There are 300 people for whom last week was not a good one. They were the ones who were working at boo.com when the company went into liquidation.

So what went wrong with the boo bubble? Why was it that months after going live, the site was still costing its owners far more than it was making for them? And why did boo.com battle on to the bitter end when almost everyone in the new media industry continuously hammered on at them to sort things out?

The boo-haa started before the site even went live. A massive PR campaign saw the site's founders and backers interviewed in national newspapers.

But while the publicity machine rolled on, the launch date started to slip. At the time, this was forgivable, and not all that surprising.

But boo began to push it too far. The months went by and still no functioning web site. People started to wonder what the hold-up could be. Worse for boo, the rumours started - most of them wrong, but all of them damaging.

When the site finally appeared, there was a huge wave of indifference. The public were bored of it by then, and the internet types greeted the "challenging" site design with howls of laughter.

This reputation was something boo was never able to shake off, even after it introduced a "plain vanilla" version of the site and simplified some of its features. First impressions count, and for boo it was the impression that the site was difficult to use.

Customers simply stayed away.

Meanwhile boo spent millions on advertising and staff.

Where many web shops start small, perhaps backed by less than five full-time staff, the whole idea behind boo was to be global from day one, and to have the staff to cope. Just paying salaries to all these people must have been a huge drain on funds - and in the meantime, not enough people were shopping at the site.

That's not to say boo got it all wrong. The site's fulfilment - in other words, packaging and delivery - was said to be extremely good, with prompt arrivals of all ordered goods, tastefully wrapped in trendy boo bags. But this wasn't enough to save it. The labels the site earned in its first few weeks just wouldn't budge.

Ultimately, boo.com appeared aloof and arrogant. When the world criticised the site and how it worked, the company refused to back down and insisted on keeping the main elements of the design. Rather than agree it had made mistakes, it insisted that it was ahead of its time and would one day be proved right.

Well it was sadly wrong. The site will have one legacy, though: the phrase "boo.com" will live on in the internet lexicon as an all-encompassing term for failure.