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Like a lot of New Yorkers, I've been following the saga of the perhaps-questionable sale of a painting of perhaps-questionable origin via eBay, reported, among other places, in a series of A1 stories in The New York Times.

Back in the day when atNewYork.com co-founder Tom Watson and I were writing The Industry Standard's daily e-mail media criticism column, the Media Grok, I would have hammered the pieces. It's not that they haven't been interesting. And the reporting by my colleagues Saul Hansell and Judith Dobrzynski has been quite good.

The problem is that the Times has dramatically overplayed the story. Since when has the private, $100,000 auction of an abstract painting by an obscure artist made multi-day, page one news? It's the kind of overblown hype that characterized the Internet coverage of the Times and other outlets back in the old days when placing "on the Internet" at the end of a story moved it from B14 to A1.

Drugs? Ho-hum. Drugs "on the Internet" -- move it to A1. Real Estate? Move it to the back of the business section. Real Estate "on the Internet" -- let's do a special package.

But instead of raising my self-important, Internet true believer's indignation, these stories have served to raise in me a strong sense of nostalgia. Together with the recent shared Net experiences of the "Love Bug" virus and the Playboy.com Elian Gonzales/Budweiser animated cartoon parody, the eBay stories have reminded me that what drew many of us first-generation Netpreneurs to this medium in the first place wasn't the lure of IPO riches but a sense that we were part of a new, emerging cyberculture.

These days, big chunks of the cyberculture have moved from the fringe to the mainstream. Just this week, an exterminator who came to give my house a termite inspection engaged me in a long conversation about the music he had downloaded via Napster. And the surest sign that Silicon Alley culture in particular has entered the mainstream was word that came a few weeks ago that Disney is developing a sitcom for ABC set in the offices of a Silicon Alley Webzine.

All this raises a question of whether or not there is a unique cyberculture anymore, or whether or not that the continued existence of a cyberculture even matters.

The second question is easy to answer. Yes, it matters. The history of American culture has always been dialectical. Subcultures and countercultures have always sprouted in the shadow of mainstream culture. Sometime this has happened accidentally, as a result of a kind of involuntary cultural separation - -for example, a clearly distinct African American culture came to exist in part because slaves and their descendents were forced to live apart from the rest of American culture. But often these sub- and countercultures arose by choice in reaction to mainstream culture -- think about the hippies of the 1960s or the Christian fundamentalist explosion of the 1980s. Inevitably a new, mainstream culture arises out of the dialectical combination of old mainstream and new subcultural trends, with the subculture driving change and innovation.

The innovations of our first generation Internet subculture has already caused us to question our notions of intellectual property rights; tax policy and states' rights; the nature of community; the role of the gatekeeper in art, editorial, and media; and the way we define our workplace and separate work from the rest of our lives.

The continued growth of the Net as a platform and the break-the-mold ideas that have made it so vibrant depend upon the continued existence of a thriving, renewable cyberculture.

Thankfully, the answer to the first questions also seems to be "Yes, there is a cyberculture." And that cyberculture seems to continue to grow like bacteria in a petri dish. While Napster is embroiled in legal battles, products like Gnutella and Freenet continue to seep out from between the cracks of corporate control. And, while I personally believe that intellectual property creators should have total discretion over how their work is disseminated, the constant challenges to the platform and to our ideas posed by products like these are what will keep the Internet growing as a medium.

The world of self-publishing on the Net continues to grow. I mean, where else but in the Foreskin Restoration Web Ring could you find QBMan's Restoration Journal (http://www.oil.ca/~dkettle/jrnlframe.htm) -- a two-year glimpse into the dark heart of foreskin restoration. And we have yet to begin to feel the effects of the Net on religion -- though the Web is full of self-published, religious manifestos, many of which are ad supported. Web-based art, both participatory and otherwise, remains in its infancy.

Which brings me back to the Times articles. Back in 1996 and 1997, atNewYork.com's co-founders wrote a series of columns for the late, lamented, "CyberTimes" section of the then-just-launched New York Times on the Web. The columns were okay, but the idea behind CyberTimes -- created by Times editor Rob Fixmer -- was radical: To publish a daily newspaper for this new place, cyberspace, which was just then being explosively colonized by human beings; to chronicle the cultural movements that took place in this obscure, but world-wide-reaching universe.

Partially because we journalists failed to think sufficiently afield of the proverbial "box," and partially because of decisions by upper management at The Times, the CyberTimes section devolved into mere tech coverage and as such became redundant when the paper began to beef up its own Net coverage.

But perhaps it's time for The Times or some other outlet to revive the idea of daily journalism devoted to the life and culture of this new electronic frontier, because, we are still in frontier days. Lessons are still being learned and many breakthroughs are yet to come, breakthroughs that will someday make for charming "Hey Maude" stories in the traditional press, while creepingly changing our world. The business of the Internet get all the, but it is the culture -- and the new ways of thinking it inspires -- that impress themselves upon our hearts and minds and lead to change.

Jason Chervokas is co-founder and co-managing editor of atNewYork.com