Ringside at the Web Fight

[Commentary] People who follows the next big thing believe that this year -- emerging from recession, with the death of so many aspects of conventional media -- will be a year of, in Internet-speak, radical inflection, precipitating a wave of acquisitions and IPO's and a river of new investment.

If you can only focus on what so many geniuses are saying, you can win big. But deciphering the chatter is no small talent, because the technology business is at least as much talk as it is science. The next big thing can sometimes feel like the coming of Christ, but it can also feel like the internecine debates about socialist doctrine that famously took place in the cafeterias of City College, in New York, in the 1930s. So Wolff tries to align the factions, parse the theories, distinguish the geek Lenins from the geek Trotskys, and offer the possibility for you to profitably know what this year is going to bring (or, anyway, hold your own at a cocktail party).