It came very late in the year, but 2000 finally got a website as classic as Google or UpMyStreet.com. It's the simplest of ideas - it provides an online form that will send a fax to your local MP in just a couple of clicks. But there maybe one snag. The MPs. Possibly overwhelmed by the response, early reports suggest that few of them can find the time to reply.
In the future, historians might look back at the moment when Nasty Nick was evicted from the Big Brother house as the moment when the internet first superseded TV as the mass entertainment medium. Maybe. Groups of office workers logged on to the net on August 17 as news of Nasty Nick's eviction spread hours before the events were broadcast on television. Channel 4 might have pulled the plug for two crucial hours but come that evening's show everybody already knew exactly what was going on.
On the other end of the spectrum we have Am I Hot or Not, the site which spawned a thousand imitators. Probably the most gratuitously useless website of the year in which users are invited to upload pictures of themselves (or sneakily upload pictures of their mates) to be given marks out of ten in terms of sexiness. Wonderfully addictive, spread largely by word of mouth and surely only asking for trouble.
Liberals, environmentalists and anyone hoping for some kind of rational transport policy might not like it, but this site offered the most tacit sign this year of how the internet could affect mainstream politics. 1999 might have been the year of anti-capitalism, but 2000 showed that counter-revolutionaries could take to the net with the same ease.
However, not to be outdone, the anti-capitalists launched one or two sites of their own in 2000. Most of them were "indy media centres" - news portals staffed by non-journalists. London got hers just in time for the May Day riots; Prague for the meeting of the WTO and even the Millennium Olympics had its own centre in Sydney.
iFilm has come into its own this year. By giving filmmakers a free, global showcase for their work. Hollywood discovered some underground filmmakers, while many others simply flourished in the new-found medium of digital film. And some of the films are pretty good too. Just check out Bruce Branit and Jeremy Hunt's excellent short 405 which has already knocked up over two million hits and counting.
The New Jersey-based Digital Freedom Network did much sterling work to ridicule the inadequacies in net filtering software. In September the site ran a contest encouraging surfers to take to test sites, chat rooms and bulletin boards to uncover the most ridiculous examples of "censorware failure". Users responded in droves reporting that they were kicked off bulletin boards when the censorware recognised the word "whore" in the phrase "who reported".
Hack SDMI the name of the challenge put out by the US record industry to the global hacking community inviting them to hack into their commercial MP3 prototypes. The hackers responded in two ways. Half complained that they were not prepared to do the industry's dirty work for them (and besides the $10,000 prize money was not nearly enough). The other half just went and made mincemeat out of all five of the industry's prototypes overnight.
This year also saw the welcome return of Spinal Tap and the website to promote the re-release of their film was one of the most inspired Napster parodies the year. It even offered to rip the band's own tracks off.
Not the only site to gleefully delight in the sound of internet companies falling off the bandwagon, but undoubtedly the best.
Too much hype, then the wap-lash and now news that users are taking to their Wap phones after all. Still many of them needed the web to find the sites they liked. This site categorised the best and told you how to build your own wap pages.
