Last week, the Webby Awards named the top ten Internet moments of the decade.

Each of the winners represents how the internet has triumphed over old technologies and practices.

“The Internet is the story of the decade because it was the catalyst for change in not just every aspect of our everyday lives, but in everything from commerce and communication to politics and pop culture,” said David-Michel Davies, the executive director of the Webby Awards.

“The recurring theme among all of the milestones on our list is the Internet’s capacity to circumvent old systems and put more power into the hands of ordinary people,” he said.

The Webby Award’s top ten are:

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Owners of the iPhone and the iPod Touch can now access Wikipedia at any time. Independent of connectivity or wireless signal, nearly three million articles are being boasted to fit into Encyclopedia the mobile app.

Patrick Collison wrote the application after spending some time with a new iPhone and no connection in Japan. After finishing the iPhone project, he adapted it for use on the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) notebook.

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Last week was a major fail for traditional journalism, which rages so ineffectively against the dying of its light.

Journalism stubbed its toe against the truth when reporters reproduced a hoax quote taken from Wikipedia in obituaries for composer Mauricel Jarre.

The quote, added to Wikipedia by Irish college student Shane Fitzgerald after the composer’s death, was designed to expose the lack of journalistic rigor in blogs and the small press.

“I was wrong,” Fitzgerald wrote in the Irish Times. “Quality newspapers in England, India, America and as far away as Australia had my words in their reports of Jarre’s death.”

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From an innovation standpoint, Juice’s integration of drag and drop technology with Web-based research is a useful idea. The notion of dragging and dropping a word or phrase into another window that automatically conducts a multi-source Web search is attractive. But after downloading the Beta version, Juice’s service hurt more than it helped. The sidebar cluttered my browser, and the turning in my stomach eventually made me kick the interface to the curb. Perhaps Linkool International’s next release will not be as agitating.

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Augmented reality (AR) is the superimposition of computer-generated data onto the physical world to add information and enhance perception. Currently it is media mediated, laying a strata of data over video images, and is promising to become a vital part of the mobile and gaming markets.

While augmented reality has thus far been specialized and theoretical, several AR devices have been recently been announced or released for the iPhone and Android, and it looks like mainstream adoption AR is around the corner (OK, it’s a long corner, but it’s still a corner).

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On the MUNI this morning, I overheard a guy (I think he built medical buildings) say that he really liked recessions, because they destroy all of his competitors. He’s one of the happy few, I guess. There’s only one of him, but many who will become his competition.

When the first Valley Bubble broke, the Web was still essentially a frontier. In the years since, practices have been set – online buying and banking is the norm, Wikipedia.com and Ask.com answer all our questions, social media brings people together from around the world.

The last few years have been ripe for startups. People now understand the Internet, they know what to do with it, and they are open to new ways of interfacing with it (see: the Twitter craze). As little as two months ago there was a notion that tech was going to go through it untouched. In this short time, that optimism has begun to fade.

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Mobile barcodes are being showcased in ReadWriteWeb ’s series about “integrating the internet with the real world through barcode scanning technology.” The opportunity to bridge this gap is available now with “real” smartphones such as the iPhone, Blackberry, and the T-Mobile G1. The failure of past barcode implementation was the fault of extra hardware, such as the CueCat, or relying on newspapers to propagate the technology. Newspapers, arguably a dying format, targets the wrong demographic for creating a new promotional medium.

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One of the more intriguing ideas in the current tech scene is the attempt to “virtualize” the physical world. How this will translate into mainstream usage is really still conceptual, but we’re beginning to see more and more attempts to bridge the gaps between “the two worlds.”

One such effort is tikitags. Tikitags are stick-on labels that link to a URL, and are read with readers using Near Field Communications (NFC) technology.  In layperson’s terms: place the information on the sticker, put the sticker on the thing, read it with a reader (your cell phone), and voila!

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ClearForest Gnosis is early example of the possibilities of semantic web searches, hinting at the facility semantic web applications will allow in the future. Gnosis, a plugin for Firefox or Internet Explorer (link currently unavailable), does a real-time semantic search of textual key words.

Gnosis effectively puts a powerful search engine right into the text of any web page you visit.  After processing the page, Gnosis offers a series of hyperlinks, each one operating like a sort of minisearch, highlighting people, organizations, medical conditions, companies, currency, city, country, or industry terms, for example. The thematically color-coded hyperlinks link to automatic searches on Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, Linked In, Reuters News, Technorati and various financial services.

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Google [GOOG] Wednesday launched another site that’s like an already existing one, Knol. In essence it’s Wikipedia, the difference being that its authors are credited as opposed to anonymous. So it’s About.com, then.

The idea is like Wikipedia combined with an ad-driven blog. Right now, there’s mostly medical articles, so it looks like Knol will work more like About.com – more often than not, you’ll get to a Knol article through a topic search instead of going in through the homepage. This could work for Knol, although brevity is part of what makes About.com’s articles appealing. This could also work against Knol, as it puts it in direct competition with Wikipedia’s Medpedia, whose preview launched today, created under the aegis of Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Michigan’s medical schools. Tough competition if Knol stays mainly medical.

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