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If you haven't paid attention, the World Wide Web has been changing dramatically over the past few years. It used to be that if you wanted to create a web site, you either had to learn the basics of HTML, or spend a few hundred dollars on a web development tool. Or hire a designer to put one together for you.

Every time you want to add new content to your web site, you'd have to go back to your tools, add a new page, update all of the site navigation, or pay another fee to your web designer.

Those days are history. Thanks to a variety of different content management systems, you can easily add new content to your web site with no technical knowledge whatsoever.

Joining the ranks of Sharepoint Portal Server, Plone, Mambo, PostNuke, and hundreds of other portal systems, is the open source Metadot Portal Server.

Why pay for something you can get for free? Many reasons:

Interesting article about the open source and free software movements in the MIT Technology Review. While the author generalizes a little bit too much, he makes some interesting arguments.

Can you tell I have posts stacked up to write? Taking a bit today to post some links I've stumbled across in the past few weeks.

Where do you get your information? Seth Godin wrote a very interesting post about The New Digital Divide.

Technical note: here's how to configure a Linux router to handle multiple Internet connections, providing automatic redundency should your primary Internet connection goes down: Linux.com | Using a Linux failover router.

Stumbled across this project management system recently, an open source web-based system called Trac. Developed by Edgewall Software, Trac is a Wiki-based system complete with task management, bug tracking, and milestone tracking.

Maybe Orwell wasn't so far off after all. Microsoft UK has recently started a marketing campaign that is straight out of 1984: Thought Thieves. This would be hilarious if they were joking. They're not.

A ZDNet blog has an interesting post titled The rise of the open sorcerors, summarizing and putting a new spin on a Doc Searls' editorial posted here: Getting Flat, Part 1

Over in the UK, some people are noticing how the Open Source approach might be applied to completely different fields. Geoff Mulgan writes:

At Freelock Computing, we've been using OpenVPN regularly for the last year and a half, both in house and at client sites, and we're huge fans. It's easy to administer, has a variety of security options, and no vulnerabilities have been found to date.