Internet news are advantaged. They are frequently and dynamically updated (unlike static print news) and are always accessible (similar to print news), immediate and fresh.

The future will witness a form of interactive news. A special "corner" in news Web site will accommodate "breaking news" posted by members of the public (or corporate press releases). This will provide readers with a glimpse into making of news, raw material news are made of. The same technology will be applied to interactive TVs. Content will be downloaded from internet and displayed as an overlay on TV screen or in a box in it. The contents downloaded will be directly connected to TV programming. Thus, biography and track record of a football player will be displayed during a football match and history of a country when it gets news coverage.

4. Terra Internetica - Internet, an Unknown Continent

Laymen and experts alike talk about "sites" and "advertising space". Yet, Internet was never compared to a new continent whose surface is infinite.

The Internet has its own real estate developers and construction companies. The real life equivalents derive their profits from scarcity of resource that they exploit - Internet counterparts derive their profits from tenants (content producers and distributors, e-tailers, and others).

Entrepreneurs bought "Internet Space" (pages, domain names, portals) and leveraged their acquisition commercially by:

Renting space out; Constructing infrastructure on their property and selling it; Providing an intelligent gateway, entry point (portal) to rest of internet; Selling advertising space which subsidizes tenants (Yahoo!-Geocities, Tripod and others); Cybersquatting (purchasing specific domain names identical to brand names in "real" world) and then selling domain name to an interested party. Internet Space can be easily purchased or created. The investment is low and getting lower with introduction of competition in field of domain registration services and increase in number of top domains.

Then, infrastructure can be erected - for a shopping mall, for free home pages, for a portal, or for another purpose. It is precisely this infrastructure that developer can later sell, lease, franchise, or rent out.

But this real estate bubble was culmination of a long and tortuous process.

At beginning, only members of fringes and avant-garde (inventors, risk assuming entrepreneurs, gamblers) invest in a new invention. No one knows to say what are optimal uses of invention (in other words, what is its future). Many - mostly members of scientific and business elites - argue that there is no real need for invention and that it substitutes a new and untried way for old and tried modes of doing same things (so why assume risk of investing in unknown and untried?).

Moreover, these criticisms are usually well-founded.

To start with, there is, indeed, no need for new medium. A new medium invents itself - and need for it. It also generates its own market to satisfy this newly found need.

Two prime examples of this self-recursive process are personal computer and compact disc.

When PC was invented, its uses were completely unclear. Its performance was lacking, its abilities limited, it was unbearably user unfriendly. It suffered from faulty design, was absent any user comfort and ease of use and required considerable professional knowledge to operate. The worst part was that this knowledge was exclusive to new invention (not portable). It reduced labour mobility and limited one's professional horizons. There were many gripes among workers assigned to tame new beast. Managers regarded it at best as a nuisance.

A decade after invention of World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee is promoting "Semantic Web". The Internet hitherto is a repository of digital content. It has a rudimentary inventory system and very crude data location services. As a sad result, most of content is invisible and inaccessible. Moreover, Internet manipulates strings of symbols, not logical or semantic propositions. In other words, Net compares values but does not know meaning of values it thus manipulates. It is unable to interpret strings, to infer new facts, to deduce, induce, derive, or otherwise comprehend what it is doing. In short, it does not understand language. Run an ambiguous term by any search engine and these shortcomings become painfully evident. This lack of understanding of semantic foundations of its raw material (data, information) prevent applications and databases from sharing resources and feeding each other. The Internet is discrete, not continuous. It resembles an archipelago, with users hopping from island to island in a frantic search for relevancy.

Even visionaries like Berners-Lee do not contemplate an "intelligent Web". They are simply proposing to let users, content creators, and web developers assign descriptive meta-tags ("name of hotel") to fields, or to strings of symbols ("Hilton"). These meta-tags (arranged in semantic and relational "ontologies" - lists of metatags, their meanings and how they relate to each other) will be read by various applications and allow them to process associated strings of symbols correctly (place word "Hilton" in your address book under "hotels"). This will make information retrieval more efficient and reliable and information retrieved is bound to be more relevant and amenable to higher level processing (statistics, development of heuristic rules, etc.). The shift is from HTML (whose tags are concerned with visual appearances and content indexing) to languages such as DARPA Agent Markup Language, OIL (Ontology Inference Layer or Ontology Interchange Language), or even XML (whose tags are concerned with content taxonomy, document structure, and semantics). This would bring Internet closer to classic library card catalogue.

Even in its current, pre-semantic, hyperlink-dependent, phase, Internet brings to mind Richard Dawkins' seminal work "The Selfish Gene" (OUP, 1976). This would be doubly true for Semantic Web.

Dawkins suggested to generalize principle of natural selection to a law of survival of stable. "A stable thing is a collection of atoms which is permanent enough or common enough to deserve a name". He then proceeded to describe emergence of "Replicators" - molecules which created copies of themselves. The Replicators that survived in competition for scarce raw materials were characterized by high longevity, fecundity, and copying-fidelity. Replicators (now known as "genes") constructed "survival machines" (organisms) to shield them from vagaries of an ever-harsher environment.