Victor Keegan

The population of online communities such as <i>Second Life</i> and <i>Blue Mars</i> is now greater than that of the US and Europe combined.

With more and more of us streaming live video of ourselves online, the meaning of the word "privacy" is undergoing a change.

The internet often goes through bouts of soul searching, but a full-blown counter-reformation could be on the way. If so, then Andrew Keen, author of <i>The Cult of the Amateur</i>, could be the Martin Luther of the movement. He believes the so-called web 2.0 revolution is leading to "less culture, less reliable news and a chaos of useless information".

If you were to stop someone you know and ask them to give you a list of all their friends — together with their friends’ friends, complete with their special interests — you would be dismissed as strange, if not bizarre. Yet that is what is happening voluntarily with the seemingly unstoppable expansion of social websites such as MySpace, Bebo and Facebook.

Social sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Bebo that want to run your life for you are all the rage, but this shouldn’t distract from the strong growth of networks geared to special interests. When I wrote recently about the slowness of the digital revolution to hit the book world, I was hit by a shoal of letters listing stacks of sites not mentioned

There may no be such a thing as a free lunch in real life, but it is different on the internet where companies are falling over themselves to give you free services such as photo hosting, video storage, email, word processing and spreadsheets. A common feature of these services is that what we do is increasingly being stored on the web.

It is curious how the globalisation of people is happening much faster than the globalisation of goods. While trade talks to cut subsidies on products have been immobilised for years, the global expansion of relationships between people via social websites is probably the fastest growth area on the planet.

A few weeks ago a man turned up at my front door, having been guided there by a GPS satellite navigation system on his dashboard. He was a bit surprised when I told him that the place he was looking for was 9km away. I was less surprised because I have yet to come across a single such device reliable enough to justify shelling out thousands.

If 2007 is really going to be the year when the cellphone comes of age — after several false dawns — then the much-hyped Nokia N95 may prove to be a turning point in more senses than one. It’s expensive for a phone, but for a combined phone/camera/MP3 player, video player and satnav system it is cheap.

Rupert Murdoch, watch your step. I am coming to get you. I have just launched my own global TV station from my cellphone and laptop. So far, the total audience at any one moment hasn’t risen above eight, but everyone has to start somewhere now that the creative revolution is offering everyone the opportunity to be a producer as well as a consumer.

This month’s state of the blogosphere survey by Technorati, the monitoring service, was greeted as if it were the online equivalent of the president’s State of the Nation address. But for all the undisputed influence of blogs, the figures also show that blogging is still very much a minority sport.

The arrival of the three dimensional web — in which participants have their own on-screen avatars — is dismissed by some as a nine month wonder that will fade away once the novelty has worn off. But that hasn’t stopped a fresh surge of development that is taking virtual worlds to wider audiences.

The web revolution that is turning whole industries from music to television upside down has been slow to reach the cosy world of books — apart, that is, from the pioneering bookseller Amazon. Not any more. Interesting things are happening on a variety of fronts that are changing the way books are found, read and talked about.

If you were walking recently on a beach in Puerto Rico and saw a strange web address scrawled along the sand, or if you saw balloons released from a window in Chicago with similar hieroglyphics, then they can almost certainly be traced to something written on a napkin and left in an Oxford caf&eacute; by an undergraduate.

The scene is a Starbucks in Regent Street, London. Two 23-year-old women from Trinity College, Dublin, are doing a five-minute pitch from a laptop to a couple of serious venture capitalists. It is the cappuccino version of TV programmes such as <i>Dragons’ Den</i> and it is telling us a lot about the vitality of the new internet start-up boom in the United Kingdom.

The late and great management guru Peter Drucker said he wasn’t worried about Microsoft because no non-governmental monopoly had ever lasted more than 15 years. Well, Microsoft is proving him wrong. More than 16 years after the debut of its Office suite it still has nearly 95% of the world market for PC operating systems.