It occurred to me today that we are getting close to Christmas.

This may not have been much of a revelation for other people, yourself included, but for me it came a as a bit of a surprise. The few presents I have bought have been done so with the help of others, which has partly taken out the associated stress of shopping at this time of year, however it also means that so far I’ve not really drunk in any festive spirit.

I did fetch the tree down from the loft a number of weeks ago, and also think I saw some tinsel recently too. Other than that, exposure to truly Christmassy things have been missing to date. Even this year’s Christmas number one is not very Christmassy, but then again, I can’t remember the last time one was.

For the most part of this week I’ve been grappling with proposal documents, long days in London learning tag-based codes, eating pies, drinking in Stourbridge, spending hours getting a bulb fixed, and picking up my new chair from Rotherham, which gave me an excuse to see folks in Sheffield. It could have been any other week in the year.

My todo list in things has become far more static than it should be, and I’m now finding that although I’ve reduced the number of items ever in my inbox at any one time, these have simply been translated into list items.

But this isn’t a moan, more an observation. I’m now quite looking forward to a few days off and all that excess - I just wish this weekend had been a bit longer.

I was pleased to discover this gem in the Stourbridge News this week. This free CV listing service has been running a while, but it wasn’t until this week that I noticed the fantastic social observation of my local area which the illustration provides.

Clearly the demographic illustrated here is a true representation of the cross-section of society which can be found in Stourbridge. If you have ever visited here you can always expect to see number of road workers, cleaners, doctors, office workers and police officers. What you might be more surprised to learn is that one in every 17 people in Stourbridge is an astronaut.

Another fact that you may not be aware of is that Stourbridge has a higher ratio of Ninjas to any other single profession in the town. Both red and white Ninjas live in the Dudley Metropolitan Borough, but of course, you wouldn’t know that because Stourbridge-bred Ninjas are very, very good at their job.

We also have a number of celebrities living here. Chef from South Park, Britney Spears and both Roy and Moss from The IT Crowd.

Clearly the most dangerous job in Stourbridge is being a nurse. Most nurses live in fear of the famous yet terrible brain-sucking monster, which of course eats their head like a creme egg.

I hope you now have a little more insight into Stourbridge and the sort of people who live and work here.

Ok, so this is a little deeper than what I usually pen on this blog, but as the economic screw continues to tighten, it’s of course of interest to speculate what this means for the web, our industry and it’s immediate future.

I’ve been saying for quite some time (if I’ve put a couple of pints down my neck) that I believed that the web bubble would burst once more. Perhaps not anywhere like as seriously as back in the early noughties, the big businesses may have matured a bit, but certainly in my view there is scope for a temporary collapse in certain areas.

What I really mean by this is the vast amount of web start up ‘ideas’ that until recently been getting investment. Not businesses building the web (development firms), and not web businesses already with dedicated audiences (MySpace, Digg etc), but specifically all those new venture capital funded ‘ideas’ that were, and to some extent still are, appearing like dew each and every morning.

In the past year or two, there has seemed to be an increasing, eventually endless, well of funds. It’s been overflowing and allowing pretty much any web-based idea to be transformed into a product. Especially if it was ‘social’. Perfect times for innovators - if it sounds good, throw some pennies at it and let it flow. If it doesn’t take off, no worries, the next idea might be the big one. New Money web-types were more than happy to step in and become VCs themselves - investing their time, knowledge and well earned cash into more of the same.

It wasn’t just the big web powerhouses chucking out products (although Google was doing this too), but large numbers of these products were developed ‘in-house’ by small teams or individuals, and the sheer number was mainly down to the vast number of small web designer/developer/agencies that were sponsoring their own internal products to fill niches.

The result was a saturation and a mass of overlap. Most people realised you couldn’t build the next Facebook, but you could try and capitalise on the digital renaissance, and an ever more savvy and curious-minded web community. You can plainly see the successes and failures of this gold rush. For many developers, If there wasn’t an application out there that did exactly what you wanted, you just prototyped it over the weekend, slapped a beta star on it and put it out there for the masses.

You could say that it was hopelessly optimistic, but at the same time the climate was good and it really didn’t matter if your idea sank because ultimately the only thing at stake was a bit of time, and that wasn’t a problem as it was all being bankrolled by some venture capitalist or your primary business - probably making websites.

Diversity has meant so many ideas have flooded the web in the past few years (what will probably be looked back upon as the 2.0 boom time) but clearly there were too many ideas that were simply not viable as full on businesses. If you can name ten, twenty, thirty successful web apps, you eventually would have to stop. But if you flick to the homepage of something like feedmyapp (a site I randomly selected from Google), there are more applications in the first category alone than most web-users could name (and the first category is Accountancy).

