As the year 2000 draws to a close it is time to look at what lies in store for the World Wide Web in the year 2001.

The past 12 months have prompted some pessimistic responses to the Internet - not least from the mighty stock markets.

High-profile names going under, predictions of doom from the established media and a lot of hand-wringing over the shape of things to come marked out the end of Y2K.

But The Cyber Space crystal ball has been given a rub down and predicts a happy new year.

After all, more and more people are getting online every day and no doubt Santa's sack delivered plenty more PC's, Internet televisions and phones this week.

Figures published by the magazine for the Internet industry, The Industry Standard (www.thestandard.com/europe) show good cause for optimism.

The magazine's End of Year Report shows that people in Europe spent more than 10 billion hours online during 2,000, that an amazing 15 billion text messages are now sent monthly and every day there are now 100 billion e-mails winging their way across the world.

And we should also look to America to see how things might shape up in the future. According to the report, a total of one per cent of all retail sales in the US were made online in April where more than 100 million people are surfing the web.

Closer to home, the number of visitors at our own website www.thisisthenortheast.co.uk also shows reason for good cheer - increasing by more than three times in December compared to the same time last year.

And websites in the region start up every day - taking their place among the five million new web pages being produced every day, according to NEC Research figures.

So all the evidence spells out a GR8 2001. CU in the New Year.