More light holiday posting …
Technology Review has published its list of top ‘infotech’ stories for 2005. They note:
- Municipal Wi-Fi. “Now there are more than 300 U.S. cities considering municipal Wi-Fi, which would provide inexpensive wireless Internet access anywhere, for anyone: in a park, library, home, or car.”
- Silicon photonics
- Social machines. Yep … all that social, collaborative, participative, Bloggy stuff.
- Search. Notes the emergence of vertical search (e.g. Technorati for blogs), mapping, and the importance of user-contributed data in the form of tagging or other input. It is interesting that books are mentioned here as a vertical search area, as mass digitization initiatives emerge. Feeds. RSS. Podcasts. “subscribable online media”: increasingly you will not need to know or recognize RSS. (Subscribe is the new search.)
What I find interesting about this list is how much of it is about making information, communication and computational resources available in the flow of our everyday work, play and learning.
