Timika Mitchell was living in the Salvation Army shelter in Austin, Tex., when she developed her first home page on the World Wide Web. A homeless person with an Internet home page may seem to represent a scrambling of priorities. But for Mitchell-an unmarried mother of two-her home page is a source of pride and, she hopes, an entry point into the high-tech economy. Thanks in part to her abilities to create on the Web, this tall, talkative, self-directed young African-American woman landed a job with Time Warner, moved into her own apartment-and created a second Web page, where she plans to publish her poetry.

Austin boasts one of the highest per capita rates of Internet use in the world and has recently been cited as the nation's fastest growing job market. On the west side of town lies one of the world's leading high-tech centers, with major semiconductor manufacturing firms, a booming new media industry, and tens of thousands of computer professionals. But Mitchell lives in East Austin-a poverty zone segregated from the rest of Austin by an interstate highway. In her neighborhood, known as the 11th and 12th Streets Corridor, the median annual income is $6,000 per year. The area suffers from high unemployment, poor schools, drugs, gangs, and violence.