online

Sometimes, what futurist Ray Kurzweil calls the “ever-increasing rate of technology” is scary. (Who, exactly, wants to live forever? Or grant robots the same rights as humans?) But when singularity—the theory that technology will improve exponentially until it reaches a state of unprecedented progress—quickens the Internet’s pace by a hundredfold, I will gladly drink Kurzweil’s Kool-Aid. Scientists from the University of Sydney have inadvertently demonstrated this theory by making the Web 60 times faster than current top-notch speeds, and promising to raise that to 100 times in the near future.

In 2006, David Holtzman decided to do an experiment. Holtzman, a security consultant and former intelligence analyst, was working on a book about privacy, and he wanted to see how much he could find out about himself from sources available to any tenacious stalker. So he did background checks. He pulled his credit file. He looked at Amazon.com transactions and his credit-card and telephone bills. He got his DNA analyzed and kept a log of all the people he called and e-mailed, along with the Web sites he visited.

For an exclusive photo tour of Second Life, click here.

Remember the used-record store? The racks were made of dirty white particleboard, the signs were handwritten in red permanent marker, and the bald guy with the lip piercing behind the counter played in your cousin´s band. You could find almost anything there, usually for around $6. Music megastores and Web sites put these places out of business, and even if you can get just as good a deal buying a CD off eBay, you don´t get the music community that came part and parcel with your local punk-rocker-run music shop. And obscure titles are getting harder and harder to find in CD form.

A: Tagging is the act of assigning your own keywords to things online-photos, blog entries, bookmarks-so that you can easily categorize, locate, and share them in the future. One of the best examples is del.icio.us, which lets you save Web bookmarks to a page on the site instead of to a file stashed away on your computer. This way, you can access them from anywhere and let other people see what sites you like.

Unless you live on a mountaintop, miles away from civilization, with a 15-inch-wide telescope at your disposal, you will have a hard time topping the celestial view slooh.com gives you. This new Web service affords users real-time access to four telescopes perched 7,900 feet above sea level on the Canary Islands’ Mount Teide. "We wanted to open up astronomy to people for whom the initial setup cost, their location or the base knowledge required was prohibitive," says Michael Paolucci, Slooh’s president and founder.