David Neal

Here's a fact that not many people know about me: I'm married. Yeah, I know. I probably should have told my folks, and invited a few of my friends along, but it just happened so quickly that I got swept along with the whole thing.

It happened back in 1999. I was just starting to do a bit of shopping online, I was nicely settled into using my Hotmail account and I was in the process of adding some flying toasters to my personal web site, when I happened to meet a lovely sounding American lady in a chatroom.

From the off it became obvious that there was a connection (and I don't mean the 28kbit/s dial-up one). She had an appointment with what she called "ol' sparky" and I was trying to find an electrician. She liked to paint clowns and had had an odd relationship with her parents. I was raised by clowns who were painters and decorators.

She was suspiciously keen on tying the knot, but back in 1999, in that first swell of internet excitement there didn't seem much else to do but fall in love and get married to a rotund death-row inmate.

It made sense at the time. It didn't when Belinda was granted conjugal visits, but luckily by that time I had a Gmail account, and a blog so my Hotmail and personal homepage were a thing of the past. Unless she hires a private detective, or Googles me, it is unlikely that my switchblade sweetheart will ever turn up on my doorstep.

With good reason, other people were a lot more cautious in their use of the internet. And it has only really been in the last two or three years that the internet has truly reached the consciousness of the vast majority of the UK population.

Unfortunately (or should that be fortunately?) these late bloomers now face the second blossoming of the internet – this Web 2.0 business that keeps popping up. Last week I was talking to Loic Le Meur, of blogging software provider Six Apart, about what I called the "Web 2.0 vibe". Le Meur said that blogs had gathered the sort of traction that personal web pages never did during what we can now call Web 1.0. Now, however, the internet is a lot more vertical and a lot more community-centric, he argued. "Innovation is here again," he said.

Indeed, innovation is here again. But at what cost? The openness of Web 2.0 effectively strips consumers of the privacy that they fought so long to preserve.
Yes, it's exciting, and a natural maturing of the internet, and it's a lot more useful. But I fear that Web 2.0 and the sites that represent it will worry more people than they reassure – not unlike the missives I used to receive from my strange, and estranged, missus.

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