In the beginning, there was darkness. Then, one day, man created the worldwide web, a seemingly random collection of static, networked web pages in an era of low bandwidth. Most people had a hard time imagining where this would lead. Early adopters mused about an information superhighway, but the dream was as vague as the metaphor. Enthusiasts were outnumbered by the skeptics who thought of web pages as brochures at best, or pornography distribution at worst. Linear thinking often characteriz...