A handy reminder today of the incredible potential for both bad and good represented by the Internet.

The good:
ConceptShare, a new online collaboration tool for graphic designers to work collaboratively, viewing and marking up designs online. A rare example of excellent use of Flash to do something genuinely useful.

The bad:
Stanford University says that if we were designing the Internet today we wouldn’t start from here.

We believe that the current Internet has significant deficiencies that need to be solved before it can become a unified global communication infrastructure. Further, we believe the Internet’s shortcomings will not be resolved by the conventional incremental and ‘backward-compatible’ style of academic and industrial networking research.

The ugly: new exploits using Javascript inserted on unsuspecting third-party websites to at best show unsolicited adverts and at worst download and install malware on Windows computers. An interesting post from Ethan Zuckerman explains, and proves the point that if you accept input from users and display it on your website for others to see, you should filter it for unwanted HTML and script tags first! Interesting that Google is now detecting these exploits and warning site visitors.

Hat-tip for pointers to all of these to John Naughton’s eclectic Memex.