When pollsters for Ipsos Insight recently asked 6,500 people in 12 countries whether they had used the Internet in the past month, 68 percent of South Koreans said yes. That ranked No. 4, behind Japan (89 percent), Canada (72 percent) and the United States (71 percent).

(For those who track Asia's fastest-rising economies, China had a rate of 50 percent, while India showed just 15 percent — though Ipsos researchers only queried people in urban areas in those countries.)

South Korea also didn't own the top slot in time spent online. The survey found that Korean Internet users, on average, were online for 12.7 hours each week, behind those in China (17.9 hours a week) and Japan (13.9). Canadian Web surfers clocked 12.3 hours each week and Americans were fifth at 11.4, followed by Mexicans at 9.2.

Of the 17,576 possible three-letter sequences, again every single one is already taken. Adding digits to the mix (note that I'm intentionally ignoring obtuse dashes for such short domain names, though technically they are legal from the second character onwards), giving 46,656 permutations, yields a larger number of garbage domain entries (either REGISTRAR-LOCKED, REDEMPTIONPERIOD, or with no nameservers), giving a false hope of 228 seemingly open domains, yet they aren't actually available.

If you're dying to acquire great domains like 8VZ.com or Q6X.com, they'll free up within a month, though it seems evident that there are swaths of domain speculators acquiring every variant when they come available, so they won't go without a fight.

Stepping up to four letter sequences, choosing among the 456,976 combinations, yields a vastly greater availability -- perhaps the set is a bit too large for domain speculators and their unlikely success with random sequences -- with 97,786 showing as open. A quick check verifies that most are legitimately available. "Choice" domains, such as AGJV.com, EIYK.com, GZVW.com, and QFEV.com. Adding digits into the mix and there are a massive 1.16 million open domains, so long as you're looking for something like 7RG8.com, or U3JZ.com. Choose one and then manufacture a ridiculous backronym to explain it.

Regardless, the initial reaction to the UMPC, announced by Microsoft on March 9, will become clear in just a few months. The first UMPCs -- small computers with 7-inch screens that are designed to occupy a niche for consumers who want a device larger than a handheld yet smaller than a laptop -- are expected in the second quarter ending June 30 from electronics manufacturers such as Samsung, Founder and Asus. UMPCs, priced between $599 and $999, promise to run all the applications that a Microsoft Windows desktop computer does.

On the plus side, products like cell phones and the iPod didn't initially strike consumers as must haves, but became big hits. On the other side of the ledger, products like Apple Computer's Newton, a handheld computer that debuted in August 1993, was a commercial flop in large part because its handwriting recognition software didn't perform well. Microsoft, for its part, has attempted to create new categories of computers before, as with its Tablet PC, which analysts say has yet to be a big seller beyond select industries such as health care and financial services. However, even commercial flops can be deemed a success if they blaze a path to new categories of products. For instance, Apple's Newton was an early disappointment, but forged the way for handhelds like the Palm Pilot 1000, launched in March 1996.

So what will be the fate of Microsoft's UMPC, formerly codenamed "Origami"? According to Clemons, there is potential for the devices, but he won't know how much until he gets to play with one. Kendall Whitehouse, senior director of advanced technology development at Wharton, says the UMPC is a good way for Microsoft to spread its software into all forms of devices as they begin to converge. Wharton marketing professor Eric Bradlow suggests that Microsoft has a sales challenge convincing consumers they need another device that is a "tweener" between a laptop and a handheld. Jagmohan S. Raju, also a Wharton marketing professor, predicts that the UMPC will have a tough time competing due to its high price. And Robert Shelton, co-author of Making Innovation Work (Wharton School Publishing), describes the UMPC effort as another attempt by technology companies to use innovation to create new markets by finding just the right mix of size, functionality and price.

