Happy new year everyone. This post is a wee bit random, but it is my first day back slaving over a hot computer so forgive me. Hopefully there’s some links of interest, and you might get to know me a bit better if you read it anyway. The esteemed James Meek perhaps puts our strange times more eloquently into focus if you need something else to read. It’s a long one though, you might want to print and recycle.

What a year 2009 was! A black president for the US, banks collapsing left, right and centre and – shock horror – the end of Woolworths! Can’t say the last will affect my life considerably, but we’re definitely in an interesting time of transition. I try to remain positive despite ‘economic gloom’ and the revival of the never-ending Israel/Palestine conflict. After all, from a philosophical viewpoint, the Earth is billions of years old and she’ll carry on doing her stuff long after human beings have finished making their mark. If you think of things in those terms it makes the current state of things seem a little less scary. None of us can really know what’s round the corner, so it makes sense to live in the now. A whole new year of possibilities is here. Sod the doom-mongers. That’s what I say.

There’s still much talk of start-ups amongst UK digital folk and beyond, even if some venture capitalists aren’t feeling that adventurous. The shift towards sustainability and generally more worthwhile ways of working and living is demonstrated everywhere. At the end of the day, it doesn’t take much to set up an internet business thesedays. That’s the beauty of it. It feels like there are big changes coming, or maybe everything will stay the same. One thing that will change is how we use the web and associated gizmos. In December The Guardian published its Top 100 websites which reflects the massive shift towards mobile, location-based media and social collaborative ways of working and playing. Well worth checking out if you missed it. Online video of course also features heavily in the Top 100 run down. It’s now just part of the mainstream. That means company’s like Kinura are looking rosy, but also having to specialise and diversify. This year we’ll be focusing on developing more tools to add to our live streaming service and niftier ways of integrating high quality video with webinars, online conferencing and web widgets. We’re interested in stuff like video bookmarking, video search and facial recognition: all kinds of exciting things like those. I’m personally wondering if this really will be the year that video goes mobile en masse. Maybe. I’ll tell you next January.

We all know that MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. are changing everything.. blah blah you’ve heard all this before – but what I’m really interested in is that we seem to be moving towards a more truly democratic world, where people can have their say and have a presence from anywhere, facilitated by technology. This not only applies to politics but also to creativity. One example of this is the launch of Raw Nerve’s CreativeNetworkPlatform which is currently in beta (I’ll be writing more on that in coming months), and any other site you can think of that allows people to connect, collaborate and showcase their work.

The approaching analogue switch-off is also of massive interest to me (as demonstrated by my Goodbye Old TV groups on Facebook + Flickr). Despite inevitable resistance and hiccups, it represents the possibility of people being able to engage with the digital world in a much more familiar way. iPlayer stats show millions of folk catching up online and TV viewing figures are making headlines again with old-fashioned light entertainment punted alongside the slightly more hellish modern-day-freak-show we call X-Factor. We still watch some programmes in the ‘old fashioned’ way in my house, but have a laptop handy of course for Googling and wotnot. But what if we can chat to other people whilst watching the news using cool tools like Banter? Or use Wii type motion sensors to interact and make content? Hmmm. Food for thought. I just hope the digital switch over doesn’t leave the very marginalised sections of society out. I wrote my dissertation on the Digital Divide back in 2000, when internet cafes were still quite new and we still had a bit of hope in Tony Blair. I focused then on the gaps between rich and poor, young and old, in terms of access to the internet. It’s taken a bit longer than we thought, but it does seem that access is almost universal now in the UK at least. And mobile devices make that even more achievable. There’s so much going on in the digital world, and despite the fact all I really want to do is move to the country and grow my own veg, I’m still excited by the possibilities for 2009 and beyond. Let’s hope the future is a nice blend of sustainable living, fresh air and super-fast networked communications that facilitate a more enlightened race of homo sapiens.