that TiVo will be out, and NDS Group, a TiVo rival owned by News Corp., will be in.

"The TiVo-DirecTV relationship is absolutely in jeopardy," Smith said.

Another analyst that's been publicly bullish of late is Price Headley, founder of BigTrends.com and frequent guest on CNBC and Bloomberg TV and radio.

Bull markets usually run for three years, so if one began early last year, then there's another two years to go, he argued.

Headley uses market sentiment to predict where stocks are headed. When investors are overly bullish, it means they are fully invested, so the market lacks the buying power it needs to go higher. Overly bullish sentiment, is bearish, and vice versa.

Apple Computer, primarily because of the success of its iPod music player, is a top pick of Headley's. "They sell on eBay for not much less than they do brand new," he said. "That's a good sign."

He likes DVD chip maker Zoran Corp. and thinks Yahoo! is a buy for long-term investors "as a play on the convergence of entertainment and the Internet."

Headley is bearish on Amazon.com. "It's treated like a technology company, but it's a retailer, so the multiple people are paying for it is too high," he said. Amazon trades at a bubble-like 550 price-to-earnings ratio.

"We may have a choppy March, but presidential years are very bullish for stocks," he said. "A lot of stocks can go very high nowadays without even getting near their all-time highs. That's very intriguing."

One such stock is Akamai Technologies. Once recommended as "bulletproof" by Red Herring magazine, Akamai traded at $300 per share just prior to the bubble burst, then sank to about $1. It has since clawed its way back to $16.

When it traded north of $100, there was no shortage of analysts touting Akamai shares, though the company didn't make a dime. It is interesting, therefore, that not many had the guts to recommend buying Akamai when it traded recently for just $1.28. Investors who bought at that price got themselves a 13-bagger in less than a year.

Akamai, which recently reported its first profitable quarter, delivers photos and graphics to Web sites run by such companies as Yahoo! and Disney.

"We're a real business and a survivor," said Akamai president Paul Sagan, a former CBS and Time Warner executive.

"During the irrational period, people did every deal because they didn't want to miss out," Sagan recalled. "What's different today is, companies don't do the dumb deals. They need profits."

Along with the Internet boom came a host of Internet "services" companies with ambiguous business models and names like Scient, Viant, Razorfish and iXL Inc.

Internet stocks, said Ken Papagan, former general manager of iXL's digital media services group, "were a big house of cards that we knew would fall. We were just hoping we'd get out in time."

The veteran TV production and development executive was wooed to iXL in January 1997. He started with 15,000 stock options that grew over time to 100,000 priced from $2-$5. Though the stock once traded at $58, he never profited because he wasn't allowed to sell before the company went belly up.

"They kept giving me more options. That was one of the tricks going on," he said. "Everyone knew that every company was raiding every other company's employees, so they kept throwing more stock options my way."

Papagan today is an executive vp at Rentrak, the video, DVD and boxoffice tracking firm.

Over at Wirebreak, founder David Wertheimer, a former Paramount executive, was building an online, interactive entertainment destination. After raising a modest $8 million, he said that venture capitalists were eager to give him more.

"The majority of people were raising as much as possible and spending as much as possible," he said. "I don't think anyone predicted the 180-degreee turn from a rocket ship going up to a rocket ship going down."

Wertheimer recently joined the Institute for Creative Technologies, a government funded organization that creates interactive training tools for the military.

Not all tech startups of the bubble era went bust, of course. Scott Newnam, CEO of Goldpocket Interactive, said his interactive television company actually benefited from Nasdaq's fall.

"We gained market share," he said, adding that the company also made three acquisitions. "We couldn't have afforded them if the bubble didn't burst."

Raghav Gupta, chief operating officer of online radio firm Live365, likened Nasdaq's meteoric rise and subsequent collapse to a "Behind the Music" segment. Live365's head count is just 45, down from 95 during its peak, but they're close to turning a profit, and they are hiring again, Gupta said.

"There was the peak of excess, then the fall, the restructuring and now the rebound," he said.