Remember Boo.com, the famed flameout of Web retailers from the cash-flush days of 1999? Mike Butcher of the UK version of TechCrunch reports that Boo.com is planning a relaunch soon. Butch, as he's known in the London tech world, bases this on a report in a Swedish magazine; it's also the case that the site itself indicates that "Boo.com is back and a new site will be launched in 2006".

For anyone who may have forgotten the Boo.com saga: The site surfaced in 1999 as the brainchild of two young Swedes, Kajsa Leander, a former fashion model, and Ernst Malmsten, a former poetry critic. Its ambitious goal was to launch a fashion e-commerce site simultaneously in dozens of languages across the globe. Instead, Boo.com made just about every mistake imaginable: It launched late; it spent millions advertising a site that wasn't up; it used too much Flash that made it unreadable on many computers, and so on. Press stories focused on the company's total burn of $125 million in six months (although, in his book about the disaster, Malmsten asserts that it was merely $75 million.)

It would be tempting - and certainly understandable - to take this news as yet more evidence that we are living through Bubble 2.0, which is basically Om Malik's take. But Butch argues, counterintuitively, that "among the general public there is probably enough name recognition to make this - and I say this hesitantly - almost a savvy move on Boo's behalf."

Before jumping to any conclusions, isn't it worth knowing first what the new Boo.com is and who's behind it? Last time we checked, the original managers were feuding and the company's assets had been sold at fire-sale prices to whomever would take them. It stands to reason, then, that whatever the new Boo.com is, it will be significantly different from the first - assuming it launches at all. (The Browser has e-mailed Malmsten to see if he can shed light on these reports; we'll update you if he writes back with anything relevant.)