A great time to be in this business!

It really is all happening. The Holy Grail of anyone being able to publish stuff on the web just by typing on a page seems tantalisingly close. A whole raft of wonderful new web-based applications are being trialled and we get to use them for free. I didn't even get time to write about Google's Page Creator when along came Pageflakes and the cool Netvibes. Now I've discovered 9cays and, well, the whole web scene is changing. 9cays is all about communication: you send an e-mail to people and their replies get accumulated on a web page they can all access, with simple facilities for getting others involved, developing the strand and leaving it too. Forget the distribution list or the cumbersome ones someone else has to set up for you via JISC or whoever - this one you can just start.

Pageflakes and Netvibes are remarkably similarly remarkable. One is now my home page - they're that good. Again, quite free. You can create a page that contains the panels of your choosing, from news feeds, feeds from your own blog, other web pages of your choice or a range of smart tools like clocks, searches and more. You can move panels around and, and this is the bit that makes them special, add your own text to as many panels as you like too. Pageflakes has the edge on content and the fact that you can have several pages comprising a pretty useful 'site'-ful but Netvibes has the better design and functionality in my view.

Google Page Creator basically does just that - provides you with areas in which you add your content, including images, then select from a variety of templates and when you hit the publish button you have a web address and a pretty decent looking site.

All these allow the inclusion of a nice facility to show your Flickr images or fine Flickr badges featuring your or someone else'd collections. . . oh, didn't I mention Flickr?

Lastly, for probably not very long, go to Wink and tag these and a whole lot of other pages you find that suit a particular need and they'll get stored in your own area for quick future reference or, indeed, as a selection for others to view, with a selection of similar sites, tagged by others via Wink, which have similar content but you perhaps missed.

OK, so it wasn't lastly . . . I forgot box.net where anything that's still what is rapidly becoming an 'old-fashioned document and needs to be stored somewhere, can be stored and accessed by whoever you care to give access to - and none of the processes require anything other than a reasonable recent computer and common sense.