Best of Broadstuff 2009

So folks, here it is for your Bumper Christmas Holiday Edition- the 10 Best (as in most visited) Broadstuff stories of 2009. In its own way its a good log of some of the ZeitGeist in the Digital Ecosystem space. In order of popularity they were:

1. Stuff White People Don't Like #2 - Real Geeks (#CabinetForum Redux) - Cabinet level consultation on future of Digital Britain wss mainly a media-political class fest, no techies who actually understand the stuff were allowed at the table. This story logs an overall story about the general view that Digital Britain is an opportunity that has gone begging (mainly due to lack of cash....)

2.
10 Ways of using the Twitter Egosystem - Twitter takes Vanity Publishing to new lows - marke the shift in the system from Chat room to Pump room.

3. Facebook blinks, copies Twitter, still gets it wrong - Facebook (and many others) forced to copy Twitter's real time feed - marks the official start of Real Time Hype

4. SXSW – Jumping Sharks, Hunting Snarks, Punting Sparks and Something Stark
- Yes, SXSW showed that the Web 2.0 fad was peaking, and yes it is full of humbug and old dogs whose ideas should be left to die, but there is also so much else emerging there too.

5. Swine Flu Pandemic breaks out on Twitter - Far more panic among the Twitternauts about Swine Flu than among the public at large - early warning signs of the "wisdom of mob" news flows on Twitter that became so prevalent later in the year.

6. Shirky, Journalism, the BBC and me - sees Clay Shirky starting to argue against some of his more overoptimistic pronouncements in "Here Comes Everybody", as it becomes clearer that quality journalism will largely disappear in a FreeConomic world. 2009 has seen many of the more "New World" prognostications of the 2005-2007 period unravel, mainly due to the....

7. Bankers excessive salaries as predictors of Depression - Interestingly, it was possible to predict the Second Great Depression just by tracking the divergence of Bankers' salaries vs the Rest of Humanity. That this has not yet been fixed does not bode well.....

8. The Death and Life of Second Life - 3D Worlds were largely written off in 2008, there are second signs of life in 2009.

9. Jan Moir, the Web, Free Speech and the Wisdom of Mobs - worrying signs that the "Liberal Intellectuals" who apparently inhabit Social media re as intolerant as any decent McCarthy-ite. All you have to do is pick your issue....

10. Freeconomics 2.0 - or how Pay! is the New Free! - Chris Anderson's much heralded FreeConomics finally came out, but was more about Some-Of-You-PayConomics. A big shift from his original proposition that we argued so vehemently against in 2008, and which we predicted would drive the increasing Usurpation of Privacy (see "Bubbling Under" below)

Bonus Track:

11. SXSW Journalists need to get out of the beer tent and see real world (Shock, Horror) - It would appear that Real Digital Age Journalists are as lazy as Our Man in Havana ever was - no surprises there then. Big story is that even on the digital media, the message is being moderated by middlemen, so tune your channels with care.

Bubblin' Under

The Mashup Social Media Firehose - a rather good Mashup Event towards the end of 2009 did a rapid fire expose of many of todays trends including one of the starkest expositions on how your data is being mined

Its quite interesting looking over these, as they give a good review of the big themes of the year, which were by and large the chronicling of the Chrome of Web 2.0 tarnishing (to the extent that it even got a makeover to Web-Squared - we will see if that takes off):

- the recantation and/or downright disproving of early Web 2.0 New Economics and Economists
- the discovery of the power (and downside) of low value, high velocity real time content
- the replacement of advertising by data mining in the Web 2.0 business model

On the other hand, there is still hope - "Web 3D" is not over yet, people are starting to care about quality in their feeds, and other stories not hitting the Top 10 as they are too recent include the beginning of a fightback against privacy invasion, the increasing realisation that losing quality content is too big a price to pay for a Free-for-All internet, a belated realisation that women are 'Netpeople too, and the fascinating new-network effects of social networking that are emerging (such as Twitter being used in conjunction with TV watching).

So gather ye mince pies while ye may and gird your turkey loins, for next week we shall publish the Broadstuff Top 10 Predictions for 2010.