Blurring The Lines Of Life Or Web

The World Wide Web turned 15 on Sunday, marking a world-changing phenomenon that has reached adolescence, faster and more able than in its infancy, but still awkward in some ways, untamed, irreverent, and lacking in respect for tradition. What will the next 15 years bring? Equality? In some ways, yes. But when the Web turns 30, many think the digital divide will expand until the virtual world more closely matches the real world. On November 13, 1990, British-born Tim Berners-Lee sent the first hypertext document through cyberspace giving a new medium to the world that "has transformed the way we read the news, watch films, sell our cast offs, gamble, order our food and drink, find our dates, write encyclopedias, steal music, commit fraud you name it," says Times Online's Within five years of its birth, the Web had 40 million users, exploding to an incredible 1.07 billion users by 2004, numbers that fulfilled Berners-Lee's envisioning of information freely and widely accessible by everyone-information being a realm previously limited to the elite. Google, with its loudly promoted goal to index the world's information, shares that Memex (how we see the Web today) to Metaverse (how we will likely see the Web in the future, where people are represented by avatars-the better your avatar, the more elite you appear). "The killer app' is computer-mediated realtime human interaction-such as talking to each other. (If you think that's not important, here is a data point: Skype has 200 million downloads.)" This device is a computer with a Web browser. By zooming in on it you can access all of the World Wide Web and run old-fashioned applications. (Here's