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A few years ago, the larger ISPs tried to provide content along with internet access in a concept referred to as the "walled garden". These failed miserably because the provided content was so naff, and users made it perfectly clear that all they wanted from their ISP was TCP/IP on the end of an Ethernet cable, and perhaps some effective spam filtering. But there's a sense in which communities such

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as Flickr and MySpace are walled gardens revisited, only this time planted and tended by the users themselves.

Perhaps a better metaphor is that they're walled cities rather than gardens. The web is passing from its age of primitive cultivation, where everyone tends their own little plots, into urbanism. MySpace and YouTube are cities to which people flock from the surrounding countryside. These cities are owned by great feudal lords such as Murdoch and the Google founders, but in the finest liberal tradition they allow citizens to do pretty much what they wish, while plotting ways to take some of their money in taxes.

Outside the city walls there are only small towns, which will either be swallowed by the nearest city or grow to rival it and go to war, in the manner of the hilltowns of renaissance Italy. In this spirit I'd like to be a latter-day Machiavelli, a hired gun who roams between the great lords, offering sage advice and stirring things wherever possible.