The internet has been evolving into three dimensions for years without most people noticing. The change has been confined to niche activities, even though some–such as World of Warcraft or Second Life–are big niches. Now there is a worldwide move to bring the 3D web to a mass market, led by the building of “virtual” cities where avatars can walk, shop, club or whatever with links to “real life” activities.

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Earlier this year, games publisher Midway collapsed, plunging the staff of its Newcastle studio into a desperate struggle to find a buyer. They failed. This is what happened next…

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Its 17 declarations on the future of journalism in the age of the internet have been discussed worldwide.

As soon as it came out, it was spread all over the net: 15 German journalists and bloggers wrote an “Internet Manifesto” on how journalism works today. Shortly after it was announced online, their server went offline. The reaction was overwhelming.

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From uncles wearing skinny jeans to mothers investing in ra-ra skirts and fathers nodding awkwardly along to the latest grime record, the older generation has long known that the surest way to kill a youth trend is to adopt it as its own. The cyberworld, it seems, is no exception.

The proliferation of parents and teachers trawling the pages of Facebook trying to poke old schoolfriends and lovers, and traversing the outer reaches of MySpace is causing an adolescent exodus from the social networking sites, according to research from the media regulator Ofcom.

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Search is the beginning and the end of the internet. Before search, there was the idea of an organised, hierarchical internet, set up along the lines of the Dewey Decimal system.

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As someone who produces copyrighted content, I suppose I should be cheering at the Pirate Bay verdict. Or perhaps, as someone who wants to get the latest episodes of my favourite show quickly, I should be angry about it.

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I have to say that my initial reaction to Google (GOOG) Labs News Timeline feature was meh. I don’t think it’s as elegant as Marcos Weskamp and Dan Albritton’s newsmap, which has been around since 2004.

However, as Edward N. Albro points out at PCWorld, there are some useful features such as the ability to see the news by decade. It really shows how news goes from being the first draft of history to become history.

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Another weekend goes by and another old school newspaper guy writes a long screed condemning Google (GOOG) as a menace hellbent on destroying all that is good and right in the news business. This one, by Henry Porter in The Guardian, is particularly amusing due to the logical inconsistencies within.

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Professional journalists in the age of the Internet look as doomed as blacksmiths in the age of the combustion engine. Local newspapers are disappearing. National newspapers and commercial TV stations are seeing the Web take their advertisers.

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Yesterday, as Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington was leaving the DLD conference venue in Munich, one of the conference attendees walked up to him and spat in his face. I’ll say that again. One of the attendees. Walked up to him. And spat. In. His. Face. And then without a word, the attacker turned on his patent leather heel and vanished back into the crowd.

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My, my, Wired magazine’s looking thin these days. Only a month or so ago I remember looking at a big fat dollop of paper, all health and bouncy. Today, however, when I went to get my post, my first thought went something along the lines of “Wow, this feels really lightweight.”

You might almost say it was gaunt.

The next thing that popped into my brain was “why?”

Knowing the way the magazine industry works, with lead times of around three or four months, I had a little theory: The January issue of Wired was put together in September or October–in other words, after the financial crisis. Was it the victim of the credit crunch?

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U.K. paper The Guardian this morning reports that Orange, the mobile phone operator owned by France Telecom, is considering yanking Research in Motion’s (RIMM) BlackBerry Bold from its handset lineup–presumably in the U.K. market–because of what the paper calls persistent software errors.

The curious fact of the article is that it cites no one–it is “understood,” in the passive voice, that the device will be discontinued by Orange. And the article is actually more about the BlackBerry Storm than the Bold.

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A new generation of designers and developers is putting the social element back into videogames, using online networks such as Facebook as platforms to turn people from across the world into poker aces, boffins and the proud and sometimes obsessive owners of virtual pets.

These new games give people the ability to play with their friends rather than strangers, which has sent usage through the roof.

Facebook is already seeing over two billion minutes of game play a month, and the longer people stay online the more chance the game’s developer and the network itself have to make money out of them, most obviously through advertising.

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In the heyday of rock music, no stadium gig was complete without a slow number that prompted the crowd to hold aloft their cigarette lighters to create hundreds of flickering points of light. Now the same effect is created by hundreds of people holding up their mobile phones as the audience takes photo after photo to prove they were there.

This is most likely to occur in the U.K. as the British use their mobile phone as a camera more than anyone else. They are also among the world’s fastest adopters of social-networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo, posting the subsequent photos or at least updating their status to relate how great the gig was, as a way of keeping in touch with an ever-expanding and ephemeral collection of “friends.”

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Most people still look askance if you admit to using virtual worlds where you move around with an avatar or 3-D version of yourself. It recalls the technophobic reactions in the early days of the Internet. But attitudes may now change for two reasons. First, children are piling into their own virtual worlds, so their parents can get a glimpse of what it is all about. And second, a huger user base is being created, one that is accustomed to virtual worlds and is ready to trade up to more sophisticated ones as they grow older.

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