In the Web world, you know that a trend has major traction when IBM (IBM) is all over it. Like any large Internet company, Big Blue is careful about which trends it latches onto. It was a good couple of years before they were spotted at the Web 2.0 conference, for example. However in the case of Internet of Things, IBM is proving itself to be an unusually early adopter.

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As the world financial crisis has gotten gradually worse over the past few weeks, I’ve been pondering what this means for the Web. … we’re clearly now at a point where the financial problems of the world will have a big impact on where Web Technology is headed. Indeed, it looks like we’ve arrived at one of those giant inflection points–where one Web era is usurped by another.

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If you’re a fan of Digg, you’ve probably been noticing that tech stories are becoming less and less a feature of the social news site. The reason? Digg is attempting to attract a large mainstream-user base. Just how low has tech sunk in Digg? We have new data that show that the number of front-page tech stories is halving every year on Digg.

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We received an interesting email today from Business Wire, a press-release wire service that Warren Buffett bought in March 2006. Currently Business Wire is ranked about No. 32 on the Techmeme Leaderboard, which puts it above some top tech blogs (but not ReadWriteWeb, which is ranked No. 6 currently). The email claimed that companies and marketers can use Business Wire to bypass journalists and bloggers to get into key news sources like Techmeme and search-engine results too. Is this true? I think it’s a fair claim–and there’s no reason why Business Wire shouldn’t feature in Techmeme if it is “breaking” news stories or is being linked to by bloggers. In fact it does indeed route around blogs that simply regurgitate PR–which is a good thing in my book!

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