The World Wide Web was created by Tim Berners Lee long before the idea of every US citizen, or citizen of any other country in the world, having a computer in their home was viewed as realistic. While a vast network of PCs, or notebooks, or Apple Macs, was a necessity for the internet to be created, the visionary at CERN had an idea well ahead of the curve, and in the process revolutionized the future of commerce.

Predicting the future of technology is a notoriously precarious undertaking. While we have some idea of what's in the tech pipeline, we have little knowledge of what's happening inside of companies (how far behind schedule are they?). We're even less capable of knowing what products and services will be huge hits or big busts. Not a soul imagined Google's ascendancy just 10 years ago, while many predicted Yahoo!'s continued rise. Not too long go, most predicted that Amazon.com would either be wildly profitable or a big, crashing failure.

Last week I wrote about the scores of useful Web 2.0 sites and applications available either for free or at a very low cost. I also promised that I would provide some tips on how to select your Web 2.0 apps without going crazy. While "software as a service," (SaaS among business honchos, Web 2.0 to you and me) is new for home users, students, and small businesses, it's very much like other tech industries--as soon as you sign on to or subscribe to one Web 2.0 site or service, another one comes along that does the same thing--only better.

More and more people are searching for their own names online, a study has shown.

With 2007 shaping up to be remembered as the year of the social network, 47 percent of internet users have searched for their own name online, research from the Pew Internet Project discovered. This compared to 22 percent who had done this in 2002.

What's more, 53 per cent of people said that they have looked up information about personal and business contacts online.
"The cumulative traces of our online activity are more visible in the age of Web 2.0," explained Mary Madden, a co-author of the report.

Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, the first Web browser, and the first Web server, way back in 1991, not been overwhelmed with the new Internet applications that have been bunched under the general term "Web 2.0." Last year, in an IBM podcast, he said, "Nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along."