Web Week

Five years on: The Herald's online edition is five years old this month and steadily growing in popularity. Visit our Birthday feature to see how far New Zealand's leading online news service has come.

Whispers about jewels: If groups.google.com was able to measure its web traffic this week, it might be the most popular place on the net. The allegations about Prince Charles were floating around newsgroups several weeks ago, showing how the royal court injunctions against British newspapers cannot stop a whispering campaign among ordinary folk on the net. In the forums, wild conspiracy theories - oblivious to injunctions and libel laws - are debated at alt.gossip.royalty and alt.conspiracy.princess-diana. Meanwhile, UK satire site Deadbrain pokes fun at the media furore around the allegations. Another satire site is covering what it terms "the Chuckgate scandal".

The final frontier: As the Voyager 1 spacecraft arrives at the boundary of the solar system and flies into a region of space that has never been explored before, you can follow its journey at the Voyager website. See pictures of last weekend's lunar eclipse at CNN.

Super-computer: A cluster of 1100 Macs stacked like library books in a squat cement building on the outskirts of Virginia Tech's campus next week will be ranked as the world's third-fastest super-computer, at 10.3 trillion operations per second. Read about the project at Terascale Cluster.

Tennessee professor Jack Dongarra, who compiles the annual list of the top 500 super-computers, will list the $500m earth simulator centre super-computer in Japan as the world's fastest - clocking at 33.9 trillion operations per second.

Award-winning duty free: Airport retailer Regency Duty Free has won best website category at the Raven Fox Awards for travel excellence in the Asia Pacific region. It was judged the best duty-free site by representatives of the travel industry for the second year. This country's annual web awards, judged largely by public online votes, will be released tonight.