…and I haven’t posted a remembrance of that potenially silliest of all silly dot-com-era hustle concepts, MarchFirst.com.

It was a merger of two web-design and online-services companies, which themselves were the results of several prior mergers. It was named after the date in 2000 in which the merger documents were signed.

The combined company boasted more than 5,000 employees, doing many different things on behalf of other companies. But MarchFirst’s preeminent claim was that it would help corporate clients build their Internet presences from scratch. Just one call to the Chicago-based MarchFirst, and your firm would instantly turn from an old-economy dinosaur into a new-economy powerhouse, right up there with such rising behemoths as Pets.com and Flooz.com.

None of this, however, was mentioned in the company’s costly TV ads. Most infamously, it bought naming rights for NBA halftime shows on NBC. “Coming up next: MarchFirst At the Half! Presented by MarchFIrst, where it’s all about ‘The Importance of Being First,’ at www-dot-MarchFirst-dot-com!” The commercials that aired within these halftimes were sentimental things, with gauze-filtered cameras and soft-rock music, in which a syrupy narrator talked about such feats as the first manned space flight and the first four-minute mile, and then simply reiterated the “Importance of Being First” slogan. Nary a word was given to what the heck MarchFirst was or what the heck it did.

For a company whose principal premise was helping other companies market themselves, it sure did a lousy job of marketing itself.

Within 14 months of its formation, it declared bankruptcy. Now, the URL points only to a claims site for ex-employees who were bilked out of their health benefits.