It was all so amateurish, in a good way

THIS week's Web Scout was to start '07 with an atomic bang: a column detailing the swirling intrigue and recrimination surrounding New Media's highest-profile divorce (stay tuned). However, as deadline approached, it became clear that the tangle of allegations required more investigative spadework than time allowed, and so I fell shamelessly back on the oldest, most reliable of saws in the column writer's toolbox: Predictions 2007.

Fortunately, turning to the question of "Where the heck are these Internets going?," it became evident that I had stumbled into a blessedly volatile and uncertain subject.

Online 2006 was the year of Lonelygirl, exploding Diet Coke bottles and yawning kitten videos. The world spent its days at the office mesmerized by the site of anything weird, quirky, cute or aggressively obnoxious that could be documented by a very cheap video camera. Trooping across our laptops was a parade of human oddities and low-cost stunts unearthed in the darkest reaches of YouTube and forwarded by friends equally desperate to avoid work.

And as the carnival grew, it became the year when the amateurs attempted to turn pro; the portals were crowded with video bloggers (real, fictional, meta, or some hybrid of all) attempting to become the Jack Parr, Jay Leno, Jack Kerouac or "Law & Order" of the online world.

But now, with the commercial possibilities of online entertainment out of the box, the looming question is: Are the major producers (the networks, studios, Jerry Bruckheimer) going to continue to cede this space to amateurs, or will 2007 be the turning point, the year the Internet becomes a mere colony of Big Entertainment?

Will we, two years hence, look back at the 2006 fantasia as a quaint prenatal stage before professionalized people figured out how to really give us what we want? Or will the future hold merely an arms race, as webcam kids attempt to push the medium to ever-increasing heights of spectacle? Can these heroes of the New Age compete with Big Entertainment once it enters the fray -- or perhaps the question to ask is, can Jerry Bruckheimer compete with yawning kittens, exploding soda bottles and teenage girls spilling their secrets?

What the experts foresee

I turned to some people who, unlike a mere finger-pointing journalist, might actually know something about these issues: a few of the Web savants and watchers whose eggs and bacon are gathered by knowing their way around the big issues of the future: