Top 10 best things about the web

5. Activism

Iain Thomson: Activists were very quick to spot the power of the web, and the internet before it. In the 1989 Velvet Revolution in the old Czechoslovakia computer messaging was a significant factor in spreading the message of protests and getting people out onto the streets.

Professional activists recognise that strength comes in numbers and organisation. It's difficult to organise a group without electronics since they have to be physically present, which makes things unwieldy and easy to crack down on by the authorities.

Using the web, activist groups have not only been able to organise more effectively but to share information and campaign literature. In more mainstream protests the online petition is gaining credibility and services like theyworkforyou.com in the UK have made it much easier for people to get in contact with their elected representatives.

The politicians may hate this, but they notice it. It's an old adage in politics that for every letter they receive there's around 10 people who feel the same way on the subject and they'll be talking about it to 10 people each.

Special interest groups in the US have been very active in using the web to co-ordinate correspondence with those in power. Say the wrong thing and a politician's inbox can be flooded with messages reminding them that people are listening.

But it's not just politics; the web has made consumers more active as well. Had a bad experience with a supplier? There are sites to let people know and businesses are increasingly monitoring to see where they are falling down. In the past you could only tell your friends and family if you got ripped off, or were treated exceptionally well. Now everyone can know.

Shaun Nichols: I would add that the web has not only empowered activism, but has changed the concept of what an activist truly is. Activism was previously very limited by geography and surrounding demographics which could often reduce it to only the most dedicated individuals.

Because of the web, protest and activism have spread into the realm of moderates, and truly brought the sense of 'power to the people'. Those who would otherwise have been unable or unaware enough to organise on their own, or intimidated about speaking out in a potentially hostile environment, can now make their voices heard because of the web.

As with most things on the web, this cuts both ways. The web has also empowered hate groups to spread their message, but even then, people are able to safely speak their minds and counter the ugly arguments with more enlightened points of view.

4. E-commerce

Iain Thomson: In a lot of cases e-commerce took existing old-world businesses and used the web to make them accessible to all.

Auction houses, for example, were only able to cater to people who could actually turn up, or afford the services of a phone bidder. Internet auctions, on the other hand, are open to anyone online. This broadens the buying base and ensures the best price for the seller.

However, e-commerce has also forced plenty of industries to change their business models. Take journalism, for example. Back when I was working on a paper publication we sold a magazine on the news stand for some revenue and then made up the rest with advertising. Now we give our copy away for free and use the expanded readership from being online to boost advertising revenues.

This is fine for some industries which accepted the change and worked with it. Others, like the music industry, tried to force people to ignore the web and are reaping the heavy cost of ignoring change.

But, by and large, the popularity of the web has been a huge advantage to business. If you look at the value of e-commerce it makes up a sizable minority of the money being used in the economy and that percentage will only grow. At some point in the future, be it years or decades, the bulk of business will be carried out online.

Shaun Nichols: Not only have businesses seen the advantages of e-commerce, but consumers have benefited greatly as well. Just as a store owner can now sell an item to a buyer in another corner of the country, a consumer can buy a specialised item from a store hundreds of miles away that would have otherwise had to be ordered at a premium cost, or painstakingly purchased through a catalogue service.

Then there's the bargains. A service such as Amazon would never have existed in the real world because doing so would have resulted in a sort of flea market layout that covered the entire state of Kansas.

With the web, users can compare prices from dozens of retailers in multiple locations from a single screen. For things such as travel and hotel prices, it would be nearly impossible to match the efficiency of bargain-hunting web sites.

3. Neutrality

Shaun Nichols: Current debates aside, the idea of a neutral and level playing field is one of the most admirable traits of the web.

As anyone who follows cable news in the US can tell you, presenting information in a completely neutral light is extremely difficult, if not impossible. On the web, however, it's a much easier task. Not only does the accessibility allow one to consult multiple sources with different viewpoints, it also allows those viewpoints to be in the same space at the same time without coming to blows.

Often, this devolves into trolling contests or pointless back-and-forth, but when it does work, the web can become a truly excellent forum for debate and as reliable a method for presenting an issue from a neutral point of view as there ever was.