Taking a page from Google's playbook, tech publisher IDG is getting ready to launch TechWords, its own twist on contextual keyword advertising. IDG publishes ComputerWorld, GamePro, InfoWorld, PC World, CIO, and 300 other niche tech mags. It runs more than 400 associated Websites, and put on 175 evenst last year, including MacWorld and LinuxWorld. It also owns market research firm IDC. The private company brought in revenues last year of $2.7 billion.

I spoke with CEO President Bob Carrigan today, and he told me that a big part of IDG's growth is, not surprisingly, Web advertising (the conference business is booming too, especially for niche events that go deep into tech topics like wireless or business intelligence). With TechWords, within a few weeks he's going to let advertisers place contextual text ads against any topic they want across his network of more than 400 sites. So if you want to buy the key word "grid computing" your ad will appear on any page that is about that topic, much like how Google's AdSense works.

The layoffs represent about 5% of the company's 21,400 employees. Lenovo managers will identify the workers by the end of March, spreading the cuts throughout company offices in the Americas, Asia-Pacific and EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) regions.

The changes make sense in terms of the competitive PC market, analysts said.

"Business desktops are a narrow, narrow margin business; they are almost a commodity. You have to be very efficient in order to make money selling desktops," said Gordon Haff, senior analyst at research company Illuminata Inc.

Lenovo faced a challenge achieving that efficiency because it was still struggling to integrate IBM's PC division into the rest of the company. Lenovo acquired that business in 2005.

Ken Silva, the chief security officer for VeriSign Inc., compared the scale of attacks to the damage caused in October 2002 when nine of the 13 computer "root" servers that manage global Internet traffic were crippled by a powerful electronic attack.

VeriSign operates two of the 13 root server computers, but its machines were unaffected. "This is significantly larger than what we saw in 2002, by an order of magnitude," Silva said.

Silva said the attacks earlier this year used only about 6 percent of the more than 1 million name servers across the Internet to flood victim networks. Still, the attacks in some cases exceeded 8 gigabits per second, indicating a remarkably powerful electronic assault.

"This would be the Katrina of Internet storms," Silva said.

Write, read, and delete objects containing from 1 byte to 5 gigabytes of data each. The number of objects you can store is unlimited.

Each object is stored and retrieved via a unique, developer-assigned key.

Authentication mechanisms are provided to ensure that data is kept secure from unauthorized access. Objects can be made private or public, and rights can be granted to specific users.

Uses standards-based REST and SOAP interfaces designed to work with any Internet-development toolkit.

Built to be flexible so that protocol or functional layers can easily be added. Default download protocol is HTTP. A BitTorrent™ protocol interface is provided to lower costs for high-scale distribution. Additional interfaces will be added in the future.

Trying to do things in playsh is most similar to games like Zork from the 1970s. To go north, you type north. To examine an object, you type look. There are no graphics, just descriptions.

But instead of ducking grues and collecting zorkmids, you're interacting with whatever program code you're working on, as well as the data and hardware devices that it uses. "It treats the web and APIs as just more objects and places, and is a platform for writing and sharing your own code to manipulate those objects and places," says developer Matt Webb, who unveiled the tool at last week's O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.

Playsh is inspired by the user-customizable variety of MUD called a MOO, for "MUD object-oriented." MOOs were like chat rooms, except the members of the community could create new objects by programming them into the virtual world in a dedicated programming language, shaping the game as it went along.

When you log into playsh, you see a basic description of the room and whoever is in the room with you. The current incarnation of playsh is written in Python, and each room has a Python interpreter built into it that anyone in the room can access. Adventurers contribute to the code while simultaneously interacting with the room's objects and each other.

"If AOL or another ISP decides that someone's a spammer, then no e-mail from that individual gets through," said EFF attorney Cindy Cohn, whose group opposes the AOL plan. "But there's a fundamental difficulty at the heart of the spam debate: The only one who knows what you want delivered in your inbox is you."

For years, e-mail users complained that torrents of unwanted messages clogged their inboxes and crimped their productivity. Now, e-mail users, marketers and mailing list operators are more worried that spam filters are blocking out too many wanted messages.

