The thing is, you need to look out for the pattern of a real review as opposed to the one someone’s churned out for the sake of a few pence (or cents, in Belkin’s case) or – in the case of book reviews on Amazon – where the author, publisher or friend of either has posted the review themselves.

Anyway, to fight back against the inevitable backlash I thought I’d quickly write about ten brilliant things the internet has done.

10. Giving the public a voice

The internet has been the ultimate democratiser (a new word I’ll be sending to the Oxford dictionary folks soon), with the public being given a voice via everything from user reviews on Amazon (despite the shambles mentioned above) to blog sites that have the power to affect decisions. Remember what life was like back in 1994?

9. Spread BBC radio across the globe

I was listening to Radio 6 Music this morning, and was once again struck by how absolutely fantastic it is. Quite aside from the quality of the music and the eclectic guests (this morning, a master cooper from Wadsworth Brewery was explaining why he was looking for an apprentice), the DJs are actually there to talk about music rather than just inflate their own egos. And now everyone can listen to Radio 6 Music – not to mention Radio 4 – wherever they are in the world, so long as they have an internet connection.

8. Facebook

I’m currently in my loving Facebook phase, having passed through the Barrier Of Irritation  - thanks in part to sage advice from Lise (thanks Lise) about fiddling around with the settings to get rid of the biggest reminder/post spam irritants. And now it’s become a source of entertainment, whether via ridiculous comments by friends and colleagues or my own not-so-secret addiction to Facebook Scrabble, and very occasionally information too.

7. Built communities

Whatever your interest, be it building bicycle wheels or following Stargate Atlantis, there will be a community you can join to share stories, successes and tips. Compare that to the pre-internet world, where if there weren’t already a number of like-minded souls in your town – and one of them had the gumption to set up a  club – then you were alone.

6. Email

Something so ubiquitous it’s now simply annoying. But who’d go back to paper mail?

5. Created online gaming

As it happens I’m no great fan of online gaming – unless you count the Scrabble I mentioned earlier – but even I can see the mass appeal of playing against a worldful of opponents rather than just a couple of friends or (more likely) yourself.

4. Ended pub arguments

Although ending pub arguments in itself is arguably not a great thing, thanks to Wikipedia (keep that salt handy) and just the whole resource that is the web, you can now get hold of information in a trice. In the olden days, we needed to buy the Encylopedia Britannica.

3. You can’t lose your documents

Thanks to excellent online backup services such as Carbonite and Mozy you now have to try very hard to actually lose documents, while the likes of Dropbox and Live Mesh have solved the tiresome problem of sharing documents between computers that aren’t on a network. No more burning to CD, no more searching through piles of miscellaneous media to find vital files. Hurrah!

2. Made software free

Despite the best efforts of Adobe, Microsoft and Symantec, there’s absolutely no need to pay for software any more. The internet has made it easier than ever to co-develop open-source software, and we’ve also seen the advent of free software as a marketing tool – so get anti-virus cover for free, but expect nag screens for the full internet security suite. And to top all that, the lovely people at Google have made brilliant software such as SketchUp free as well.

1. Means I never need go shopping again

But my all-time favourite thing about the internet is that it means I never need go shopping again. For example, I bought two pairs of shoes online last night. And there really isn’t anything you can’t buy: contact lenses, books, holidays, organic vegetable boxes, music… it’s little wonder that Woolworths, Zavvi and numerous other high-street names are finding life tough.

There’s something in the air. In fact, look closely and you can see it. Up there, white and fluffy, and apparently full of exciting new technology. You see, all the best new technologies are moving to the cloud, and if you haven’t moved your data to the cloud yet… well, heaven forfend.

I’ve just deleted filed two press releases in the space of two minutes that sell themselves on the back of cloud computing. The first was from respected backup specialists EMC: “EMC has today announced its first major step into cloud computing as EMC Mozy and Lenovo will now offer unlimited online backup for SMBs” to quote the first line – head to Lenovo’s Protect My Data site for details.

The second is from F-Secure, which has just launched Wellbeing 2009, its new and trendier name for its suite of security products: Internet Security 2009, Anti-Virus 2009 and Home Server Security 2009.

Apparently, with this release “F-Secure is the only anti-virus vendor to have an ‘in the cloud’ real-time protection network deployed globally”.

Now I don’t dispute for a second the marvellousness of both these new sets of technologies, but the brutal reality is that the first has very little to back up its cloud claims. So far as I can see, it’s another online backup service (and don’t get me wrong, because Mozy is among the best).

This is in stark contrast to the F-Secure press release, where the cloud computing tag is completely justified. The central idea is that any PCs protected with F-Secure take a “fingerprint” of any files that are suspected of being malicious.

F-Secure’s ferocious fleet of servers then analyse the file and if it’s suspicious they’ll feed that information to all the other PCs protected by F-Secure’s technology (DeepGuard, to give it its marketing spin).

The problem is, cloud computing is just going to become another marketing term used without any great thought to describe any service delivered over the internet. And in the end, all that will happen is that people will get confused and ignore it.

Which is a shame, as real cloud computing is – as that F-Secure example shows – a very powerful thing.