Last night, the mesh gang broke bread with three of the b5media crew (if you get a chance, you have to eat at The Big Ragu in Toronto). One of the many topics in an enjoyable evening was how long the current excitement surrounding Web 2.0 can last. Stuart MacDonald - of mesh fame ™, argued the end is near after what he contends has been a fantastic three-year run, and wondered whether anything really new and exciting is happening these days. His assertion may be true except for the fact there are so many relatively fresh concepts - virtual worlds, social networks, user-generated content, etc. - that are just starting to gain momentum. Who knows, for example, how or if virtual worlds will evolve. Second Life could become another mainstream communications medium for personal and corporate activity, compared with his current roots as a strange place where people pimp their cars and buy virtual clothes. User-generated content such as blog networks could stand shoulder to shoulder with traditional medium as trusted destinations for news and information. One thing is for certain, the excitement surrounding the Web these days is palpable and infectious. The mesh meet-up earlier this week demonstrated people are truly excited about what's happening now and the possibilities down the road. The encouraging part is it's a different kind of buzz than during the dot-com boom when the focus was on "show me the money" (premature IPOs, venture-backed back-of-the-napkin business plans) and good times (swag, open bars, junkets). Today, people just to be involved. Sure, many of them would like to make some serious coin but there just seems to be a participation wave going on. Rather than sit on the sidelines, people are jumping into the Internet any way they can. Some (like me!) join Web start-ups, others such as fellow mesh gang member Rob Hyndman break out on their own and set up tech-focused law boutiques and organize conferences, while others such as Globe & Mail reporter (and mesh gang member) Mathew Ingram focus their professional and personal energy on writing about everything Web. In writing about and working within the Web over the past 11 years, the one thing that has never surprised me is the emergence of something new. In the late-1990s when e-commerce and online advertising were all the rage, you wondered what would be next. Lo and behold, Web 2.0 appeared, although it did three or four years after the dot-com bust for it to really take hold. So what's next the next thing to capture the imagination of the instant gratification tech crowd? Is it the intelligent Web (or Web 3.0) as the New York Times proclaimed earlier this month? Any thoughts? (Note: The URL for The Big Ragu has been corrected)

My mother is a Luddite. She was having enough problems, for example, trying to use a computer before her son-in-law convinced her to switch over to a Mac so she could iChat with her grandchildren. Imagine my mother's frustration when her mobile phone crapped out on her recently. (Apparently, the phone is broken if you have to shout into it so the person on the other end can hear you) A call to Virgin Canada led to a suggestion she mail in her phone (a cheap, bottom-of-the-line Nokia) and maybe three weeks later, they would send it back. That didn't seem like a good option so she looked up the phone number for one of those Virgin kiosks popping up in malls across the country. Instead of putting the phone in the mail, my mother would just march down to the mall and exchange her broken phone for a new one. Simple, eh? Well, no. It turns out you can't do that so my mother's got two options: put the phone in the mail and hope it comes back some time soon, or buy a new one. That can't be described as good customer service. Where's Richard Branson when you need him?