Big media companies were setting up portal sites to centralize the Web experience. Users would enter the Net through these portals and then read content provided by highly compensated publishers. It was a centralized vision. Thankfully, it was wrong.

The Web today hasn't evolved the way I feared in the mid-1990s. The Web 2.0 conference, which took place in San Francisco in early October, highlighted many of the reasons. Today's tools have turned Web users into powerful shapers of its content.

The trend shows up not just in obvious places like Weblogs, but in projects that grow with their user base, like the open source Wikipedia encyclopedia and the innovative Flickr file-sharing service.

Flickr (www.flickr.com) is a classic case of value being added by consumers rather than publishers. On one level, it's a photo-sharing site where you can post pictures that other people can see. But as users upload photos, they also tag them with key words, allowing highly specific searches for imagery. The value is in the users; the more photos and tags, the more powerful the database.

This is hardly a model for centralized publishing, but it's so effective that Yahoo recently bought Flickr as part of a move into content-sharing called Yahoo360 (360.yahoo.com). Yahoo CEO Terry Semel told the Web 2.0 crowd that projects involving user participation will proliferate at his company in the next 12 months.

When users tag material with key words, they create a data organization that grows from the bottom up (as opposed to taxonomy, some call this mode "folksonomy," an evolving structure whose value is freely contributed by its participants). The bookmark system I wrote about Oct. 2, del.icio.us, uses similar methods to let users tag their bookmarks and then examine what others have also tagged.

Evolving technologies are propelling this move toward a more collaborative Internet. Consider RSS (Really Simple Syndication), which allows you to subscribe to the Weblogs of your choice and learn immediately when new content appears. Browsers such as Firefox now have RSS capability, and a host of reader software is available, much of it free.

I use Newzcrawler (www.newzcrawler.com) and also the free, Web-based Bloglines (www.bloglines.com).

Weblogs can change continuously as they are updated, while their postings are anchored by "permalinks" where they can always be retrieved. "Trackbacks" allow Weblog authors to know when someone else links to their pages. Because bloggers link so often to information, they have a major role in shaping search results, since search engines examine the number and quality of links. Thus, big publishers are increasingly running into competition from tiny operations boosted by collaborative technologies.

And if you think this trend isn't powerful, ponder how advertising has begun to change as it moves away from a centralized model to reach smaller sites. By creating context-sensitive ads using their own search technologies, both Yahoo and Google have moved well beyond the largest Web sites and now put minimally intrusive ads on the pages of Weblogs and small businesses throughout the Internet.

Publisher Tim O'Reilly, host of the Web 2.0 conference, notes the power of "mashups" -- Web sites that link an online map, for example, with Internet-accessible data sources. Check www.housingmaps.com for an example; it's an interactive search tool for housing, built by combining Google Maps with real estate offerings from the Cragislist classified ad sites.

The lesson is clear: Users are shaping Net content in ways that bypass centralized publishers and unlock innovative new business models.

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