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Mobile technology, virtualization, the social web, cloud computing - a think tank study has all our good friends on a hit list.

The study, which shows primary security and privacy concerns of U.S. government IT leaders, is making the rounds among military and government bloggers. Policy makers are being told that the applications we know and love are dangerous and pose gaping security loopholes for cyberterrorism. Is a Big Brother overprotective meltdown? Or are our advances really causing greater risks for all users?

Five years ago I interviewed tech publisher Tim O'Reilly about a new term that his company had just coined: Web 2.0. The first Web 2.0 conference had been held the previous month, October 2004, and O'Reilly had graciously agreed to give an interview to yours truly - "an unknown blogger from New Zealand," as I put it back then. The interview ran in a 3-part series (see also part 2 and part 3) and covered Web 2.0, new business models, social software and eBooks.

I've always been a big believer in learning from history as we look to the future. So let's re-visit this interview from five years ago and see how prescient the father of Web 2.0 was.

In the Web 2.0 heyday, Netvibes had that star appeal that few companies ever experience. Their platform for creating personal dashboards rocketed in growth. Web innovators sang its praises. But you know the story. Netvibes struggled to find a business model.

Of all the technologies powering the social Web, few are as under-appreciated as the espresso machine.

We go gaga over great mashups, we drool over high-powered hardware, and we lust for private beta invitations to Google's latest whatever-the-hell-it-is. But none of these would be possible without machines to blast steam through finely ground coffee beans, and baristas with the skill to pull a perfect espresso shot.

Comcast sees the writing on the wall: cable-based TV will not survive the next decade. Its value is fast eroding because it can't compete with on-demand, Internet-delivered TV across all screens. Unlike their music counterparts, TV executives have pulled their heads out of the sand in time and are working hard to survive this monumental shift. To do so, however, they need to choose the right battles to fight.

Every year at the Web 2.0 Summit Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker does a fast and in-depth presentation of internet trends. The report is available here.

Once again mobile is a big trend this year, with Apple's market share expected to "Surprise on Upside Near-Term."

Overall the key message was that financial markets have rebounded now; and that technology is "relatively impressive."

We're at the 6th annual Web 2.0 conference, now known as the Web 2.0 Summit. John Battelle and Tim O'Reilly opened the event. O'Reilly spoke about being at another transition point for the Web. They have termed this "web squared", a.k.a. "web meets world." O'Reilly said that in the current era "we're starting to instrument the world." He referenced a quote from VC Fred Wilson, that we are currently in a "golden triangle of mobile, social and real-time."

O'Reilly remarked that we're seeing "what may be the next wave of internet business models." Speaking about the evolution of both the conference and the web 2.0 trend, he noted that the "revolution we're seeing today is as great as the one we saw five years ago."

It's become fashionable among a certain set to declare that RSS is no longer the foremost pipeline for news and information on the Web. Steve Gillmor and innumerable others have said they've abandoned their RSS readers in favor of Twitter. Twitter hiring Feedburner's CEO seemed to compound this trend towards dismissing RSS as old hat (though headlines shouldn't always be taken literally).

The usual suspects, such as Dave Winer and our own RSS geek, quickly jumped to the defense of really simple syndication. But where was the data to back them up? And what do businesses think about RSS? The McKinsey Global Survey on Web 2.0 in business came out yesterday, and out of the almost 1,700 executives they talked to, 42% said they see a measurable benefit from RSS. That's 24% more than those who see any benefit from microblogging (i.e. Twitter).

At the recent Real-Time CrunchUp 2009, Khris Loux, CEO of one of the web's largest commenting services, announced the
"death of the comment". This declaration was extremely significant as Loux's JS-Kit is currently installed on over 600,000 sites. He blames the death on social media sites like Twitter and Flickr and the rise of "parallel channels away from [the] product". In essence, dialogue has moved from a singular destination to a series of parallel but separate social networking channels.

A year ago, I wrote a magnum opus three-part post that attempted to chronicle some of the underlying changes happening in the economy and how this would impact web technology ventures. "Useful, but too long" was a recurring comment. So, here is a one-year update, much shorter. And hopefully a bit clearer, seeing as we are further into this transition.