The gurus seek bliss amidst mountaintop solitude and serenity in the meditative trance, but I, grasshopper, have achieved the oneness with the universe that is known as pure externalization.

Chris Lyman tried to live a life of leisure. After selling the start-up company he had founded, Hosting.com, for $30 million in 2000, Mr. Lyman, then 26, bought a big house on a bluff above Los Angeles. He bought a $100,000 sports car. He splurged on heliboarding trips, extreme diving and “other primordial male, risky stuff,” he said. In between, there were plenty of days where 4 p.m. rolled around and he was still in his bathrobe. Yet no more. Like many other young techies who came into an elephantine payoff during the Internet era, Mr. Lyman has chosen to start another company — mainly because he felt he had no choice.

Having already struck it rich, many young Internet tycoons throw themselves back into a start-up, in a competition with one another and themselves.

How many people visited Style.com, the online home of Vogue and W magazines, last month? Was it 421,000, or, more optimistically, 497,000? Or was the real number more than three times higher, perhaps 1.8 million? The answer — which may be any, or none, of the above — is a critical one for Condé Nast, which owns the site, and for companies like Ralph Lauren, which pay to advertise there. Condé Nast’s internal count (1.8 million) was much higher than the tally by ComScore (421,000) or Nielsen/NetRatings (497,000), whose numbers are used to help set advertising rates, and the discrepancies have created a good deal of friction.

The word ‘resources’ sets my spine tingling. My old hippy-but-curmudgeonly soul had high hopes of the World Wide Web. The future, in some respects, was living up to expectations, providing videotapes of movies you didn’t have to leave home to see again, music remastered to a complexity not heard even in the concert hall let alone your own bath; and now here was a space that couldn’t be pictured, and didn’t require going out to be in, where minds from anywhere on the planet, full of knowledge and knowhow, wit and wondering, could chatter together, collaborate, pass information and the time of day. The internet would be a planetary depository, freely available, a dream library of everything. Borges and Brautigan thought of it but never fully imagined the weird airiness of its actuality.

Music and TV were lazily paddling their canoes down Prosperity Creek when Music suddenly heard a deafening roar ahead. “Help! What’s happening?” cried Music — but it was too late. The canoe tumbled over the Internet Falls, knocking Music upside-down into the churning vortex. TV, following at a short distance, was determined to avoid Music’s fate. “I shall go with the current and not fight it,” vowed TV. And with only seconds to spare, TV threw every shred of brainpower and muscle into avoiding its doom. End of Chapter 1.

I'm deep in a quandary. A couple of days ago, after calling Adblock Plus "the nuclear plug-in," I actually went nuclear. I downloaded the sucker and started using it. I was seduced by Noam Cohen's description of the almost Zenlike sense of peace that flowed through him when he'd outfitted Firefox with the ad-eating add-on:

Tim Berners-Lee View profile More options Aug 7 1991, 6:37 am Newsgroups: alt.hypertext From: timbl@info .cern.ch (Tim Berners-Lee) Date: 6 Aug 91 16:00:12 GMT Local: Wed, Aug 7 1991 2:00 am Subject: WorldWideWeb: Summary Reply to author | Forward | Print | View thread | Show original | Report this message | Find messages by this author In article <6...@cernvax.cern.ch> I promised to post a short summary of the WorldWideWeb project. Mail me with any queries. WorldWideWeb - Executive Summary