"...[commenting on a news article]... I see it as a sign of a growing awareness of the big changes we are facing in our immediate future. I talk with people, and they're sort of blase about what's happening. "Do-to-do-to-doo- technology, techshmology, whaT-evrrr. The nerds. So we'll have cooler video games? I'm just going to eat m' food and do my work..." In the voice of the Speak'N'Spell: WRONG." -- Lion Kimbro
This page is about technologies that you may not of heard of but that i think you should. These are technologies that i think will "be big", and change the world.
The main list is here, then down below are (will be) descriptions of the items on the list. Below that are other lists of techs that are not quite as important or that i'm not quite so sure about.
Wiki, or some similar type of versioned document collaboration paradigm, is going to be nearly ubiquitious. I think that open[[image:some wiki pages have tens or hundreds of authors from throughout the world, some anonymous, most of whom have never met each other offline?]], collaboratively written{{REALLY collaboratively written, with different authors frequently finishing each other's sentences, rewording them, and moving them around -- this is a whole new level than the type of collaboration typically found in traditional "collaboratively written" books with multiple authors}} hyperdocuments, constitutes a whole new category of literature -- just as books were fundamentally different from scrolls, and newspapers from books.
The technology that enables this new form of writing will change society as fundamentally as did the printing press.
See http://wikipedia.org for the most famous wiki website.
But wikis are not just for encyclopaedias. They can also be used to do something more similar to a discussion board website, although in the end the result is somewhere between a discussion board and a book.
See usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?MeatballWiki?, for example the [1] or ConflictResolution clusters, for a great example of what kind of documents this can produce.
todo
topic maps, RDF & related
todo
hg, unison, dropbox
todo
this prediction came true.. pretty much every smartphone
pretty good article (i'll summarize below in case you have no time to read it):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3...,922337,00.html
It leaves out some of the "smart mob" applications, though: to quote headmap,
Won't be ubiquitious for years.
summary:
tie some information on the internet to specific locations. This allows 1) websites to be annotated with a location 2) locations to be annotated with information
Applications:
http://www.headmap.org/book/manifesto/background.htm
See also http://futures.wiki.taoriver.net/moin.cgi/BaylesImpendingTechnologyAlerts