BUSINESSES have traditionally been the early large-scale adopters of new technologies due in part to having the ability to afford them and part because they strive to use anything that makes a business more efficient.

Telegrams, telephones, fax machines, mobile phones, laptops, all had business people as the first users with the general consumer market following years or decades later, as prices started to drop. Even today the high-end mobile phones are marketed to businesses and gadget freaks with moderately large credit limits.

With considerable research and development going into software and web services in the past five years, new usage patterns are emerging which are showing that early and first adopters of technologies are technologists, followed quickly by general consumers and then eventually businesses.

This is what happened with blogs. First the tech people started using them, then followed the diarists and pet lovers, with the result that the stereotypical image of a blogger is now someone in their pyjamas talking about their hamster Boris McTwitch.

It is only recently that businesses have started to use blogs after seeing the possibilities shown by the early adopters.

Now dozens of more web services are allowing people to share their personal lives with the world.

An abundance of communications channels are now ready and willing to share your life with the world.

Some of these new services have been called vanity or ego services as they allow someone to share whatever is on their mind or on their camera with the rest of the world in the easiest way imaginable.

One such service is Twitter. Twitter, as previously mentioned in this column, allows you to make your text messages public and to put them on a website.

Other vanity services exist such as Kyte. tv and UStream. tv which allow people to upload their webcam or videocamera videos live to the web and automatically put them on mySpace, blogs and websites or deliver them via email to friends and family.

The outside broadcast unit has gone from a camera team, a truck and a satellite dish to just one person with a videocamera connected to a wireless data card. Forget quality control, forget time delays, forget editing and standards. This is Me Me Me TV and it is driving some purists crazy.

As more and more of these services are launched and used by the general populace, a large proportion of people are pushing back and getting vocal about all the "rubbish" that they see flowing on to the web.

Comparisons are made to reality shows like Big Brother. Twitter gets a daily hammering from critics who say they don't want to know what breakfast cereal someone ate this morning and where they are on the bus route at this very second.

Many people give out about the content-lacking fluff being streamed from these sites but there is obviously a market for it, since the viewing figures for the 24-hour Big Brother channel are quite healthy during the show's run.

Now an Irish web service has joined the fray. MySay allows people to phone into the MySay. com website and leave a voicemail.

There are special local numbers for many countries, including Ireland. Friends and family can dial in and listen to the message or the account owner can make the voicemail public and have the message played on the mySay. com website as well as on blogs and mySpace profiles via a widget the company has created.

For now most messages are nervous, quick messages with people umming and aahing and talking about nothing of consequence.

As mySay grows in usage, it too could be prone to criticisms of the overpersonalisation of the web.

However, all of these criticisms, many of which are accurate, forget that the allowing of all of these people in to your system is a very cheap way of building an audience and a fantastic way of getting this audience to find all the sharp bits and rattles in the service which can be ironed out before offering a premium version for businesses.

Consumers can accept downtime and bugs, businesses expect more.

There is also the possibility that the underlying technology can be reused for another system once the technology has been stablised.

This is what happened with Skype, which was built on top of technology the company used to build a file-sharing network.

Skype was sold to eBay in 2005 for in excess of $2.5billion.

So while cultural guardians in smoking jackets might choke on their tea and scones, the businesses building the new communication infrastructures can go skiing down the mountains of cash they acquired in allowing people to get personal. I know which route I'd choose.

LABELLING THE INTERNET THE Guardian recently ran an attack piece in their publication alluding to the fact that this columnist was against something called content labels. Content labels are labels for websites, along the same line as the labels you see on bags of peanuts saying "Warning contains traces of nuts". The misinformed Guardian should have realised I was against a blogger code of conduct, a set of elitist rules that tell bloggers how to act and react online.

The Internet is a place where people are allowed to say what they want in a manner that they want, while respecting the law. For many around the world, it is the only place they can do this. The Guardian expressed utter distaste that my reaction to the code was quite coarse. Do the Guardian prefer we all live in North Korea?