When I first took this job in 2001, I wrote about a future where surfers would surf an Internet as instantaneously accessible as television. Kawabunga dudes. Surf’s up!

The non-static net is here. The living web. The YouTube era of cyberspace.

"When I first took this job in 2001, I wrote about a future where surfers would surf an Internet as instantaneously accessible as television. Kawabunga dudes. Surf's up!"

Okay, I didn’t predict YouTube. But I did tell you that broadband would become the norm and that the majority of those broadband surfers will demand content that moves. I first heard about broadband in the late nineties. It was a rich pornographer’s fancy dream. What I did predict was that the fancy price for broadband access would drop down to real people prices. What I anticipated was that once the average price fell past a certain level, the majority of users would switch to broadband Internet connections. Prices did fall and users switched. Now, broadband users are the majority. The future is today, so you better make your pages boogie!

When I first started writing for Cozy, I went just about nuts for porn, delivered on PDA’s. I was creaming my jeans at the possibility that I could download web pages and images on my Handspring. Handspring is out of business but the concept of a hand-held web never died. See, my mistake in prognostication came from a dependency on labels. I touted the mini-computer known as a PDA. Instead, today, millions are leasing mini-computers but they’re calling them cell-phones. The much ballyhooed iPhone? Totally a PDA!

Streaming content and hand-held devices. These are but two of the elements in this new net.

Remember that nasty IE "Channels" screensaver thing? Egad, what a horrid piece of software. Imagine a damned screensaver that phoned your ancient dial up connection whenever it friggin wanted to? To download what? A crapload of slow-loading pages that just stuffed your tiny hard drive? Who the hell wanted that?

Ah, but with the hippity hoppity web, you can download hundreds of links, weather reports and stock market figures. You can keep track of updated sites and the freshest news reports with handy dandy software that will do way more than any lousy IE, dial-up pointlessware. RSS readers are much more versatile and much more popular due to broadband access. Bonus points go to the fact that RSS syndication is an incredible, affordable marketing tool for any webmaster.

When I first began to write articles for Cozy, ICQ was still the King of IM software. Instant Messaging is stronger than ever but IM programs from AOL, Yahoo and MSN share the crown. What I missed was that IM software would find fertile ground among cell-phone users. Text messaging is fun but to IM via your Nokia is way more satisfying. Which leads me to community.

Remember the old days when live, multi-user chat meant iRC and shitty Java applets? Remember when being a member of an online community meant posting privileges on a message board and a megabyte of free ad-heavy web hosting ­ with a teeny email account if you were lucky? Today, we barely call them online communities. Now they’re known as 'social networking' sites and oh, do they offer perks!

On the new net, a member of MySpace gets free hosting, image storage, video upload space, live commenting, archiving and access to site management software so sophisticated it was unheard of five years ago. What’s crazy is that most of the features (offered by these Internet gathering places) are insanely user-friendly. The average user is able to upload, download, converse, email, check calendars, post schedules, form clubs, filter out spammers and control their little corners of cyberspace with a couple of clicks ­ in a matter of seconds.

Speaking of community and movement, the hippest place to be is where the videos are at. Oh sure, adult webmasters were serving up short, fast loading clips ages before YouTube and Google got the big idea. The difference was once again, the speed. Sure, any horny bastard will wait for a clip to load if the clip is of people fucking. Now, practically anyone will wait a few seconds for a clip of a poor fucking bastard’s video. They’ll load it, load it again and they’ll email friends about it. They’ll post the fully playable, embedded player link on websites. They’ll comment on it. They’ll film, convert and upload other versions that satirize the original.

Pretty soon the whole thing will culminate in some tremendous blogswarm of text blogs editorializing on v-logs. V-logs will then create new video posts (podcasts) that address the subject of close-angle camera work and Internet disease. In the meantime these communities/social networks will spread the gospel of the hottest gadgets and by next month we’ll have forgotten what it was that was so exciting and modern, today.

The year is 2007. This is the new net. The second, great leap. Be prepared. Things will only get faster from here.