We've Come a Long Way, Baby
Top 10s in Technology Stories, Gaming, and Web Sites
By Sarah Hepola, Fri., Jan. 7, 2000
It was a fitting capstone to a century whose biggest stories involved the evolution of technology -- and its effect on entertainment, warfare, business, and communication. With that in mind, Jon Lebkowsky has supplemented our regular top 10 lists with a roundup of the century's most important communications media -- a list that, in essence, charts the evolution of communication throughout the 20th century. In his "best of the decade" list, he takes a look at how the latter half of that list -- from Internet access to broadband -- has changed the Nineties and played a hand in the most compelling stories of this past year. A look at Marcel Meyer's various top 10s for gaming shows how much the intelligence and style of video, console, and computer games have changed over the industry's comparatively brief 20-year lifespan. And I'd like to bring your attention to some of the local and national Web sites which continue to forge new paths along which we can inform and entertain ourselves, do business, or communicate with others. They are a mix of the Web sites we have used most in this decade and the ones we will continue to hear about in the next. All of them change and challenge our lives -- not only the way we live in our world, but the way we think about it.