2006 - the year in which YouTube became culturally ubiquitous, Flash video became the de facto Internet video standard of the Web, Microsoft beta-launched Vista, and the Wii entered our lives - was also memorable for one or two other, real-world events such as the hanging of Saddam Hussein, prompting the obvious question: is the progress of i-Technology front-runners like Google and eBay more, or less, important than the trial and execution of Saddam?
The difficulty of a working life spent examining and indeed celebrating the vibrant and energetic world of Internet technologies (i-Technology) is that there is always a risk of allowing the real - as opposed to the virtual - world to slide into relative insignificance. E-mails risk seeming more important than reality, and the birth of mere Web sites takes on the gravity of much more substantive and world-changing events.
So how do we gauge the relative importance of a war criminal's extinction and a Web site's birth? What, in short, matters most: the world of geopolitics, wars and globalization, or the far more peaceful, equally globalized world of the Internet?
It is a problem set that can be addressed in different ways. In the case of Bill Gates, for example, he has committed greater sums of money made through i-Technology than any man alive (specifically, an endowment fund now worth US $24 billion) to bringing innovations in health and learning to the global community, a cause that has attracted in addition the substantial fortune of Warren Buffett - who gave the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation 85% of his fortune.
But what of the rest of us, those of us with a current net worth less than $53 billion and a 2006 salary plus bonus of $966,667? Should we just rejoice that 2006 has seen the liveliest array of Web 2.0 start-ups since the bursting of the Silicon Bubble? Or should we take more interest in the prospects for global peace, or lack of it, in a Real World that doesn't necessarily reflect the same sense of order and indeed hope as the World Wide Web?
SYS-CON will enlist the collective wisdom of its stakeholders - editors and commentators, columnists and analysts, developers and managers - and report back. Watch this space!
In the meantime, a very Happy New Year from all of us to all of you!
Executing Hussein is an incredible blunder in a series of major blunders in Iraq. We had one of the major players on the Middle East in our hands- a player who could have told his side of the sad sorry 40 year history and we allowed the Iraqis to kill him for local politics and to shut him up before he went on trial and tell about how the US was involved. Yes a major blunder by an adimistration governed by a series of blunders. By the way Google, YouTube, Ebay and the rest will fundamentally remake the Middle East in ways Hussein could not.
The good thing about the so called bubble is that Web 2.0 sites will now be able to survive for much much longer than going it themselves. How long could YouTube and Flickr really have kept up the bandwidth costs when they are serving larger and larger content?
#1
inothernews commented on 30 Dec 2006
The purchase price of YouTube--and rumors of other corporate buyouts of popular sites like Digg--helped fuel a discussion of whether there is an investment bubble in the Web.
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2006 - the year in which YouTube became culturally ubiquitous, Flash video became the de facto Internet video standard of the Web, Microsoft beta-launched Vista, and the Wii entered our lives - was also memorable for one or two other, real-world events such as the hanging of Saddam Hussein, prompting the obvious question: is the progress of i-Technology front-runners like Google and eBay more, or less, important than the trial and execution of Saddam? 