AOL isn't the only company to face charges that it improperly blocks legitimate messages. But, as the world's largest ISP for years, it has long borne the brunt of complaints from mass e-mailers over the problem.

Those concerns are seeping into the debate over a planned AOL program, set to go live in the next month, in which approved e-mail senders pay to guarantee delivery of their messages.

Today, broadband is mainstream, online shopping is commonplace, everyone has a wireless device or two, and Apple's latest music player was - for the fifth season in a row - the must-have holiday gift. The Internet and digital media are clearly not fads. Over the past decade, we've started to live a life only imagined in mid-'90s business plans. As a result, some silly bubble-era ideas are starting to actually make sense - perhaps a lot of sense.

Free phone calls over the Internet? That's Skype, which eBay just bought for nearly $4 billion. Online virtual communities? Now a global phenomenon in the form of massively multiplayer online games. Free music sites? MySpace, which rivals Google in traffic. (The boom's ultimate echo: The owner of Dog.com just paid $1 million for Fish.com, in hopes of starting what amounts to a new Pets.com. Just so long as it doesn't ship 50-pound bags of chow.)

The second reason that this boom is so different from the last is that the sunk costs of the dotcom era make the economics of entrepreneurship more favorable. In the bad old days, companies bankrupted themselves building out their fiber-optic networks. Bad for investors, good for everyone else: We're now enjoying supercheap bandwidth. So, too, for storage, screens, and a host of other technologies that are benefiting from profligate '90s-era investment and research.

Meanwhile, open source software has come of age, and computer hardware will soon cost less than the electricity it takes to run it. The result: industrial-strength servers that are cheaper than desktop PCs (sorry, Sun). Or, if you prefer, you can buy hardware and software even more cheaply as a hosted service (there's that inexpensive bandwidth again).

The small Canadian company NTP, Inc. has been judged to be the owner of the technology that powers Blackberry handheld devices, and that Research In Motion, Inc. ("RIM") stole said technology. After that ruling, NTP demanded that RIM's Blackberry operations be shut down, which was within its rights. But joy reigned this afternoon as the two companies made peace and the naughty thieving corporate pirates at RIM reached a settlement in which they will pay NTP $612.5 million for licensing its technology.

The little guy wins and gets money. Millions of Blackberry users get to keep their favorite gadget. Everyone wins. Don't you just love a happy ending?

Driven by ubiquitous broadband, cheap hardware, and open-source software, the Web is mutating into a radically different beast than it has been. And that is leading to the creation of entirely new kinds of companies, new business models, and oceans of new opportunity.

We are in the early stages of what might be better thought of as the Next Net. The Next Net will encompass all digital devices, from PC to cell phone to television. Its defining characteristics include the ability to interact instantaneously with any of the more than 1 billion Web users across the globe -- not by, say, instant messaging, but by evolving instant-voice-messaging and instant-video-messaging apps that will make today's e-mail and IM seem crude.

The Next Net is deeply collaborative: People from across the planet can work together on the same task, and products or tools can be rapidly tweaked and improved by the collective wisdom of the entire online world.

The new era is also creating a realm of endless mix and match: Anyone with a browser can access vast stores of information, mash it up, and serve it in new ways, to a few people or a few hundred million.

Caterina Fake knew she was onto something whenone of the engineers at her Vancouver, British Columbia-based onlinegame start-up created a cool tool to share photos and save them to a Web page while playing.

"It turned out the fun was in the photo sharing," she says.

Fake scrapped the game. She and her programmer husband, Stewart Butterfield, transformed the project into Flickr. In less than two years, the photo-sharing site - now owned by Internetgiant Yahoo - has turned into one of the Web's fastest-growing properties.

"Had we sat down and said, 'Let's start a photo application,' we would have failed," Fake says. "We would have done all this research and done all the wrong things."