Special News Report on Returning the Net to Social Roots

Over the past week, CNET News.com has been publishing various instalments in its special report entitled Taking Back the Web: New generation, technologies return Net to social roots.

The series explores how the rise of technologies like blogs and tagging are "fulfilling some of the utopian objectives espoused in the early days of the Internet, when it was hoped that the Web would empower the individual and dismantle communication barriers across the globe. Many of those altruistic goals were vastly overshadowed by mass commercialization. But, in the years since the dot-com meltdown, they've been resurrected with a new generation of digerati who are developing and exploiting the social aspects of the medium. "

The series covers mass culture and entertainment, wikis, tagging, virtual maps and the emergence of the "millenial" generation.