This is important news. Not because it challenges Microsoft’s dominance of the PC operating system market, as stressed in the New York Times article on the announcement, but because it’s a sign that we are heading to another sweet spot in the information technology revolution. A sweet spot is where hardware, software and cultural trends come together to make complex tasks much easier and cheaper to accomplish. The effect transforms society enabling new ways for people to interact. For example, in 1994, reliable, dial-up Internet service met the graphical Web browser, Mosaic, just as Al Gore re-invented the Internet as an open platform for business, entertainment and the free, global exchange of information and ideas.

Here are the important trends today: A new generation of high-speed WiFi based on freed up broadcast spectrum from the conversion to digital TV is on its way and will meet up with new portable devices that are fun to use and cheap to own. After Google Chrome OS goes open-source, there should be versions available for everything from X-Boxes to old TiVo machines.

Speaking of Tivo, the recent Supreme Court decision to deny the appeal in the Cablevision DVR case highlights another trend. Cablevision wanted to provide DVR services upstream on their servers. The broadcast networks held that this was making copies for redistribution and, thus, they should pay royalties. The Appeals Court ruling, which the Supremes let stand, held that, once the consumer paid a license for a piece of content, it didn’t matter where it was stored on the consumer’s behalf—on a local hard drive or somewhere in the cloud.  This decision lays the groundwork for challenging all the restrictions that the telco, broadcast and cable monopolies, place on how, where and when we do anything.

Here’s my last trend to watch: A month ago, the state of Vermont OK’d the formation of virtual corporations by a change in its tax laws. This means that corporations (LLCs) in Vermont no longer need to have a physical mailing address and can conduct online board meetings.

An important conclusion was missed in the Vermont reporting – a corporation can have bank accounts and credit cards. This is a privilege hitherto granted by our government only to corporations and individuals and denied to such entities as: MeetUp groups and SecondLife communities. The effect of this, as Clay Shirky points out in Here Comes Everybody, limits our ability to leverage the Internet, with social media tools, to organize and engage in collective actions other than protest movements.

How will society change in the next two or three years when all of us are connected to a World Wide Web of rich media, all the time, in devices on us and around us; with fast, friendly software that knows about us, our friends and the tribes we associate with; when the last geographic and cost barriers to collaborative action for the common good are gone?

What’s the difference if I use just my domain name in a URL or use www.mydomain.com?  One of my colleagues said I should use www because more people understand what that is.

Okay. So what is the ‘www’ good for? Is it a necessary part of your Website’s address? In what contexts should it be used or omitted?

Technically, saying,  www.yourdomain.com, directs the Internet user to your domain’s webserver. Saying: yourdomain.com, directs the visitor to your domain’s network and you’ll figure out which server to use along the way.

Conceptually, the former presents your website while the latter presents your brand. Visually, designers like the ‘www’ prefix for its 3.x.3 symmetry. Practically, it makes no difference.

www doesn’t necessarily denote a Webserver, it’s just a widely used convention. Sixteen years ago, when the World Wide Web only attracted the attention of computer geeks, they would install web server software on a separate test or development machine in their corporate network. Each computer in a network must have a unique host name which is prefixed to the domain name. Typically, whoever first created the network would set the theme and server names were chosen from that theme — Norse gods, British warships, state capitals, whatever. There already were loosely adopted conventions — mail, news, gopher (an early, global information system without hyperlinks.) Somebody named a webserver ‘www’ and others followed suit. Interestingly, the Web’s very first home page did not use www, it used info.

The Web’s http protocol has gained dominance over other Internet protocols and the Web’s conceptual framework is synonymous now with the Internet itself. Most organizations make their Web server the primary entry point into their information domain. Hosting companies do this by default for virtual hosting accounts.

Today, search powers the Web and the Web, for many organizations, is the primary means of delivering their service and promoting their brand. When someone wants to find information about You they are more likely to enter You in a search box, than to type your url into a location field. Mobile users really appreciate shorter URLs. And for audio content, the extra ten syllables are a pain.

Like ‘dubya’, ‘www’ should fade away.

— Larry