Another dot.com boom this year?

SAN FRANCISCO -- It's starting to feel like a 1999 flashback. Internet companies -- some of them profitable, some not -- sense a golden opportunity and are lining up to go public this year.

But here's something to keep in mind as the latest case of Internet fever grips Wall Street: It's still nowhere close to the giddy days of the dot-com boom, when investors bought stocks as impulsively as lottery tickets. Technology stocks today are the cheapest in more than nine years, at least judging by one benchmark for appraising companies.

This year could yield the most initial public offerings of technology stocks since 2000. But the venture capitalists who bankroll high-tech start-ups aren't pouring money into the Internet like they once did. And even rapidly growing Internet companies LinkedIn Corp. and Pandora Media Inc. have lost some of their luster after dazzling investors when they went public in recent weeks.

All those factors signal that cooler heads are prevailing, especially with the global economy on shaky ground.

So far this year, 28 of the 74 IPOs completed in the United States have been by technology companies, according to IPO investment advisory firm Renaissance Capital. If, as expected, another 31 tech IPOs are completed by the end this year, it will be the most from the sector since 2000.

The growing enthusiasm for Internet services reflects how far the Internet has come since the dot-com boom. An estimated 2 billion people worldwide have Web access now, about eight times as many as in 2000. High-speed Internet connections have become common, turning the Web into an entertainment center as well as an information hub. And mobile devices have made it possible to stay connected from almost anywhere at any time.