Top 10 best things about the web

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 (see the Top 10 worst things about the web) 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.