Archives for December 2005

In early 1998 1996, John Perry Barlow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, released a manifesto of sorts. He called it the “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”. I happened to have it linked on my first website. I’m going to link it again. With the problems with ICANN and other regulatory bodies, it seems more relevant now than it was in ’96. Of course, the issues of ’96 were just as important, but the idea remains the same.

A couple of my favorite tidbits:

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don’t exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Any body been to digg lately? Seen the KoolAidMan story? We take care of our own.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

Read the rest here.

Technorati Tags: Cyberspace, Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, John Perry Barlow, Barlow, EFF

Hey, everybody is doing it. I know, “if everybody jumped off of a bridge…”. But really, it’s kinda fun to play seer for a bit and look back at how wrong (or right) you were at the end of the year.

1. Google ~ There’s at least one more card up their sleeve. I think that there will be one major purchase, and I’m putting my money on one of their current partners. Possibly Firefox. The Firefox partnership is so deep at this point, that it would really make fiscal sense for them to save the money that they currently pay Mozilla for advertising. Look for google’s stock price to drop radically to the tune of about 20% or more in the 3rd or 4th quarters.
2. Microsoft ~ Look for Redmond to become a little more proactive in the “Web 2.0” front. I think that this is a pretty easy one considering the Live rollouts, but I think there are several small surprises yet to come from the Live line and possibly a few possible purchases. Their new partnership with MTV has the possibility to not only compete with, but to take over the iTunes dominated market. Also, look for MS to announce/leak several new products after the official releases of Office 12 and Vista.
3. Apple ~ iPod’s kept Apple on top of everybody’s mind in 2005 and I think we’ll see one if not two more generations of that product. The big news for Apple this year will be the Intel switch over. Here’s where my crystal ball gets a little fuzzy though. I don’t see Apple’s computer market share holding steady, but I’m not sure whether it will take off or begin to dwindle. I’m betting on it taking off for the first few months and then dwindling as people realize that there really isn’t anything all that great to get all excited over.
4. Generalities ~ Thats the big three, now lets take a look at some other tidbits.
   • Blogging and the Blogosphere will reach a pseudo critical mass in the early half of 2006. The stories that we keep hearing about how people are making mass amounts of money will start to dwindle. The continued creation of Blog networks is going to act much in the same way as the growth of google and Yahoo to squeeze out the smaller search engines. A lot of us smaller bloggers will still be around, we just won’t be able to get the traffic and revenues that the bigger networks are able to get.
   • Web 2.0 or the companies that comprise it will begin to level off, but we will still see at least 6 new companies with great ideas make it big. Look for Ebay to try and make another big splash here with a universal feedback system much like the one native to Ebay.

There’s plenty more that I could touch on, but really those are the big things that I see happening in the year to come. I could be completely wrong, but really this is just a for fun exercise in future reading anyways.

Related predictions: (in no particular order)

• Geeking with Greg
• Dave’s WordPress Blog
• Rough Type
• Incremental Blogger
• John Battelle’s SearchBlog
• Corante
• Jason Calcanis

Technorati Tags: predictions 2006, google, apple, microsoft, web 2.0, blog