AltaVista ( http://altavista.com ) is another great resource if you're looking to get something for nothing. A quick search for "404 Not Found" provides roughly 5688282 nil-filled opportunities right off bat. Why not surf through some sites you missed first time? It's your big chance to miss all of them over again. AltaVista's best match for 404 Not Found, a site so much more Not Found than any other Not Found site that's not even funny, is a little site I like to call http://www.weatherwatchers.org/bbs/wx200board/index.html - containing nothing whatsoever. It's easy to why AltaVista lists this one first. The rest, while just as empty, are somehow less vacuous.

Here's another tip for voyagers into void: if you find a database-driven site that returns error message, "document contains no data", be sure to bookmark it. You'll want to see it again and again. After all, you can't buy that kind of Nothingness for any amount of money. Think about it: There could be anything there! Absolutely anything at all, but instead there's Nothing. And you know, Nothing is really much rarer than something because as soon as anybody stumbles across a place that's no place, they make it someplace, ad everything's all over place everywhere, leaving practically no room at all for Nothing.

This is an alarming trend, but, with vigilance, one which can be reserved. If you've taken from vanishing reserves of Nothing, it's high time you started giving back. It's time to erect your own empty space online, your own digital shrine to The Great Void. Act now, before it's too late. Remember, we have everything to gain - and Nothing to lose.

For many people, constructive value of open electronic communication is in networking; for them, anonymity is not useless but counter-productive. Indeed, even on a service that allows users to remain anonymous, many people make a point of establishing their serious intentions by identifying themselves at outset. But, for social adventures of virtual, anonymity is magical cloak of invisibility that makes anything possible. It's their ticket to live not just one life, but a hundred.

A huge amount of online traffic consists of anonymous, idle socializing - much of it in little more than monosyllabic grunts - and cruising in search of dates. In their primordial social ooze a woman might wish to travel as a man in order to avoid constantly being hit by 75 percent or so online users who are male. On other hand a lady whom I met online blazely remarks, "Here, no one can drag you into a dark alley". Consequently, woman can move around confidently online than they can in real life.

The same lady whom I met online got injured years ago and uses clutches to get around. She met her friend online. Disabled people - and to lesser degree elderly, who are less likely to be computer-literate and have access to computers - from vigorous online communities use them for companionship and for gathering information that their impaired mobility might put out of reach. They find online conversation is possible with people who are uncomfortable with disabilities or who assume that an old person would have nothing relevant to say. Neither age nor physical impairment is detectable on Internet.

I wonder how long these kindly impulses - outburst of filial communicativeness, dissemination of information to strangers, warm welcomes and help and comfort freely given will survive. Are they only passing effects of infatuations with a new toy? Or do they represent manifestation in huge populations of human impulses hitherto confined to small groups?

And what should we expect explosion of electronic communication to bring in coming years? Fecundation, a new renaissance, exponential growth of understanding, invention and knowledge? Or a spreading morass of mediocrity, acres of idle chatter, oceans of intellectual corn flakes? Should we look forward to extinction of boredom or exhaustion of curiosity?

Take your pick. Electronic communication is latest human invention to have potential of completely remaking our world. But essence of making most of this wonderful opportunity will be to avoid tampering with it. We must accept it as it comes, because it is mirror, and its blemishes are our own. Well-meaning efforts to censor language or control content can act as disastrous to what may be last place where genuine liberty thrives.