It's fair to imagine that those who celebrated another year of the internet at the New Statesman's 2006 awards ceremony were feeling pretty pleased with themselves. Not since the time of the pre-Millennial boom has new media made so many headlines in one year, at least in those publications still printing on dead trees; and for good reason.
The financial columns bulged with speculation, as media giants gobbled up minnow start-ups for unbelievable sums, after the first dotcom bubble burst. The international pages were full of stories from across the Atlantic of Silicon Valley collusion in Chinese repression and plots to destroy the neutrality of the internet. More recently, the old guard of the British press have taken their first steps into citizen journalism, via podcasting and other such endeavours dismissed as mere fripperies only two years ago. And the Westminster blogging scene finally broke its first story in the national press.
First, let's get the money stuff out of the way. In July last year, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation bought the parent company of social networking site MySpace for $580m. In September, eBay snagged internet telephony leader Skype for $2.6bn. Then a pre-Christmas spree saw ITV forking out $208m for Friends Reunited, and Yahoo! grabbing social bookmarking company del.icio.us for an undisclosed sum rumoured to be in the tens of millions. And in March this year Google came out of the closet as a competitor to Microsoft when it bought online word processing site Writely. Those in the know followed the action on former VC Michael Harrington's blog, Techcrunch, where European endeavours like RSS-driven personal homepage Netvibes were just as likely to get a mention as Silicon Valley start-ups.
Meanwhile, serious debate on internet governance finally seeped out of the niche press into the mainstream. At the World Summit on the Information Society in November, we debated whether the UN or US-backed ICANN should "control the internet". Then, when Google launched services in China which returned rather odd results for the search term "democracy" we held Larry Page, Sergey Brin and their counterparts at Yahoo! and MSN to account for collaborating with the authorities while the Chinese government was suppressing dissent.
And when US telcos offered to "improve" the web with what looked like two-tiered pricing, we cried "network neutrality" and took to the streets in protest. Well, almost. But we cared, at least; we understood. And for those who have been campaigning on similar issues for years, that's a heartening step forward.
Perhaps the reason old media gave a care this time around was the investment they had started to make in the medium. In May 2005, the BBC had announced a download and podcast trial, but it wasn't until November, when the Guardian launched, with much fanfare, the Ricky Gervais podcast, that the potential for the new form of audio distribution became clear. Gervais's riffs with Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington will go down in the Guinness book of records as the most popular podcast to date, with more than a quarter of a million downloads.
In March The Guardian launched Comment is Free, its take on citizen media. Although both Tony Blair and Hannah Pool, among others, got a rough ride from the seasoned bloggers who populated the site's comment stream, columnists like Timothy Garton-Ash got it right, using the space as a resource to consult readers on future ideas. Meanwhile, BBC Online unveiled a new focus on user-generated content as part of its Creative Future strategy and Reuters partnered with international blogging activists Global Voices, having brought hundreds of GV bloggers from all over the world to a special conference in their Canary Wharf headquarters in December.
All this establishment action only served to encourage the grassroots. At the launch party for this year's awards, the New Statesman's own Kathryn Corrick looked forward to the day that UK bloggers got their first scoop in the national press. It wasn't long in coming. When Guido Fawkes led with a story the papers were too scared to print on John Prescott's "third mistress" it added fuel to the fire already raging over his connections with US billionaire Philip Anschutz, and led to some embarrassing bumbling by the Deputy PM live on Radio 4's Today programme: "I think that it's called the internet or something - blogs is it? - I don't know, I have only just got used to letters, I haven't got used to all this new technology."
And so, as the sun sets on this year's awards, the mind turns to what might be in store for next year. The web is in hyperdrive. No doubt the events of next year will dwarf the money, contention, influence and scandal generated by online activity in 2005-2006. Here's to it.
