December 21, 2007

As we come to the end of another year on the Internet beat, we ask ourselves: When will things pick up around here?When will people start developing new businesses? When will users employ the medium in new and innovative ways? Oh, and when will that rebate check for the Webcam I bought three months ago finally show up?Sometimes it can seem as if a full minute, or two, slips by without any of these things happening. Once, there was even a four-minute break between announcements of new social networks.

As we come to the end of another year on the Internet beat, we ask ourselves: When will things pick up around here?When will people start developing new businesses? When will users employ the medium in new and innovative ways? Oh, and when will that rebate check for the Webcam I bought three months ago finally show up?Sometimes it can seem as if a full minute, or two, slips by without any of these things happening. Once, there was even a four-minute break between announcements of new social networks.

Such breaks are good, because they give me time to come up with a list of top Web stories of the year.Here are my picks:Facebook grows facial hairThe biggest man on campus tries to join the real world and is phenomenally successful at signing on grown ups.

Unclear, still, is how bothered the site's core, college audience will be by all the old folks. Still, more than half of the almost 4-year-old social network's 58 million registered users now are not collegians, and the site, fueled by the wise decision to open itself up to outside application developers, has been averaging at least 250,000 new registrations daily in 2007.In October, Facebook sold a 1.6 percent share to Microsoft for $240 million, placing the value of the company at $15 billion, about the same as Ford Motor Co. Now -- ahem -- its executives have to figure out a way to make money from the site without overloading it with ads or invading users' privacy to the point of rebellion.

iPhone kick-starts mobile computingSure, only 1.4 million people had them by late October, but Christmas was around the corner, and many more coveted them, thanks to Apple's phenomenal product design and even more phenomenal marketing.What makes the iPhone (left) big news for the Web is that its highest and best use is not as a phone, according to the reviews, and definitely not as an e-mail device, but as a portable Internet delivery system.

America has trailed Asia and Europe in getting its Web to go, but iPhone shines a bright light on the takeout window.Gold rush, part deux, continues -- nervouslyOne word is appearing with more and more frequency, and the word is "bubble," as in that thing that popped in the early 2000s, , killing pets.com, changing the face of Super Bowl advertising and making apartments in San Francisco suddenly close to affordable, temporarily.But the current Web boom is different, people say, because it's based on what people are actually doing on the Web (making rad MySpace pages) rather than what they might do (shop for groceries).There's a lot to that theory, so much so that the venture capitalists are again partying (i.e., tossing in piles of millions) like it's 1999.

And the arrow on the Internet advertising growth chart is pointing skyward. But there are also a whole lot of Web businesses whose big and, really, only idea for turning users into cash is good old advertising (see Facebook, above). There may not be enough eyeballs to go around.Radiohead shakes up the music bizCritical darlings, Webheads and possessors of a slavishly devoted fan base, Radiohead was in a perfect position to experiment with its new disc, "In Rainbows." It offered the album in October as a digital download at whatever price the downloader wanted to pay

.We still haven't seen a full accounting from the band on the fascinating question of how this compared with a regular, big-record-company release into iTunes and whatever CD stores remain. The band disputed -- albeit without offering refuting details -- the analysis by one Internet audience measurement service suggesting that 60 percent of people had chosen to pay nothing.

But, like the earlier rise and continued power of iTunes, it was still a milestone in the long-playing battle over the sale and distribution of popular music. It forced people who've been downloading songs for free to confront the ethics of what they're doing. And it could point toward a new, more efficient music system. The Internet, enabler of dread file sharing, also acts as enabler of record-company sidestepping.Web moves toward screen meld with TV


On the one hand, you have television and motion-picture producers, insisting in negotiations with striking Hollywood writers that sharing future Internet revenues isn't a big deal, because there's no business model there.On the other hand, you have the TV networks and film studios stampeding to get their material on the Web. Take NBC as an example. NBC and iTunes feuded over money in 2007, leading NBC to pull out. But NBC moved to Amazon for pay-per-view downloads and with Fox, the network started hulu.com, a pretty slick showcase for current prime-time series, full-length, embeddable on your own site (but not downloadable). NBC also launched its own video download site.Get your stuff out there, anywhere, any way people want to see it, goes the new mantra.

It's all edging toward some great fusion of the future, where a screen is just a screen and the Internet will be another input source, like your DVD player or your basic-cable cable.So of course, the writers say, there's a future business in scripted material over the Web or you producers wouldn't be fighting us so stridently over what our cut will be. And they put up a YouTube video collecting clips of entertainment-industry captains talking -- whoops! -- about how huge the Internet is going to be for them.It's called "Voices of Uncertainty," and if there were a Web video Emmy, this would be a nominee.

Actually, a Web video Emmy is another convergence thing that's probably on the way.Going mainstreamIt's long been in use beyond your geeky little brother, of course. But now your formerly Luddite grandmother has a knitting group on Facebook and a discomfortingly randy blog (note to self: Do not teach Grams how to upload photos). She may even be playing MMOGs (that's massively multiplayer online games, such as "World of Warcraft," as she could surely tell you).Even if your particular parental mother isn't quite so tech-forward, the population is heading there.

More than half of American households now have broadband Internet connections. Time spent on the Web continues to climb, as do activities undertaken -- from renewing a library book or paying bills online to ego surfing (plugging your own name into Google, which half of us admit to having done) to relying on it to keep up with our favorite TV shows or watch the Masters.During 2007's extended presidential-campaign throat clearing, the Web turned from Howard Dean's cute little fundraising tool to a central aspect of the campaigns, with many, if not most, of the announced candidates making those announcements on their Web sites first.A TV show derived from a Web site, TMZ.com, was the top-rated new syndicated series of the fall season.You, last year's person of the year at Time Magazine, didn't rest on Your laurels.

You built on that status by uploading more videos, starting more blogs, sharing more photos online. And on and on and on.This Internet medium, it seems, may be here to stay. Now if only something would happen on it.

By (chicagotribune)