The Observer had the nice idea of celebrating the 15th birthday of the Web by compiling a list of the sites that have had had a big influence on our lives. I wrote the introduction. Sample:

By any standards, the web represents a colossal change in our information environment. And the strange thing is that it has come about in just 15 years. Actually, most of it has happened in less than that, because the web only went mainstream in 1993, when the first graphical browsers – the computer programs we use to access the web – were released. So these are early days. We can no more envisage the long-term implications of what has happened than dear old Gutenberg could…

To get a handle on the scale of what has happened, think back to what the world was like 15 years ago. Amazon was a large river in South America. Ryanair was an Irish airline that flew to places nobody had ever heard of. eBay was a typo. Yahoo was a term from Gulliver’s Travels. A googol was a very large number (one followed by a hundred zeroes). Classified ads were densely printed matter in newspapers. ‘Encyclopedia’ was a synonym for Encyclopedia Britannica. And if you wanted to read what your MP had said in the Commons yesterday you had to queue at the Stationery Office in London to buy Hansard. Oh, and there were quaint little shops in high streets called ‘travel agents’…