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Nicholas Carr has done some brave predictions for 2007.
I'm not brave at all. So I have to do some chicken-hearted predictions.
Update (2006-12-04): As often I'm wrong: Steve Gilmor has done his last show this year (see Jason Calacanis). That's really, really sad.
Google shut down it's answer service. And not the whole Blogosphere seems to be only sad (see e.g. TechCrunch and Valleywag).
In a comment on a post from Dave Winer Robert Scoble says he sees "nothing that'll stop Google".
I guess that's true for almost all of us.
But what does that say in these nonlinear days?
(Who saw the huge rise of Google?)
In Web 2.0 and Tim O'Reilly as Marshal Tito Bill Thompson complains about Web 2.0, AJAX and the like obstructing a passage to the real distributed web:
Now we must decide whether to put our faith in Ajaxified snakeoil or to look beyond the interface to distributed systems, scalable solutions and a network architecture that will support the needs and aspirations of the next five billion users.
And Tim O'Reilly as Marshal Tito steering this:
Fortunately, O’Reilly seems less of a psychopath than Mao or Stalin, and is perhaps closer to the pragmatic Yugoslavian leader Marshal Tito, who carefully steered a path between the USSR and the West for decades.
I must admit it's hard for me too conceive how the Marshal steers the process. This is my best guess.
If you want a more serious comment about Bills post see Nicholas Carr, Dan Farber or Shelley Powers.
Bill Thompson fears that we may miss the brave new world by focussing on the 2.0 stuff:
If we sort out our interfaces and interactions we can may even be able to put our heads into the screen, be part of the metaverse, enter cyberspace and interact fully and equally with agents, people, sims and any other machine- or human-generated intelligence. But this will not happen if we follow the Web 2.0 fantasy and put our trust in cool but ultimately shallow tricks with the presentation of data. The time has come to stand up and be counted, and we need people who can count in hex and see beyond the Web 2.0 hype.
Maybe we have to go through applications to make progress, even 2.0 applications.
Thank God we have A-Bloggers.
See e.g. the discussion about Nick Denton in the Thanksgiving Gang (all 5 parts are highly recommended), Valleywag against Jason Calacanis, Valleywag against Mike Arrington and an older post of Mike Arrington (with some special oppinions about Nicholas Carr).
Maybe our ancestors where much smarter than some of us now.
(See The commons takes on Microsoft).
The battle between the Clouds (Google et al) and the Offlines (Microsoft) goes on (see Larry Dignan).
Steve Gillmors ceterum censeo is since a long time: "Office is dead" (see a post from his former ZDNet days and a newer Gesturelab one).
What if both worlds will survive?
Larry Dignan posted about the dificulty (but not impossibility) to calculate the ROI of information security costs.
There may be costs the ROI is even harder to calculate (or is it easier?).
David Berlinds asks why Novell paid Microsoft $40 Mio. Here is the answer.
Are we in the eve of the age of the infringement wars? Does the social web (Web 2.0 or whatever it's called) survive it? See Donna Bogatin and Steve O'Hear.
