Net Results:I was out in California over the holidays and, as usual, the Silicon Valley and Bay Area newspapers were full of year-end perspective on the technology industry, always a fascinating insider take on what was important and what didn't register at all in tech's heartland, writes Karlin Lillington.

The local angle is often quite different from what concerned the markets or people in other locations.

For the San Jose Mercury, main opinion columnist Scott Herhold's top 10 local news stories for 2006 included three technology stories, a clear demonstration of how closely entangled the Valley's sense of itself is to its connection to the technology industry.

Technology news doesn't rumble along in the background as it does in Ireland, but dominates. In Ireland, perhaps the e-voting fiasco would have qualified as a top news story in any overview, but that's about the only tech-angled national news story I can think of in recent years.

By contrast, Herhold not only had three tech selections, but they also appeared in his top four stories. At number four on his list was the stock options scam that has seen a roster of Valley tech companies having to restate earnings when it turned out they had altered the date on which options were given to executives to give them greater value. In other words, issuance dates were backdated in order to go to executives on dates when shares had the lowest values, giving the executives (and companies) the greatest financial gains.

A total of 40 Valley companies, and 200 overall, have been affected, including high fliers like Apple and Juniper Networks, Adobe and Electronic Arts, Xilinx and VeriSign, and close to 20 Valley execs have lost their jobs as a direct result of the scandal.

Yet, as Herhold notes, "the stock market shrugged. The market value of the Silicon Valley 150 [ the Mercury's tech company market index] was up 7 per cent."

At number two was "HP Snooping" - the boardroom spying and identity theft scandal at Valley kingpin Hewlett Packard. This is another saga of corporate misdoing that has shocked many admirers of HP but done no damage so far to its market value, even though former chairwoman Patricia Dunn was indicted on four felony counts.

And at number one? Perhaps hard to believe for those of us at a distance, but Herhold chose the Google-YouTube purchase as the top story of the year because "the deal said definitively that Silicon Valley had returned from the bust, with its old brio and some of its excesses ... It's the biggest story of the year because it speaks to what's possible in the Valley", he wrote.

Over in the San Francisco Chronicle's business section, a selection of top stories for 2006 included some of the same items and interesting additions. Number two on their list was "HP and the private eyes", while number four was the stock options fiasco.

Number six was "Glued to the YouTube", but the Chronicle sees the significance of the story not in Google's purchase of the video website, but the fact that the purchase symbolises a phenomenal shift towards the long-promised convergence of TV and net. Some 10 per cent of the US population now watches some TV via the internet, according to one survey, signalling a major cultural and media consumption shift.

Number seven was the rise of the MySpace-type social networking sites in 2006, with the article noting they aren't just the domain of the youth market any more. About a third of MySpace users are between age 35 and 49. The old stereotype of the lone, unsocial, net-obsessed geek isolated at a PC is just that - a stereotype. The web is where people increasingly go to find community, not avoid it.

And number eight for the Chronicle was "the rise of green tech", noting the rapid growth in technology companies focused on energy in Silicon Valley. That has meant new political involvement for the companies and their venture backers, notes the Chronicle.

The Valley supported to California governor Arnold Schwarzeneggar (aka "The Governator") when he brought in a bill to curb global warming in the state during the summer, though another eco-friendly ballot initiative backed by the green tech industry in November, to tax oil companies and use that funding to develop alternative energy sources, failed at the polls.

"Regardless of the new industry's mixed record at the polls, investors continue pumping money into [ green tech] - an estimated $3 billion (in 2006)," said the Chronicle.

Back at the Mercury, the business section had an end of year business quiz - in which every question was connected to the technology industry. The quiz included such puzzlers as: "What size bed did Sergey Brin request for Google's corporate jet?" The question fascinates me - mainly because it indicates the Mercury can (rightly) assume its business readership knows who Sergey Brin is in the first place and that he founded Google and hence would have any role in selecting corporate jet bed sizes. (The answer is a California King - an extra large version of the king-sized bed that originated in California.)

And that's exactly why it is such fun to get the Valley's year-end take on itself - it isn't quite like anywhere else when it comes to tech.