I remember sitting in a student lounge at the University of Richmond in the early 1990s, reading a one-paragraph Newsweek item about how the Internet was expected to become much more popular with the coming introduction of an interface that made it easier to see graphics and images online. It was called the "World Wide Web."

I can't recall where that fell on the cyberspace evolution timeline. I'm pretty sure the word "cyberspace'' was still common. Now it sounds dated. Remember the "Information Superhighway?" We should have known that wasn't long for this world: even "superhighway" sounded like something you'd hear in the 50s. "Did you hear they're building a highway with FOUR lanes?! It's a SUPER-highway."

But I seem to have missed a major online development. When did we stop having to use "www" when typing in web addresses? I sort of noticed that only stodgy newspapers still include "www" when writing about websites. And most of us have dropped "www" from our vocabulary - it's amazon.com and godaddy.com, etc. But am I the only one still typing it in to my browser window?

Maybe I'm wrong, but the no-www rule seems to apply to every web address I try -- including (of course) barguments.com and barguments.blogspot.com.

It's sort of a shocking development -- as if, you one day realized you don't have to dial "1" anymore when calling long-distance. (Long distance, adj., a phrase used in the parlance of "land line" telephones, in which users are charged more for placing phone calls to areas outside their immediate location. The phrase lost meaning with the advent of celluar communication.)