Of course there will always be some amount of duplication on the web - after all Facebook wasn’t the only social networking app ever developed - but it became one of the miracle heroes of 2.0 - and suddenly had a disproportionate share of the market. The thing is, this energy and belief that any Tom, Dick or Mark Zuckerberg could create a world-dominating, popular web app soon appealed to every developer in the world. And with ten-figure numbers acquisition numbers being banded around (even if it wasn’t real money), it just whipped the hysteria up further.

I think it would be fair to say that had the Google/YouTube, AOL/Bebo or Last.fm/CBS deals been on the table now rather than a year ago, they might not all have turned out the way they did. Who would have thought one year ago that Yahoo!, packed to the gunnels with some of the best developers in the business, would be begging Microsoft for a takeover and saying goodbye to their CEO Jerry Yang in fairly ungracious circumstances?

Clearly the impact of the downturn is already being felt in these big organisations, and I really wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t see a decline in the number of ‘throw-away’ web apps being produced in the coming weeks and months. Google doesn’t seem to be relentlessly pursuing hundreds of new developments, but rather is spending time refining what it’s got - solid products that seemed to resonate, such as free alternatives to office applications. While experimentation will continue and more fundamental ideas are likely to be pursued, the amount of hours developers will be pumping into personal projects in the near future are probably going to wane significantly in both big and small organisations.

I can imagine one day we may well get back to the lofty web-app factory days of early 2008, but it’s hard to imagine in the current climate that businesses and VCs will be wanting (or able) to invest the money in web apps that might or might not succeed.

And this comes to one of my biggest questions - Facebook. Seemingly a giant of the web industry, this monolith network feels to me like the interest surrounding it has probably peaked. That’s not to say thousands of people are not still signing up daily, but for those who work in the web I think most people would agree the initial excitement has passed somewhat. Recent developments such as the restructuring of the design and attempts to allow ‘externalising’ have perhaps been the first signals of change of direction that could, in my view, be the tipping point.

I’m not saying we’re going to see it collapse or go away - there is simply too much invested for that to happen - but I can’t help wonder where exactly all their money is coming from. Mark Zuckerberg is mosquito-like in his attempts to dodge questions on the state of their finances, and I can’t help but think the valuation on the company might have been somewhat over-inflated by the ‘buzz’ factor that seems now to be wearing off a little.

Then when last week Pownce made the announcement that a terminal decision had been made about it’s future it probably came as a surprise (maybe not a shock) to the wider web community. Dedicated users were clearly at a loss, but in reality there must have been a hundred other relatively unknown applications along the same lines that have already failed. Pownce may have initially done well because of it’s endorsement from certain members of the web elite, but it is entirely representative of the 99% of web apps that you won’t remember this time next year, that is if you ever heard of them in the first place. That’s not a criticism of Pownce, it just illustrates one high profile casualty. Just because you build something well, dedicate hours and hours to it, run it with enthusiasm, create a burgeoning community and look good, it doesn’t mean it’s invincible or will even generate enough to sustain itself.

On the flip side, I wonder whether MySpace will be a winner in these uncertain times. Murdoch’s injection of cash seems to have kept the profile high, and it’s proper move into music seems to have increased it’s credibility and longevity somehow - something Facebook hasn’t successfully achieved so far. Amazon also seems to be going from strength to strength. Cheaper music seems to be the key to the consumer heart, and stepping into the UK with MP3 prices that now significantly undercut iTunes seems like a savvy and well-timed move. In line with their ever-cheapening products for ever-more demanding developers, they look to me one of the stronger ones going into the recession.

With bleak expectations on the social/webapp front, my other ideas maybe seemingly contradictory regarding the other place where big money is involved - e-commerce.

When the going gets tough, especially in retail, businesses will start turning to balance sheets and trying to cut costs. My guess is that following January we will see a number of rather surprising big store closures, and in many cases, a retraction to smaller, pared down, web-based commerce.

High street businesses such as WHSmith and JJB Sports are well known to be struggling, and Woolworths have already bit the dust. Predictions in the papers in the past few days have said that this weekend people will have been visiting all these usual high street colossuses, but then heading home to buy what they saw online at two-thirds the price. This probably doesn’t sound that huge - people having been buying online in significant numbers for years now - but I wonder if this won’t be another major win for e-commerce providers. I really wouldn’t be surprised if internet sales are significantly up this Christmas (as a proportion of overall sales) as retailers struggle to sell goods in stores where the prices are traditionally higher.

