The psychological phenomenon where people rush in the same direction at the same time. The biggest recent example is Dot-Com-mania. Often one is made to feel "out of touch" or over-the-hill if they don't go along. "If you don't get the new economy, then something is wrong with you."

How does one distinguish between something real and a bubble?

''Don't bother.  Focus on what you love, and are good at, and are willing to put in the time to study and grok in fullness.   Better to be a real expert in a field that might not be the biggest, than just another coder in a market that will boom and bust, leaving unemployment lines in its wake.'' -- MikeSmith 

I don't know. I have heard complaints from LISP and Smalltalk fans about struggling to be marketable. It is not really the size of a niche, but whether it is growing or shrinking at a given time. Some suggest instead to PlayHurt and learn to tolerate the crap from Sun and MicroSoft.

''...oh.  I wasn't thinking in terms of languages of platforms - one should know a variety of them, that fill various roles {MixingParadigms}.  I was thinking in terms of domains - the whole "dot-com-mania" being largely about e-business and Webstuff and telecom and such.  Other domains (say, real-time machine vision measurement systems, just totally picked at random of course ;-) didn't explode the way the e-business stuff did, but then again they didn't ''contract'' the way e-business did, either.'' -- MikeSmith

Any project involving Xml

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perhaps related to QwertySyndrome and PowerLaw

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See Also: JavaBandwagon, EmpiricalEvidence