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Well, another year's nearly done - 2008 will forever be known as jam-packed with big, momentous events: the world's financial crisis, the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States, the final departure of George W. Bush, to name a few. It's time to sit back, enjoy holiday treats and reflect with colleagues, friends and family on the Year That Was.

Of course, the world of technology, science and business had a particularly big year. It was a transformative year in tech, full of people, ideas and events that will continue to define our world well into 2009.

Here's a list of my personal Cheers and Jeers for 2008 when it comes to technology, business and science.

Cheers to Twitter. It seems simple enough, a 140-character post that tells the world what you're doing right now. Yet this remarkable service finally went mainstream in 2008, and the results were positively tectonic in nature: everyone from Barack Obama to CBC News reporters to social activists to corporate CEOs are now tweeting. Why do people care about Twitter? It's immediate, effective and to the point. It's fascinating to read. Most of all, it just works. Twitter is making a big impact on the worlds of blogging, start-ups and the media and will continue to grow well into the next several years.

Jeers to Yahoo! One of the Web's early superstars is bearing witness to an unpleasant decline. The reasons? Internecine battles between the company's board of directors, a long, painfully drawn-out takeover bid by Microsoft that ultimately went nowhere, attempts by corporate raider Carl Icahn to take over the Yahoo! board, the forcing out of company founder Jerry Yang - it goes on and on and on. Add to this concerns over whether outdated, portal-based services like Yahoo! can survive in economically turbulent times, and you have a company that desperately needs to get its groove back in 2009.

Cheers to Sony. After what felt like an eternity of the Japanese mega-corporation's blundering with bad product lunches, DRM-laden services and other problems, it looks like the company may finally be turning a corner this year. The Playstation 3's impressive technology is being exploited more and more by game developers after a slow start and the company has released the truly excellent S-Series MP3 Walkman. Still, the big prize is Sony's redemption in the home video market. After losing the format war to VHS back in the early 1980s, Sony has claimed total victory in today's format war with the mass-market adoption of Blu-Ray discs. The technology giant seems to be turning it around.

Jeers to Apple. After several years of great success, Apple has not had a good 2008. The second-generation iPhone release in July was nothing short of a public relations nightmare, never mind Apple's inability to meet consumer demand and the global outage of iTunes on release day. The iPhone 3G model was plagued with numerous problems, including poor reception, crashing apps and numerous other issues only rectified after public outcries and threats of class action lawsuits. Add to this an underwhelming reception to the new iPod line, a muted response to the MacBook Air and real concerns over the health of CEO Steve Jobs and you have a company that really needs to think differently for 2009.

Cheers to Barack Obama. Aside from all the usual platitudes about America's president-elect, Obama and his campaign team built on the Web-based candidacy of 2004's Howard Dean and put it into overdrive. Obama's campaign was the first truly digital presidential campaign. Obama's digital outreach to Americans was nothing short of incredible: his website was well designed and Web 2.0-friendly, he was routinely seen using a Blackberry throughout the campaign, and is ditching the old-school weekly radio address in favour of weekly YouTube postings. He's already made great use of government websites to recruit new talent and may be the first president in American history to use a laptop in the Oval Office. He's included a number of progressively minded people on issues of network neutrality and ISP regulation on his team. In terms of mounting a digital, 21st century campaign, Obama has set a new benchmark.

Jeers to John McCain and Canada's political parties. When news came down that John McCain had never sent an e-mail or even used Google, the generation gap between him and Obama had never become clearer. More pointedly, Obama has made it impossible for any future presidential candidates to claim ignorance about technology. Canadian political parties took some baby steps in this year's federal election toward more digital outreach, but the results were still half-hearted and failed to inspire youth engagement in the process. If 2008's politics taught us anything, it's that the Web is starting to define political campaigns and not the other way around. Canadian politicians should take note.

Cheers to America's FCC and Canada's CRTC. In a stunning rebuke to the Bush Era of deregulation at all costs, the U.S.'s Federal Communications Commission is turning on companies like Comcast for throttling customers' BitTorrent traffic in the United States. Here in Canada, the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission is in the midst of intense hearings over Bell's activity in throttling Internet traffic and manipulating third-party Internet traffic used on Bell DSL lines. After years of questions over these organizations' relevancy, our media regulators seemed in 2008 to suddenly be developing a backbone and are standing up for the public interest online.

Jeers to paranoid, censorship-happy governments. This was not a good year for privacy and personal freedom in the Digital Age. Three nations in particular - the United Kingdom, Australia and China - spent this past year embroiled in controversies over the continuing encroachment of government surveillance over its citizens. In the U.K., the Labour government is making noises to make every e-mail, phone call and Skype call registered on a national database. Recently, a bill was introduced in the British House of Commons to make it impossible to buy a cellphone - pre-paid included - without a government-issued passport. A national ID card is being pushed ahead for all British citizens to carry, and the country has more than four million public surveillance cameras online with more on the way. Australia is quickly becoming one of the most censoring nations on Earth with its introduction in 2008 of a tiered access bill to the Web, which would filter out "offensive materials" from people. And while China offered nearly unprecedented access to the Web during this year's Beijing Olympics, the country remains stuck behind the Great Firewall of China with the Communist Party's vast invasions of people's privacy online.

Cheers to small business. You're the backbone of Canada's economy and our greatest source of economic strength in these tough times. You've taken steps to adopt new, innovative technologies for your businesses in 2008, including local search, enabling blogs, radical transparency and even Facebook pages. Unlike big corporations, small business can and must move quickly to survive. In 2008, this promise held true. Good on you all.

Cheers to you. That's right, you. The people. This was the year the Web finally moved out of being just a distribution platform for content and became something more: an activist platform, a place to confirm and refute ideas and to act. In Canada, we saw companies like Rogers taken to task over web-based petitions and forums calling on better iPhone voice-and-data plans - the protests worked and Rogers responded. Sites like SaveOurNet.ca and Facebook have become forums for concerned Canadians to speak out on net neutrality. Sites like FactCheck.org, Huffingtonpost.com, Wikipedia and many others became effective campaign tools in the U.S. presidential election, almost all of which were powered by groups of engaged citizens. After a year of nearly non-stop bad news, it's heartening to see our beloved Internet maturing into a powerful tool for real change. You did all this.

For all these reasons, let's toast to the end of 2008. While it was a tough year for the world in general, it was a fascinating, politically charged one for the world of tech. Rest assured, it's going to be a big year for tech again in 2009.