Sometimes it can feel good to stand up and admit your fears: “My name is Mark and I want the bandwagon to slow down.”

Last year, IT leaders were bombarded with a deluge of green computing hype and fears about the impending doom of the planet.

Woe betide the IT leader that failed to consolidate their servers and virtualise their applications.

But this is 2008 and now everyone ­- IT suppliers, PR merchants and journalists ­- are looking for the next big thing to hype.

In the wake of the ongoing excitement surrounding Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace, the next 12 months are likely to be the year of collaboration and social networking.

This all sounds a bit passé, I hear you say ­- searching Facebook for old flames is very 2007.

But there is the rub; for as this month’s cover feature suggests, very few businesses have worked out how to make the most of all things Web 2.0.

Through wikis, blogs and mash-ups, our analysis illustrates how firms are often guilty of dismissing the potential of social networking technologies because of concerns surrounding time management, data storage and information security.

Despite such concerns, Gartner analyst Mark Raskino says chief information officers (CIOs) can see that consumers are becoming more and more involved in social networking.

And decisions about opting in or out will be less about future opportunity and more a matter of current necessity.

As a result, Raskino says 2008 could be the tipping point for Web 2.0 technologies.

Expect, therefore, to be hit by a barrage of social software and collaboration conference opportunities during the next 12 months, not to mention an associated and not-too-subtle dollop of hype.

But surely, if you do have to jump on the bandwagon, it is better to take a leading edge in social networking developments rather than a follow-the-leader approach.

And the opportunities for forward-thinking CIOs are currently plentiful, with Gartner suggesting there are few concrete examples of a strategic commitment to social software.

Grasp the Web 2.0 reins now and your fears of a runaway bandwagon will be released.

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