The thing is, you need to look out for the pattern of a real review as opposed to the one someone’s churned out for the sake of a few pence (or cents, in Belkin’s case) or – in the case of book reviews on Amazon – where the author, publisher or friend of either has posted the review themselves.

Anyway, to fight back against the inevitable backlash I thought I’d quickly write about ten brilliant things the internet has done.

10. Giving the public a voice

The internet has been the ultimate democratiser (a new word I’ll be sending to the Oxford dictionary folks soon), with the public being given a voice via everything from user reviews on Amazon (despite the shambles mentioned above) to blog sites that have the power to affect decisions. Remember what life was like back in 1994?

9. Spread BBC radio across the globe

I was listening to Radio 6 Music this morning, and was once again struck by how absolutely fantastic it is. Quite aside from the quality of the music and the eclectic guests (this morning, a master cooper from Wadsworth Brewery was explaining why he was looking for an apprentice), the DJs are actually there to talk about music rather than just inflate their own egos. And now everyone can listen to Radio 6 Music – not to mention Radio 4 – wherever they are in the world, so long as they have an internet connection.

8. Facebook

I’m currently in my loving Facebook phase, having passed through the Barrier Of Irritation  - thanks in part to sage advice from Lise (thanks Lise) about fiddling around with the settings to get rid of the biggest reminder/post spam irritants. And now it’s become a source of entertainment, whether via ridiculous comments by friends and colleagues or my own not-so-secret addiction to Facebook Scrabble, and very occasionally information too.

7. Built communities

Whatever your interest, be it building bicycle wheels or following Stargate Atlantis, there will be a community you can join to share stories, successes and tips. Compare that to the pre-internet world, where if there weren’t already a number of like-minded souls in your town – and one of them had the gumption to set up a  club – then you were alone.

6. Email

Something so ubiquitous it’s now simply annoying. But who’d go back to paper mail?

5. Created online gaming

As it happens I’m no great fan of online gaming – unless you count the Scrabble I mentioned earlier – but even I can see the mass appeal of playing against a worldful of opponents rather than just a couple of friends or (more likely) yourself.

4. Ended pub arguments

Although ending pub arguments in itself is arguably not a great thing, thanks to Wikipedia (keep that salt handy) and just the whole resource that is the web, you can now get hold of information in a trice. In the olden days, we needed to buy the Encylopedia Britannica.

3. You can’t lose your documents

Thanks to excellent online backup services such as Carbonite and Mozy you now have to try very hard to actually lose documents, while the likes of Dropbox and Live Mesh have solved the tiresome problem of sharing documents between computers that aren’t on a network. No more burning to CD, no more searching through piles of miscellaneous media to find vital files. Hurrah!

2. Made software free

Despite the best efforts of Adobe, Microsoft and Symantec, there’s absolutely no need to pay for software any more. The internet has made it easier than ever to co-develop open-source software, and we’ve also seen the advent of free software as a marketing tool – so get anti-virus cover for free, but expect nag screens for the full internet security suite. And to top all that, the lovely people at Google have made brilliant software such as SketchUp free as well.

1. Means I never need go shopping again

But my all-time favourite thing about the internet is that it means I never need go shopping again. For example, I bought two pairs of shoes online last night. And there really isn’t anything you can’t buy: contact lenses, books, holidays, organic vegetable boxes, music… it’s little wonder that Woolworths, Zavvi and numerous other high-street names are finding life tough.

Most embarrassing event of the year

The will they, won’t they, courtship between Microsoft and Yahoo was just about the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever seen. Yahoo couldn’t resist Microsoft’s bedroom eyes, but didn’t want to appear cheap, while Microsoft made the old lover’s mistake of seeming overeager. Microsoft proposed, Yahoo said no… for a bit, then yes, but it was too late, Microsoft was shunned and not coming back. Yahoo’s share price is now somewhere south of hell, Yang’s out of a job and Steve Ballmer needs a new plan. Worst first date ever.

Brilliant thing of the year

Tough one this. There were a few brilliant things shortlisted for this award, including Fusion Man’s flight across the channel on a jetwing, the Sony eBook reader and MI6’s decision to advertise on Facebook. The winner, though, is Dropbox. Nothing’s made this much difference to the way I work since the introduction of minimum wage. I work on a file in the office, forget about it, go home and there it is waiting for me. Marvellous stuff. It just works. No fiddling, or hassle. It’s everything technology and innovation is supposed to be, but never quite manages.

Weirdest moment of the year

Stephen Fry is awesome. Simple fact. One moment he’s a silver-tongued sophisticate, charming birds out of trees with prose soft enough to fall asleep on, and the next moment he’s a foul-mouthed fury, breathing fire at Vista in language that sends sailors scurrying back to their bunks. And doing it on Twitter, no less. If anybody says they saw that coming they’re a liar and a brigand, sir, a brigand.

Most soul destroying moment of the year

The destruction of my pen drive. The realisation that I hadn’t backed anything up for three years. The complete lack of sympathy from… well anybody. Lesson well and truly learned.

Thing that nearly made my head explode in 2008

The devil that is my work PC came close, as did those ridiculous self-service machines in Tesco. Ultimately though it was the outrage at the Prime Minister’s comedy dismissal of the Jeremy Clarkson for Prime Minister petition. It was a bandwagon with David Cameron at the wheel, and half a million people with nothing better to do clinging on for dear life. Brown could have appeared at a press conference wearing a Panda’s head for a hat, and it wouldn’t have stoked up such strong feeling. It was funny people. Get a grip.

