Royal presence on the Web

Can you make an anorak out of ermine? And what does the Queen think is cool? The answers may be revealed next week when the Queen gets her own site on the World Wide Web. She will join the ranks of caffeine- fuelled American adolescents with 150 pages of information about royal topics, from finance to descriptions of the palaces and the private estates.

Buckingham Palace said yesterday that the site's World Wide Web address will not be revealed until it is officially launched on Thursday. "In the modern day and age, if there's a Web out there the Queen should be on it," said a spokeswoman. "We don't all use quill pens here, you know - we're on computers too." She would not say whether the site will contain "hot links" to other Web addresses - a popular way of pointing surfers to "cool" sites.

Charles Arthur