BUILDING A WEB SITE

High traffic is the basis for building serious income. But don't just build your own Web site to earn money alone.

You'll have a better chance of earning a lot more money doing something you enjoy. You won't mind the long hours and late nights if you make something you love. And those late nights can be very exhausting if you're not working for enjoyment!

It has never been so cheap and possible to build your own Web site. The basics of HTML are simple to grasp. Sharp-looking, effective Web pages are easy to create. Web hosting is becoming more and more competitive.

But in a few years, when everyone is surfing at megabytes per second, when search engines are no longer free or affordable, it will be far harder and more expensive to build a Web site.

The Web is becoming an integral part of our world. Knowing how to build a Web site and to develop information on the Web might be a business necessity or a job skill allowing you to potentially connect with millions of other people, as your own self-publisher.

With the unwitting help of its users, the generative Internet is on a path to a lockdown, ending its cycle of innovation and facilitating unsettling new kinds of control.

IPods, iPhones, Xboxes, and TiVos represent the first wave of Internet-centered products that can't be easily modified by anyone except their vendors or selected partners. These "tethered appliances" have already been used in remarkable but little-known ways: car GPS systems have been reconfigured at the demand of law enforcement to eavesdrop on the occupants at all times, and digital video recorders have been ordered to self-destruct thanks to a lawsuit against the manufacturer thousands of miles away. New Web 2.0 platforms like Google mash-ups and Facebook are rightly touted—but their applications can be similarly monitored and eliminated from a central source. As tethered appliances and applications eclipse the PC, the very nature of the Internet its "generativity," or innovative character—is at risk.