And this is why I think the web industry as a whole may not suffer quite as badly as others. That’s the same view I had six months ago, but now I have slightly different reasons for making the judgement. I think although there maybe a collapse in the VC funded market for hundreds of little applications all doing minutely different things, the amount of work available to the web industry may well now receive a shot in the arm by yet another consumer and retailer lurch towards the internet as a place where goods and running costs are lower, and the inevitable scramble for the remaining traditional highstreet based companies to catch the magical web zephyr, and for existing web retailers to get more aggressive.

Of course, I maybe entirely wrong; it has happened before (twice perhaps I think - once was a spelling error). However, I would like to remain optimistic that friends, colleagues and I will be able to get through this period without having to endure the worst of an economic slump. I’m not so ignorant that I don’t think things will get worse, but as it stands I don’t believe we are quite as badly placed as perhaps those who are in other business sectors, and if anything am curious and intrigued by the whole odd situation that the world currently finds itself in.

Now go and have a lie down - you’ll probably need it if you read all of that. Opinions welcome…

I’ve wanted to visit Switzerland for a long time. Of all the western European nations, it’s one of the most interesting politically, historically, scenically and racially and so I was really pleased when James (who I tend to do photography trips with) decided he’d like to try it too.

I gave myself the week off and we flew from Luton on a bitter Sunday morning, and were more than relieved that despite the temperature in Geneva, the weather was crisper; less sleety and less wet.

We spent the next few days as the only residents of a hotel in Interlaken (quite literally, even the staff weren’t on-site most of the time) and took time to explore Murren, Thun, Wengen and number of other mountainside/lakeside villages. Ski season hasn’t yet commenced, but the first snow is falling, which made for ideal photography conditions - unspoilt slopes, no overcrowding and complete isolation in some cases. On a couple of occasions we ended up in normally buzzing villages only to find that most of the transportation wasn’t running, let alone anyone else in sight. It was highlighted by the fact in the five or so days I was away I didn’t have a single opportunity to speak to anyone who wasn’t Swiss.

Limited German and French didn’t matter much as most people speak English, but I actually enjoy the challenge and being the only other two languages I have any knowledge of, meant I got to try both.

The highlight of Interlaken was definitely heading up to the Jungfraujoch - 3471 metres. Stupidly, despite my own interest in the mountain and it’s conquest, it had completely escaped me that the Eiger (especially the White Spider, or famous North Face) was actually in the immediate group of three mountains ahead of us. It really was stunning. The weather had been snowy and cloudy below about 2000m, but from the railway station at Kleine Scheidegg, looking up at the three mountains, we had exceptionally good visibility.

It’s expensive in Switzerland, but Swiss Pass railway passes halved the price on the few lines that aren’t ‘all inclusive’. You could feel the altitude, although it wasn’t anything like Tibet (where dizziness turned into a splitting headache), and instead made the whole experience even more surreal. Outside on the plateau the temperature was a chilling -18.8°C but it made a great platform for taking photographs. The only downside of these pre-prepared spaces is that everyone gets the same image - but unfortunately there is little other option at that sort of height without a helicopter and money to burn.

On Wednesday we returned to Geneva and had a chance to have a look around the Old Town, not before James took the hotel’s rooms to pieces (critically, not literally). As someone who designs them for a living he was able to point out some pretty clever cost saving techniques that you wouldn’t necessarily have considered before.

Historically of course, Geneva has an important role to play in both the League of Nations and the UN, and it was interesting to step in the same footsteps as some of the greatest world leaders. Inter-war European relations was one of my pet topics until A-Level and it really puts things into perspective when you see the rooms from where Haile Selassie made his impassioned plea and where the Geneva Convention was first signed in the Alabama Room at the Hotel de Ville. All good history stuff.

After getting back in time for Saturday’s rugby, I caught the train to meet with Sean before the match. I don’t think we expected too much from England’s performance, but after a fairly stale first half against the All Blacks (6-12), the second half could have provided a surprise result. It did, and we lost spectacularly.

Actually it wasn’t all bad, but some pretty awful discipline left us playing with 14 men for most of the game, and some lazy play and lazy kicking meant we we’re pretty stuffed.

When I got back at around 11pm I was surprised to find myself in the car heading over to Kidderminster to meet up with George, Tom and Gaz for a celebratory drink (George getting back from Canada). We ended up in a lock-in I think because the beer was still flowing until the early hours, but I had the benefit of a fantastically comfy spare bed and didn’t wake up until midday.

A good week off, all-in-all. Photos are here.