SAN FRANCISCO: Websites such as YouTube and Second Life won superstar status in 2006, helping to transform the Internet from a window on the world into a stage on which people play out their lives and dreams.

Online search powerhouse Google eagerly closed a 1.65-billion-dollar deal to snap up YouTube, a hot website at which users share video clips ranging from bedroom confessions, cute animals and backyard antics to television segments.

The teen-oriented website MySpace sought to break into the China market while also adding a service that enabled wannabe musical sensations to peddle their songs from virtual storefronts on their personal profile pages.

Yahoo bought the Bix website that provided an online forum for contests in which amateur singers, dancers, comedians, photographers and trivia buffs or anyone else claiming talent could compete for prizes and global attention.

Meanwhile, the population soared in the virtual world Second Life, where people exist in the form of graphic "avatars" constructed to fulfill fantasies that include gender-shifting, brash styles and turning into animals.

Second Life has its own money and an economy that mirrors the real world right down to owning property, having jobs, and socializing in dance clubs.

Late this year, weblog tracking website Technorati said it had indexed more than 50 million of the online pages for editorializing ideas, opinions, news, rants or rambling.

"You see more people getting involved in producing content rather than being passive consumers," said Coye Cheshire, an assistant professor specializing in Internet studies at the University of California at Berkeley.

"YouTube, MySpace, FaceBook and the content growth at Wikipedia have all been user driven. People are not just using the Internet to retrieve information, but to expose others to the media they create."

Wikipedia was created as an online encyclopedia edited and refined by website visitors, who are free in most cases to modify entries as they wish.

"In terms of who is at the helm, there is no driver," Cheshire said. "It is a reciprocal process between technology and people's needs, wants, desires and serendipity as well."

(China Daily 12/07/2006 page14)