I can't believe its going to be Christmas in a week.

I thought it might be fun to do a quick reflection on the year and the goings on... just like they do in the mainstream media.

Big impact things of the year in Australia were:

The Chaser's War On Everything APEC stunt. I wonder how much that contributed to the downfall of Howard... if at all? It certainly was hilarious!

The Federal Election itself - after the country being in lock step with the Bush White House for years it is refreshing to think that this country can ever so tentatively take steps that are not directly in line with the US. Wonderful to see Rudd make his declaration of signing Kyoto...

The Web:

Get Up's campaign in Australia to ensure that people are vectored toward simple choices in politics was extremely interesting. Their new campaign to take back the cities is a bit weak in my opinion. We shall see.

I thought that the recent visibility of Ron Paul in the US both in fundraising and in terms of the amount of buzz that is being generated online is extremely interesting. Not sure whether someone who is clearly orthogonal to the mainstream parties could ever pull off being elected, but this may be the time to do it!

Video

Surely this year was the year of the embeddable video. Video is becoming ubiquitous and YouTube is introducing new tools all the time now. Over the next two years I think that video is going to become bigger than Ben Hur. What will be truly interesting will be to see whether the copyright owners are able to put deals in place with the ISP's to stop or monitor P2P file sharing. Of course that is only one part of the problem. Its the whole business of mash ups that will continue to be an issue for them all...

Social Networks

I thought this year really did mark the coming of age of the social network. And yet there are still loads of people that I come across who have no idea about Facebook.... So maybe its still got a year to go before it starts to make real impact.

Security

The issues associated with Social Networks of course bring up the whole matter of security - or the lack thereof. The real issue of course is that in an online world you are operating almost all the time across national borders, which makes it very hard for the cops to chase down the crims. It also makes it very lucrative for the crims that operate online and live in low cost of living parts of the world.

Predictions

This coming year is going to be the big wake up year. People are going to wake up to the fact that we are facing a whole bunch of big big problems. Water is going to be the biggest issue - rising sea waters as a result of the melting of the ice caps; and lack of fresh water in a lot of the biggest cities in the world. Back in the late 90's the CIA put out a report that predicted that the wars of the early part of this century would be fought over water. So far the wars have been about oil it seems. But that will absolutely change.

The financial crisis in the US will get worse regardless of what the Fed does. Why? Because they have reached a point where trust has been broken. Ironically I believe that real estate in Australia and New Zealand will benefit from this. I suspect that well-heeled people in the US who have cash will be trying to get it out of the country and changed into stronger currencies as quickly as possible. I think they will try to find bolt holes in English speaking countries that have strong economic structure. At the moment the UK is looking a bit shaky with the runs on banks they have had there. New Zealand and Australia look pretty good.

That's all for now. Have a great Christmas everyone!