internet cool?!

Social Symbiosis. The previous tools changing and updating based on the reactions of others.

In looking for a "stall" the author misunderstands statistics. Nothing happens evenly. There is nothing magical about the length of a calendar year. It's just a human convention. As Bertrand Russell said, in the greatest depths of interstellar space, there are still three feet to a yard (from the introduction to Why I Am Not a Christian I think).

No new transformative technologies this year doesn't mean a stall, and we could have three in January 09 and it would not imply an acceleration.

Apart from that, my own guess is in line with curation; I think editors will resurge. In a way we need them more than ever to help us efficiently weed through both the junk and the stuff we aren't interested in. I think we will start to see more of them, to value them (with $), and to choose the ones we like.

An interesting question is whether editors (I'm using the term loosely) will start to do more fact checking as they always have in trad media. Fact checking has often been absent from internet communication, which in many cases resembles talk radio in providing a seemingly legitimizing forum for people to promote things that simply aren't true. Whether malicious or not, disinformation is not helpful.

We like to evaluate what we hear and read with our intuition. Does it "feel" true? Since many things that "feel" true aren't true at all, it's a terrible way to determine truth. The internet, regrettably, has reinforced the idea that intuition is a viable way to evaluate statements of all kinds, so a bit of a sea change will be needed. Perhaps a resurgence of editors can contribute?

Not sure if this is what you are looking for, but @kevinmhuff just referred me to www.Flock.com. It's a browser (built on the FF platform), that is designed completely around Social Networking. If it catches on, it could completely redefine how we browse on the Internet. Needs a few minor tweaks (from what I can see), but so far looks pretty cool.

In 2008, the general (non-nerd) public is getting their first taste of semantic web awesomeness. My phone knows where I am, and can find things close to my current location. This was possible before before, but it's getting faster, smarter, and even Soccer Moms can do it. Also, people are filtering out the once novel and interesting looking Web2.0 sites, in the same way that they filter out crappy television. "Flashier" is losing to "Smarter" and "More Integrated". Pinning a specific label on "2008" is tough; things are just getting smarter.

Quasi related: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_maps#Development_history

Awesome topic! Put a response up on BrandsAmongMany here: http://www.brandsamongmany.com/2008/11/06/2008-social-media-claim-to-fame/

Mobile devices providing apps like facebook & twitter coupled with texting and photo sharing are all contributing to this "Social Symbiosis" (well put Len)

Email, computers, hard drives, disks are all dying (Mac Air no drive?)

Facebook, iPhones and Clouds are thriving. (think me.com)

USB drives will be the 8 track of the 2000's