The Beeb as a great series on its web site called Superpower: Exploring the extraordinary power of the Internet.

Lots of interesting stories about how the Internet can and does affect society.

For example, Jiyar Gol looked at how Iraqis are using the Internet to rebuild their country and heal ethnic and religious wounds. (And by the way, I have not yet seen a similar story from any of the US media outlets.)

Another is on Afghan bloggers.

But the stuff with a really great “geek factor” are the interactive sites.

• Top 100 Web Sites in the World
• Web Rich List
• The growth of Internet use in the past 10 years

And for those who need a tutorial on how the Internet works, there is this. The cool part about this link is the counters of how many people are using the Internet that day, how many e-mails have been sent, how many Google searches and how many blog postings occurred.

Looking at the use of the Internet to get news is also interesting.

The chart represents the number and percentage of users accessing those sites based on the Nielson company monitoring system.

For example, 92.9 million people were using Fox Interactive (different from Fox News) at the time I lifted this chart, represent 1.96% of the Internet users. (Fox News drew 18 million or 0.38%.)

CNN drew 44.4 million for 0.94%, BBC had 35 million for 0.74% of online users, and the New York Times and Globo of Brazil each drew 0.49% of Internet users.

BTW, ESPN drew 26.6 million people for 0.56% of those using the Internet.

Anyway, the BBC series shows the influence and power of the Internet. It is an interesting section to visit at the BBC site. And it is too bad that only places like WIRED tend to do these kinds of stories in an ongoing basis in the American media landscape.