What were the key events of the decade?

The decade was defined by 2 events that occurred seven years and a few blocks apart.

The attacks on the World Trade Center in New York & on the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, killed nearly 3,000 people and directly affected many more. They also led to a chain of events that altered the lives of hundreds of thousands in Afghanistan and Iraq, Bali and Madrid, London and Mumbai, the capturing of Saddam Hussein and other events throughout the world. It also shed more light on how evil and sinister the Palestinian mob was that killed the 2 Israeli Soldiers & Ramallah police station in 2000.

The collapse of Lehman Brothers on 15 September 2008 showed just how serious the financial crisis was, and symbolised the precarious nature of the economics that had underpinned material prosperity during the Noughties.

That said, the sight of stunned employees carrying away their cardboard boxes didn't encourage us to look any more kindly upon bankers.

But isn't that a very Western perspective? After all, far more people - about 230,000 - died in the Indian Ocean tsunami on 26 December 2004 than perished on 9/11. But then again they weren't murdered by terrorist they died from a natural disaster. When talking about disasters should we forget about Hurrican Katrina?

Do we in the West disregard that catastrophe, and Cyclone Nargis in Burma, the Bam earthquake in Iran and the earthquakes in china because they didn't happen in the US?

Depending where you are in the world, did the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan have more impact on your life, or East Timor finally achieving independence? Cyprus joining the EU, or the retirement of Fidel Castro in Cuba?

Maybe you ignored politics altogether, and the big news event of the decade was Lance Armstrong winning his seventh Tour de France, the Led Zeppelin reunion, the end of Concorde, The miracle landing on the Hudson River or the arrival of the final Harry Potter book?

The overdose of Michael Jackson which led to his death transcended geography, culture and age, although the compulsively weird spectacle of his funeral was a real only-in-America moment.

To identify the really big stories, we have to consider not just the interest they generated, but how much real impact they had on people's lives; although in some cases the jury will still be out as we enter 2010.

Debate continues to rage over whether global warming is the single biggest threat to life on earth, or whether the Copenhagen Climate Summit will turn out to be a lot of fuss over nothing.

It may be too early to say whether the stuttering launch of the Large Hadron Collider or the election of President Obama will turn out to be false dawns. By contrast, the election of George W Bush eight years before was more like a false start; the closeness of the Florida vote - the so-called "hanging chads" controversy - delayed the final decision for weeks.

The same fears were raised about the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, but it lived up to expectations, and not only as a sporting spectacle performed by Michael Phelp's 8 Gold Medals; the event showed the extent to which China had been welcomed as a truly global power, with an economic heft that outweighed the private qualms that many governments had about its human rights record.

But I've got a hunch that one of the really big stories of the decade went all but unreported at the time.

The launch of Wikipedia, on 15 January 2001 represented a fundamental shift in the hierarchy of information. Or what about Google in 2000 becoming the default search behind Yahoo & introducing adwords which took google to one of the most powerful companies on the planet.

Along with Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, blogs and the other manifestation of Web 2.0, it meant that the final judgment as to what was significant would never again be left to a self-appointed elite of media professionals & let us not forget the iPhone which changed how we interact with the world from our phone.