How-might this manifest itself? Heylighen speculates that it might turn the Internet into a self-aware network that constantly strives to become better at what it does, reorganizing itself and filling gaps in its own knowledge and abilities.

　　If it is not already semiconscious, we could do various things to help wake it up, such as requiring the net to monitor its own knowledge gaps and do something about them. It shouldn’t be something to fear, says Goertzel;" The outlook for humanity is probably better in the case that an emergent, coherent and purposeful Internet mind develops. "

　　Heylighen agrees, but warns that we might find it a little disappointing. " We probably would not notice a whole lot of a difference, initially, "he says.

　　And when might this begin? According to Heylighen, it all depends on Internet fashion trends. If the effort that has gone into developing social networking sites goes into developing Internet consciousness, it could happen within a decade, he says.

　　How Big Is the Net?

　　Recent estimates suggest that well over1 billion people rely on computers to access the Internet. Yet there are also a billion or so other people who use cellphones to visit cyberspace, making them as much a part of the online community as someone surfing from a PC.

　　That the Internet is vast is undoubted. In July 2008, web surfers were introduced

　　Cuil. com, billed by its designers as "the world's biggest search engine". It indexed an impressive 120 billion pages, but shortly before its launch Google announced that its systems had registered a trillion unique pages.

　　Even this might represent a fraction of what is out there. Some estimates suggest that there could be hundreds of times more information stored on the Internet than Google or Cuil have so far indexed.

　　One thing's for sure: the Internet and its contents will continue to grow rapidly. According to Google, several billion web pages are added each day. And in the minute it has taken you to read this, the total has leapt by about 700,000.Index that!

　　Where Are the Net's Dark Corners?

　　If your emails mysteriously disappear, or your favorite website is suddenly unobtainable, you might have run into one "black hole". Though nowhere near as destructive as their cosmological(宇宙論的) cousins, information black holes can create all kinds of problems for surfers. Essentially they are points on the network at which data packets simply disappear due to broken connections, say, or misconfigured routers---devices that maintain lists of addresses and which help direct Internet traffic. A team including computer scientist Ethan Katz-Bassett at the University of Washington in Seattle has detected almost 1. 5 million black holes since it began looking in 2007. The majority persist for over 2 hours, he says. Unfortunately it is tough to predict where they will appear next, so it's hard for the average surfer to avoid them.

　　Far easier to avoid are a kind of online chat-room called Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels. Though the majority are legitimate, a few IRC channels have a very dark reputation, and are run as open markets for stolen goods. One 2007 survey found $37 million worth of illegal stuff in IRC channels, including 80,000 credit card numbers and bank account details. And if that is not bad enough, some of these chat-rooms are also used by hackers to send commands to their networks of evil software bots, or botnets. When a PC is infected by a virus or evil software it may be hijacked and used as part of a botnet to launch spam or cyber-attacks elsewhere.