The list of the new Seven Wonders of the World issued by a private Swiss foundation was a big disappointment because it missed out on one of the real wonders of the world, here in Southeast Asia - Angkor Wat in Siem Reap, Cambodia. One has to wonder how the compilers of the new list could have missed that. Other famous places that suffered the same fate included the Acropolis in Athens, the famous statues of Easter Island, Turkey's Hagia Sophia and Russia's Kremlin and St Basil's Cathedral.

Of course, voting online and by telephone and text messages - which is how the final list was compiled - can be anything but an accurate reflection of the truth. With about 100 million votes submitted over the past six months, it would be hard to dispute and verify each one in the case that certain sites received multiple votes from partisan supporters. Although, with modern technology and powerful computers, these votes could be tabulated and analysed, if need be, to find out who voted from where, from which telephone number, and how many times they repeated the messages.

In any case, despite many classic wonders being left off the list, it is nice to know what the rest of the world thought the new Seven Wonders should be. After all, the first naming of the Seven Wonders of the World was 2,000 years ago, and each of the sites was in the Middle East. Of the original Wonders, only the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt have survived until today.

One should not take the new list too seriously. The new sites have been considered wonders of the world for a long time already, with or without the current exercise to officially declare them as such. The Great Wall of China, Petra in Jordan, Brazil's statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, Peru's Machu Picchu, Mexico's Chichen Itza pyramid, the Colosseum in Rome and India's Taj Mahal all attract thousands if not millions of tourists each year. A trip to any of those countries would not be complete without taking in these attractions.

Of course, if one looks around the world the list of wonders is actually endless - especially in places that were once part of ancient civilisations - for instance, the Borobudur Temple of Indonesia, the Shwedagon Pagoda of Burma, Stonehenge in England and the Throne Hall of Persepolis in Iran, among many others. Then there are the more modern wonders that everybody appreciates. These are also abundant and include the Eiffel tower, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Statue of Liberty, the Sydney Opera House, and even the Channel Tunnel between Britain and France.

The campaign to choose the seven new wonders was begun in 2001 by Swiss adventurer Bernard Weber. His Switzerland-based foundation, called New7Wonders, received almost 200 nominations from around the world. At the end of 2005 the list of candidates was narrowed down to 21. The organisers said they wanted to create awareness of the world's great cultural sites and the need to preserve them.

For serious-minded people, the safest bet to preserve the world's cultural sites is to have them listed as World Heritage Sites by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco). At the moment, there are 851 such Unesco sites all over the world. They will be there always. The best thing is that Unesco keeps updating the list and adding new sites. More and more heritage sites are being named, protected and preserved. This is serious work and funds are desperately needed to preserve the sites. These sites are chosen with no fanfare or television coverage, no champagne pops or celebrity sponsorship or media hype.

Ensuring that the world's heritage sites survive for the next millennium will take more than online voting. It will require humankind's commitment, from generation to generation, to ensure that these historical and cultural monuments remain standing. We have learned the hard way that thousands of years of rich history can be blown away in a minute.

The giant Buddha statues at Bamiyan in Afghanistan are a tragic case in point. We humans will be wonders of the world if we can protect all these heritage sites for future generations to study and appreciate.