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From Rupert Murdoch's purchase of MySpace to Google's recent high-profile acquisition of YouTube, all the signs are there that a new bubble is inflating, this time fuelled by online communities rather than mere dotcoms. One of the telltale signs is a proliferation of horrible new jargon, designed to impress and flummox the punters who have to pay for it all. "Web 2.0" is immensely irritating (it means a new web that's created by its users, a bit like graffiti but with adverts), but grimmest of all has to be "VC2", which stands for "viewer created content" and means more or less the same thing.

Nevertheless, I'm not entirely immune to this feeling in the air that the web is on the move again, so I shook off my blanket of indolence and updated my own website for the first time in several years. My site was originally constructed in NetObjects Fusion, which seemed like a good idea at the time, and may well have been. However, one component of the site was a database of back-issues of this column, and Fusion made such a pig's ear of updating this that I had to hand-code all the additions. Eventually I automated the process using batch scripts, but it was still sufficiently tedious that I did it less and less often.

This time round, I took a much simpler route. First, I peeked into the horrendously profligate HTML that Fusion had generated - hundreds of identical sequences everywhere you looked - and found that I could prune it to about one-tenth of its size.

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I loaded the remnants into Microsoft Word and redesigned it there (frankly, the site doesn't mean enough to me to warrant splashing out on Dreamweaver). Then it occurred to me that there's a perfectly good database of Idealog, with proper search facilities, on the PC Pro site, so I junked that section completely and replaced it with a single link. The same was true of my illustrations, which are now all on my Flickr site, so I replaced that with a link too.

I've written before about how much I enjoy using Flickr, but recently I created YouTube and MySpace accounts as part of a research project I'm doing for Dennis Publishing. Before you start sniggering, I can tell you that they contain no content beyond my name and mugshot, because I fit into both about as well as a turd fits into a jacuzzi. My first MySpace "friend" was into Death Metal and posed for pictures dressed as an intergalactic gladiator in crotchless tights. I stared at my blank page and slowly started to type "I'm 61 years old, into Bartok, Mingus and Hank Williams..." before my fingers refused to continue. Back in June, The Guardian's acerbic and occasionally hilarious critic Charlie Brooker admitted that at 35 he's too old for MySpace, and I have a quarter of a century on him.

As I created that link from my own site to Flickr, though, a profound truth was suddenly revealed to me. Wonderful as the World Wide Web is - and I yield to no man in my admiration for Tim Berners-Lee's great invention - it's just too much like hard work for people like me to maintain isolated websites. These community sites actually represent a partitioning of the web into smaller spaces, within which everyone has similar interests, and maintaining a personal page in one of these is very much easier than building and maintaining a website.

What's more, they all contain mechanisms for getting your stuff looked at by other people that are far quicker, more effective and less tedious than trying to improve your site's ranking in Google, which has now become almost impossible for private citizens.