Many individuals and some companies and groups use web logs or blogs which are largely used as easily updatable online diaries. Some commercial organisations encourage staff to fill them with advice on their areas of specialization in the hope that visitors will be impressed by the expert knowledge and free information and be attracted to the corporation as a result. One example of this practice is Microsoft whose product developers publish their personal blogs in order to pique the publics interest in their work.

Collections of personal web pages published by large service providers remain popular and have become increasingly sophisticated. Whereas operations such as Angelfire and GeoCities have existed since the early days of the Web newer offerings from for example Facebook and MySpace currently have large followings. These operations often brand themselves as social network services rather than simply as web page hosts.

Advertising on popular web pages can be lucrative and ecommerce or the sale of products and services directly via the Web continues to grow.

In the early days web pages were usually created as sets of complete and isolated HTML text files stored on a web server. More recently websites are more often created using content management system CMS or wiki software with initially very little content. Contributors to these systems who may be paid staff members of a club or other organisation or members of the public fill underlying databases with content using ing pages designed for that purpose while casual visitors view and read this content in its final HTML form. There may or may not be orial approval and security systems built into the process of taking newly entered content and making it available to the target visitors.

Remote access

Further information Remote access

The Internet allows computer users to connect to other computers and information stores easily wherever they may be across the world. They may do this with or without the use of security authentication and encryption technologies depending on the requirements.

This is encouraging new ways of working from home collaboration and information sharing in many industries. An accountant sitting at home can audit the books of a company based in another country on a server situated in a third country that is remotely maintained by IT specialists in a fourth. These accounts could have been created by homeworking bookkeepers in other remote locations based on information emailed to them from offices all over the world. Some of these things were possible before the widespread use of the Internet but the cost of private leased lines would have made many of them infeasible in practice.