And so continues the litany of e-catastrophe.

Every advert on TV at the moment is screaming e-something at us as advertisers struggle with a message they have no idea how to sell.

And Internet Banking seems to be at the top of the list at the moment.

Except for Barclays that is, who had the ironic misfortune of re-launching themselves as the friendly giant and then, at the beginning of this week, failing to deliver a secure on-line banking service.

Claims to be the largest Internet Bank (with around 1.2 million customers) did not stop a number of users who logged on from seeing accounts other than their own.

If a bank that is trying to pride itself on being nigh on impervious can allow such a problem to occur, how can we trust the Internet?

The answer is, most of us don't.

This is not to say that the Internet is not the way forward for our day-to-day life, but we are in the infancy of its possibilities. Progression will take time and the initial honeymoon period is over, as lastminute.com found this week when it announced a £9.3 million loss in just three months.

The Internet, it seems, has a personality all of its own that entrepreneurs and analyst cannot predict. The saving grace of an otherwise unruly, attention-grabbing infant that, whilst toilet-trained, still likes to leave calling cards around when you least expect.

Take WAP phones for example, which have hardly caught on, despite the huge injection of sex into the advertising campaigns.

Text messaging took off, which analysts did not expect. Along comes WAP and analysts see the chance to jump onto a pre-existing band-wagon ... except WAP wasn't the craze, text messaging was, and anyway just about everybody owns a mobile phone now. WAP was, and is, a good idea, but the Internet isn't interested and is sticking two fingers up at the industry.

And that is why the Internet will not die, even whilst the corpses of the over-ambitious and down-right greedy fall by the way-side. Because the Internet is controlled by people. It is one gargantuan homogenous whole that does what it wants and logs on to what it wants to, not what business thinks is the new Internet craze.

So people will pick up on Internet Banking. Just not yet. When the Internet feels like it.

I think people are still chuffed you can send text messages for no charge from the Internet.

And you can do this from, among others, www.breathe.com.

Yorkshire Day saw the launch of our brand new cyber soap, YorkGate, on This is York.

A first for a British newspaper, YorkGate charts the trials and tribulations of the residents of a fictional, yet vaguely familiar street in York.

In Tuesday's episode we met Terry Martin, who's found himself a Californian cyber babe, and Martha Martino, his mother, who had been assaulted in the yard behind Coffee Spoon Caf. Her mysterious assailant made off with the cash and a stale Danish pastry.

Log on to www.thisisyork.co.uk/yorkgate for the whole story, and check out the site tomorrow for the next instalment.