I ran across an amazing tidbit about the Internet the other day.
I found it on the Alta Vista site. Alta Vista is Digital Equipment Corp.'s (DEC) search engine, which began as a research project just last year to figure out how big the World Wide Web is.
To accomplish this, DEC took a couple of its most powerful computers and set them to the task of traveling the Web and recording what they found. The first expedition, finished in late 1995, found 20 million Web pages.
Now the tidbit: As of this month, Alta Vista has found 30 million Web pages, containing 15 billion words.
Pretty amazing, considering that the Web was dreamed up in 1990.
At this growth rate, the Web will soon contain more information than any of the world's greatest libraries. That's quantity, not quality - as any veteran Web surfer knows, there's a lot of garbage out there.
What's driving this explosion? Simple economic forces. If the 1990s have truly ushered in the ''Information Age,'' with information a more precious commodity than wheat futures or pork bellies, then the Web is the information factory. It's the cheapest publishing medium in history.
Develop your own site
Joining this revolution by creating your own home page is surprisingly easy. Most online services and Internet service providers will post your personal pages for free or for a nominal charge to your monthly bill. Plus everything you need to know to create the page is right there on the Web, for free.
Web pages are created with hypertext markup language (HTML), which many people call ''computer programming.'' HTML isn't programming at all, but a simple set of codes to format text.
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications has an excellent primer on HTML (http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/Internet/WWW/HTMLPrimer.html).
If that last URL is a mouthful, you can find that link and many more on Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com/Computers and Internet/Software/Data Formats/HTML/Guides and Tutorials/). Or just search Yahoo! for ''HTML guides.''
There are three flavors of HTML: 1, 2 and 3. Version 2 is the latest in wide use; version 3 is still in testing. Version 1 is the easiest, and all will work.
Before you start creating your own Web page, you should spend several hours surfing the Web, collecting ideas. When you find a page you like, some browsers (such as the ubiquitous Netscape) will allow you to view and save the ''source code.'' There's nothing illegal in borrowing snippets of other sites' HTML code.
You can also save and reuse many graphics. Any surfer notices that many of the little icons and pictures on sites look the same. This isn't coincidence - web designers often borrow from each other. Examples: colored dots or triangles used as ''bullets,'' background patterns, ''under construction'' signs, cute icons.
A little HTML knowledge and a few borrowed graphics are enough to start you off as a Web publisher.
But is it worth a visit?
Now comes the hard part: Creating a good Web site.
A good Web site isn't glitzy, it has content. That means you must find something worthwhile to publish. You can publish your resume, or pictures of your cat or kids, or the statistics of all your favorite baseball players and join the growing ranks of inane Web sites.
It helps to have an interest. Many personal sites contain eclectic compilations of ''kool sites,'' but Canadian Jenni A. Mott Merrifield turned her love of strawberries into ''The Strawberry JAMM Page,'' which contains dozens of links to strawberry information and recipes (http://vanbc.whimsey.com/~jmott). Or 16-year-old Jay Barker who has created a sophisticated Web site that rates national Internet service providers (http://www.accessone.com/~shwaap/onlinec/index.html).
There are thousands of other top quality personal Web sites, many of which have been honored with mentions on rating services such as the Point Survey (http://www.pointcom.com) or the Magellan Internet Guide (http://www.mckinley.com).
What distinguishes these super-sites is simple: They are worth a visit. They contain information - or a compilation of links - that is interesting and valuable and can't be found anywhere else on the Web.
E-mail Charles Brewer with questions, comments and suggestions at cbrewer@enquirer.com.