Iain Thomson: Net neutrality was built into the foundations of the web, and long may it continue. The idea of an open playing field is something that would warm the heart of Adam Smith. Without neutrality we'd have no Google; lesser search technologies would have paid their way to faster access and we'd all be poorer for it.

The very idea of a totally free market is a logical impossibility; like communism it's a concept rather than an actuality. But net neutrality is the best idea we've got for ensuring that good ideas come to the fore.

When you get people in their twenties coming forward with business plans that seem insane and yet earn millions one might think that it's unfair. In fact, it's capitalism at its best.

People need to innovate, and the web allows them to do that. We all benefit from the result.

2. Entrepreneurship

Shaun Nichols: From the rise of Silicon Valley to the dotcom and Web 2.0 eras, the web has done more to restore the entrepreneurial spirit and power of an independent business than any event or innovation this side of the Industrial Revolution.

Fifty years ago, starting a small business meant either opening a restaurant or a local retail shop. A handful of people were able to expand those operations into regional outfits, and even fewer were able to go national. But when the web exploded, so did the prospects for entrepreneurs.

Now, starting a new business can be as easy as purchasing a domain and placing your code online. No longer do college students dream of landing a mid-level position with a large company and climbing the corporate ladder. Now, an ambitious individual can build his or her own corporate ladder from the top down.

This has truly changed the way people define a successful business career and the methods by which one can attain it.

Iain Thomson: New technologies are a young person's game. The old guard didn't get the internet until too late, so a new generation of entrepreneurs came forward.

It's slightly gutting to those of us who grew up in the era to see people with shakey business plans making millions while we just wrote about it.

Nevertheless fair play to them, they took their chances and we have all prospered from it.

1. Information

Iain Thomson: This was an easy pick for the number one spot on the list. The web is, was and will always be about the dissemination of information.

The web is, in my view, more important to human development than the invention of the printing press. After all, while the printing press with movable type proved vital in making information accessible to more people, it still had physical limitations because books could only be moved so far.

With the web everyone has the ability to let everyone else know facts and data. This ability has opened people up to stuff they never even thought about, and has greatly expanded the ability of educators, researchers and businesses to go about their businesses.

It has also democratised the information process. In the past newspapers could censor, publishers refuse manuscripts and governments ban writing. Now, with the ability to put all of this stuff online and spread it around, the consequences for human societies will be huge.

For a start representative government depends on an informed electorate. Certain governments still try to keep their citizens uninformed about events and actions but the web makes that more and more difficult. The Great Firewall of China, for example, is pretty good at censoring the web, but it is far from perfect and people are working around the clock to defeat it. Sooner or later the wall, like its Berlin predecessor, will fall and the resulting tsunami of information will sweep all before it.

Educators have the ultimate encyclopaedia in the web. This does not abrogate their responsibility to students - indeed in some ways it can make it harder if people just cut and paste from Wikipedia - but they are getting smart to this. Teachers need to use the web, but should also teach students to be more critical of the information they receive. As my old history teacher was fond of saying: "Before reading anything consider three questions: who wrote this, why did they write it, and who's paying for it?"

Finally, businesses have benefited hugely from the information now available on the web. It helps in sourcing suppliers, developing new products, finding business contacts in similar industries and even meeting online with people they couldn't ordinarily meet. Need a new widget for a product in development? Now you don't have to travel to meet the supplier, you can email or videoconference and get the parts more quickly and most likely at a lower cost.

Information does come with problems but these are either systemic or simply birthing pangs of a new age that the web has wrought.

Shaun Nichols: It can be said that just about everything else in this top 10 list stems from the basic principle that the web is a massive storehouse of information.

Now, anybody in the world can take computer science courses from MIT, or learn how to brew their own beer. These seem like obvious and trivial things now, but try and imagine what would be required to archive all of that information in a physical space.

Even with the early storage and networking tools that are now considered primitive, collecting and browsing huge archives of data can be performed at a speed incomprehensible just a half century ago, while news can be spread at a fraction of the time and cost required by any form of communication since.

That, at its base, is the core empowerment that the world wide web has brought to humanity: the accumulation and availability of vast amounts of old and new information.