@Mike

"But in the meantime, while walking down the aisle to find those books, I've found two books of British archaeology and one on the history of post-Roman Britain and France that puts the Arthurian legends into historical context."

Yes, there are things in the Internet that, while "efficient", have taken out some of the extras that give the experience (in this case, the library) something more satisfying for me. I usually like to check the book contents before I buy, Amazon will not let me do that (well, it does for 10 pages or so with some books).

However, some of the interesting stuff I remember of web imitating real life seems to have gone forever. Anyone remember how Geocities started? Its appeal for me wasn't the free website (I already had one with my ISP, and another one from High School) but the "Neighborhood" concept it had. You know, like having "neighbors" in your site. Say, I was Area51/2304, and I could check all users in the 2300 "block" of my area. The concept gave a feeling of community, and Geocities actually played a while with this overall concept, which I have not seen in *any* "social network" system.

Then came Yahoo!, they bought the service, and shat all over the thing. Pages became geocities.com/<username> and soon enough, the whole "community" thing ceased to exist. Then again, this is the same Yahoo! that renamed "Konfabulator" to the dull "Yahoo! Widgets".

I doubt Web 2.0 has taken in mind some of this stuff, actually I think Web 2.0 actually has more to do on javascript kiddies jacking off on how great their AJAX is than a real paradigm shift.