Me VS the World moment

If you’re going to take a kicking, you might as well make it worthwhile. So, it was with my Gary McKinnon post, which expressed in no uncertain times my utter lack of sympathy for the alleged hacker. Other people, vocal people, have quite a lot. Some of the opinions were eloquent, others were… erm, less eloquent… but none of them have changed my mind. If you put yourself in the way of a car, expect to get run over.

Thing I was utterly wrong about this year

Facebook. Again. Year after year I predict the demise of Fadbook, and year after year, it carries on growing, despite the fact that I’m still not entirely sure what it’s good for. This year, I almost escaped its prodding, pushing, ninja-attacking clutches, only to go on holiday and have all my new-found friends post their snaps on the damn thing. So, I’m back, again, and hating myself for it. The mafia would be easier to leave than Facebook.

Microsoft’s Live Mesh and online start-up Dropbox have come up with similar answers to this problem, offering online services that keep your files in synch across multiple PCs. Both are at the invite-only test phase at present, but we’ve wormed out way into the private betas. Here’s how they compare.

MICROSOFT LIVE MESH

Unlike a number of Microsoft’s other online initiatives, Live Mesh certainly doesn’t suffer from a lack of ambition. It eventually plans to synchronise files across a broad range of devices, ranging from PCs to smartphones to (whisper it) Macs.

For now, however, the service is restricted to XP and Vista PCs. You start by downloading the Live Mesh client software on to your PCs – and immediately recoil in astonishment as the software takes it upon itself to Auto Arrange the carefully placed icons on your Windows desktop. Not a good start.

Live Mesh accounts are linked to your Windows Live account, allowing the service to determine which other devices are connected to your Mesh. You give each new device a name (i.e. ‘work laptop’) to tell them apart in the Live Mesh device manager, and PCs can be added or removed at any time.

Files or folders are added to the Mesh simply by right-clicking on them and selecting Add Folder To Your Live Mesh. The folder instantly turns blue to signify that it’s part of the Mesh, and distinguish itself from ordinary files stored only locally on your PC.

Live Mesh now sets about uploading the contents of the synchronised file/folder to “the cloud”. Simultaneously, it will be creating a copy of that shared folder on to the desktop of every other PC that’s part of your Mesh. The shared folder is stored locally on each machine so that it remains available even when the PC is offline. Files can now be modified, added or removed from that shared folder using any PC in the Mesh, with changes synchronised across all other PCs on the Mesh as quickly as their network connections permit – within a few seconds, in our experience.

A sidebar attached to each Live Mesh folder handily keeps you updated on any activity in the folder, so you know instantly if someone’s edited a photo or removed a file, for example.

Microsoft’s clearly given some thought to potential synchronisation pitfalls. If you add a folder to the Live Mesh with an identical name to a folder on one of your other PCs, a “001” suffix is added to the new folder to prevent potential conflicts. And if you decide to remove a folder from the Mesh (which can only be done using the online interface), a copy of the folder remains on each PC, but it obviously won’t be synchronised from then on in.

Files stored on the Live Mesh aren’t only available on the connected PCs; they’re also available from any web browser, via the “Live Desktop”. Sadly, in typical Microsoft fashion, this has been thoroughly overcomplicated, not least because it uses Microsoft’s own Silverlight technology to create needless smooth-scrolling slideshows of images, for example, instead of simply providing access to your files. You’ll be both shocked and appalled to learn that this works remarkably better in Internet Explorer than it does in Firefox, where we experienced several crashes when trying to do something as simple as view a photo.

Worse still, if you want to share one of your Live Mesh folders with a friend or colleague, they have to use the Silverlight web interface, severely hampering what might otherwise have been a very cool feature indeed.

Nevertheless, Live Mesh remains an impressively powerful and extremely convenient service. Knowing that you can get access to certain folders from any net-connected PC – whether they are on the Mesh or not – provides real peace of mind. And with 5GB of storage to play with, it could even prove to be a decent fallback for backing up critical files.

DROPBOX

Dropbox is an altogether more simple affair. Once installed on your PC, a small box icon appears in your System Tray. Double-clicking on the box opens the Dropbox, where, as the name suggests, you simply drag and drop the files you want to share across your various PCs.

It’s not as convenient as the option to right click on any folder in Live Mesh, but it’s neater, with all your shared documents and folders conveniently stored in one place, rather than potentially strewn across your PC. As with Live Mesh, the files are instantly synchronised across all the PCs on which you’ve installed the Dropbox software.

If you want to share documents with friends or colleagues, they must be deposited in your Dropbox’s public folder. From here you can simply right click on the file and Dropbox automatically creates a public link. Email that link to a friend, and they can view the photo, document or whatever from the Dropbox website. Likewise, you can share entire folders, although this has to be managed through an online wizard.

Dropbox has been set up by a bunch of former MIT students, and so without a corporate battalion of servers to fall back on, the service only offers 2GB of storage compared to Live Mesh’s 5GB – but that’s still more than ample for sharing a selection of everyday files and folders that you want to access from anywhere.

Where Dropbox is streets ahead of Live Mesh is with its web interface. As with Microsoft’s service, you can log in from any web browser to get access to your files, but there’s no Silverlight-esque airs and graces: files are folders are neatly presented, and it’s easy to locate and download (if necessary) the files you need access to without any extra plug-ins.

In the end, the choice is between Microsoft’s powerful but slightly over-powering software, or a more nimble and lightweight rival. We’ve been here before, haven’t we?