Web 2.0 In Depth

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!