Geeky future-of-mankind type of thing

I'm reading this special report on Google in the Economist (which has an associated story on the concept of "Web 2.0", that buzzword coined in the seminal O'Reilly article). Things do look quite exciting around the corner. AJAX has been a buzzword of web programming for about a year or two (if you don't know what it is - it's used in Gmail and Flickr, basically so that small web requests are done w/o reloading a page) and it's on my top list of things to learn this month (along with the Google Maps API, Ruby on Rails and ActionScript), and it's just one of those new technologies that facilitate user interaction, thus encouraging user participation to the web.