Eh, I think the net boomed without needing online shopping. Lots of people were and are using the Net 99%-100% of the time for non-shopping purposes. The net boom drivers were:
Blogs were around long before, and the term "blog" to refer to them was even coined around the beginning of the .com bubble (1997) , not after the crash (2000-2002).
These days it seems to have turned into something akin to TV shop, with the addition of an interactive link on top of the video stream.