The eyes of the dot com storms

When you are involved with something on a regular basis - in my case internet publishing and marketing stuff - it's hard to determine the extent to which THE world revolves around this stuff as opposed to just YOUR world.

These days it sure feels like I'm a small part of the global storm - now a hurricane - which is growing in intensity, sweeping away old business models like so much straw, and reshaping the way Governments, business, and most importantly people grow, thrive, and sometimes fail in this brave new Xth wave world. Hey - I coined Toffler and Huxley in the same sentence!

Davos' theme this year is creativity and (naturally?) the top idea about the theme came from Google's Marissa Mayer. More about that later...

One little eye of one of the big hurricanes usually called "Web 2.0" is the mashup camp coming in February. I'm very excited about it because I agree with many who suggest that mashups represent a significant new trend in online activity. Blogs and mashups are putting users and small time programmers back in control in powerful and unexpected ways.

Most importantly big online programming behemoths - especially Yahoo and Amazon but also Google and MSN, are facilitating the mashup frenzy with increasingly robust APIs. These often involve mixing maps and other data, but in the case of Amazon they are pretty much releasing the search engine application itself which should lead to a flurry of rich search mashup applications.

Who's going to mashup camp? Yahoo's top blogger JZ will be there, as will MSN's top blogger Scoble and many others from Google, Yahoo, MSN, media. But most important may be the unknown little geeks working away in their garage on the next big idea. Giving away the prize for the best mashup will be no less than the president of Sun Microsystems Jonathan Schwartz.

The big guys understand that the little guys are making a big difference. I'm cool with that.