New web services create a virtual social "cocoon"

• By the millions, they're gathering and disseminating their own news with blogs and podcasts, creating customized article and photo feeds from their favorite sites and even annotating them with helpful text tags that others can search for on the Web site del.icio.us.
• Ditto at Cyworld, which claims almost a third of South Korea's 48 million people as members.
• As Mayfield noted in a recent blog post, "They Google (GOOG), Flickr, blog, contribute to Wikipedia, Socialtext it, Meetup, post, subscribe, feed, annotate, and above all share.
• Harnessing Change This potent new do-it-yourself trend is shaking up a raft of industries, from software and telecommunications to media, marketing, and entertainment.
• In the process, they're challenging the way media organizations cover and distribute news and entertainment, the way advertisers target pitches at them, and the way tech companies design and sell their products and services.
• The new imperatives of Web 2.0, as many call it, will present challenges not only for Web giants such as eBay (EBAY), Yahoo, and Google but for some of mainstream tech's biggest leaders as well.
• That's because these new Web services are rapidly erasing the line between the Web and desktop software.
• "Applications are no longer software artifacts," notes Net pioneer Tim O'Reilly, CEO of tech publisher O'Reilly Media Inc. "They're ongoing services."
• The nimblest ones are already harnessing their customers' expertise, open source software-style.
• If you can use the Web to find exactly the service, article, video, or podcast you want -- and maybe even create it yourself, or with friends -- who needs networks or newspapers or (gulp) magazines?
• Says Siva Kumar, president of the shopping search engine FatLens: "Where one site starts and another ends will increasingly be seamless."