Every year I wait till my brithday to make wishes and predictions. Here we go.
1. That the PeopleAggregator get back up and running – so everyone can enjoy what Eric Sigler has been up to. FOAF is definitely the format for interchange of digital IDs and beating on FOAF, pushing the rdf folks to do the right thing and bringing FOAF into the mainstream – is one of my goals for 2004! So GO ERIC GO!
2. The great work that Joi, Weinberger, Doc, the Dean Campaign and all the Emergent Democracy folks have been doing – to help move this world forward. I burned out on politics early – as my father is a politician. Don't get me started! My grandfather was a famous American Communist. So I leave it to you folks to change the world. me – I'm just a micro-content, new kind of tools, open standards, make up for my last company (which has locked people into propreitary standard) kind of guy.
3. That folks would grok and adopt Matt Mower and Paolo Valdemarin's k-collector and W4 technology. Turn knowledge management into a good thing (from it's nebulous current state!) Everything should have a topic attached to it! See – I didn't even use the terms ontology, semantic web or meta-data!
4. Marc Barrot's WebOutliner rocks and I hope that this is the year it gets out there as well. Everyone should have their own on-line outliner baked into their app and/or service. Long live OPML! And thanks to Danny Goodman, Doug Baron and Paolo for helping!
5. It looks like 2004 is the year that I'll get to show the world what I mean by 'new kinds of tools'. Let's just leave it at that – for now. Needless to say I'm excited!
6. OpenReviews – this is something that is gonna happen this year – as well. No longer will our opnions be locked up into Data Silos. Folks – if you think blogging is big – wait till you see how big OpenReviews will be! Notice how I don't have a page to link to for this idea. I've been leaving the leadership mantle open on this one – as I've got just too much work to do. I tried to get Seb Paquest to lead it. Before that Noah Glass. Maybe this year – someone will step up to the plate and take off – building up the alliances, technology and marketing poop needed to launch YET ANOTHER open standard. Wait! I know – maybe Clay Shirky should do it!
7. There will be a number of examples of how to take social networking to the next stage this year. Hopefully Tony Perkin's AlwaysOn-Network will be one of the first. I helped.
8. I can feel it in my bones that this is teh year that digital lifestyle aggregators will make their debut. No – it won't be from Apple or Microsoft – though they're the ultimate competitors.
9. This is also the year for Laszlo and rich media platforms. I can't wait for them to kick ass and stomp all over my former company. From the moment I heard about and saw HTML, I knew we had to move beyond that. Go bless multimedia. God bless object-oriented client side systems that bring us forward. Hopefully you folks will all have SoundBlox, PhotoBlox or ReviewBlox modules in your blog gutters by this time next year.
10. And let's not forget ThreadsML, Open Calendar events, Recipes and Resumes. There are so many open standards to develop – hopefully ATOM will get us closed to doing that, while bending over backwards and simplfying everything – to fit into the RSS 2.0 envelope – as well.
And to you all – a good night. [Marc's Voice]