I don't normally jump on these sorts of bandwagons, but I saw this group writing topic on Web Worker Daily last week, and the timing couldn't have been better. We'd just received our first snowfall of they year, you see, and the answer couldn't have been more obvious.
I believe 2008 will be the Year of the Web Worker because people can't drive anymore. They can't drive when it's sunny, and they sure as hell can't drive when the roads are the slightest bit iffy.
We got about four inches of snow last Tuesday night, into Wednesday morning. It took me almost two hours to get into work in the morning. With clear roads, I could make the drive in about 20 minutes; most mornings, I'm there in a half hour, door-to-door.
When I drove out of my driveway, I drove through about four inches of snow, but as soon as I got about two blocks from home, between the traffic and the snow plows, the roads had no more than 1/8 inch of slush on them. Nowhere was there any real snow on the roads to speak of.
Yet, the roads were completely blocked. It took me an hour just to get to the highway. And the whole time, all the cars are sitting there burning gas and time.
The cost of this idiocy to our economy has to be staggering.
We seem not to want to educate drivers on how to handle this white stuff, and to be fair, I don't know that more education would do the trick while you've still got idiots talking on their cell phones and who knows what else while they're supposed to be driving. No, I think the only reasonable way to go here is to do more telecommuting.
Does that constitute "the Year of the Web Worker?" I don't know, but it's got to help.