> I am reading "www" sort of phonetically

That's what I suggested Bean, it's more fun than useful though.
Flatlander, it's true that most of the time one can leave the www out and you'll still be understood, but some addy's do in fact have a different DNS root and therefore start with something else besides www (e.g. www2.sitename.com; ftp.site.com; mp3.grin.net etc.)
I agree that for common sites it should/could be omitted when spoken, not to mention the http://, although there are exceptions for this too (e.g. https://, i.e. secure http).

We could, of course do without with the silly protocol and use IP addresses which they resolve to....
'Has anyone visited that great new site: 207.46.131.91 lately'.
No, that's not going to work, huh.