TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

Predictions for 2008, #1: Cory D. just don’t quit

Over the holidays, James Thomas pinged me to ask what my 5 predictions for 2008 (cheers, James!). James sees…

1. Mixx takes off vs. Digg [disagree]: I tend to think not; despite all of the posturing about leaving that takes place anytime there’s a digg-directed digg-storm, the user base seems alarmingly loyal. And, arguably the conditions that created the source of digg’s value (its loyal, active community) will be hard to recreate for a knock-off - so far, the only successes in the “community curation” space (arguably) have been Fark, Slashdot, and Digg - each of which was ahead of its time and grew organically.
2. The RIAA floundering [no comment]: Hard to say; are there any verifiable metrics around the profitability of the legit non-drm MP3 sales taking place?
3. Mint dying [agree]: The “winner” of the TC40 is a lame credit-card pushing branded version of a white label financial services aggregator. Everything I’ve read about it is that its a big pile of suck. My financial details will never go near it; I expect few people’s will.
4. Napster dying [agree]: Please, let it be quick.
5. Adobe Flex/AIR taking off [no comment]: I don’t know enough about the rich application development space to agree or disagree. MS’s Silverlight seems to be an also-ran already though.

So: James kicked things off with what I think are some great calls. Without unneccessary preamble, here’s the first of my five, ranked by frivolity, starting with the most frivolous. 4 more to follow over the next few days!

TechFold 2008 Prediction #1

Cory Doctorow’s books will continue to get translated into other languages, and BB will continue to tell us about it, over and over and over and over again, until if we read the un-word “Scroogled” ever again, we’ll start screaming. Latvian, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Macedonian, Polish, Spanish, Dutch, Bulgarian, German, Russian, and Persian. Please make it stop.

The sub-text here is that between posts about Cory’s books, Gamma-Go! hoodies, BBgadgets, and BBtv, BoingBoing - a leader in blogging as a movement and political advocacy as a lifestyle - is becoming less of the cultural force that it once was, and more of the kitschy merchandise shop that it apparently wants to be.

2008, boingboing, mentallyretired, predictions scroogled

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Censorship Nation

I just wanted to point out that Boing Boing is banned on Boston muni-fi stations. Gizmodo asks if they are in the US or China.

Ok - fine, Boston uses some keyword parsing auto-censoring system, and given BoingBoing’s diverse subject matter, it tripped the filter - this is hardly punishement for the Aqua Teen Hunger Force thing, or some right-wing conspiracy against the libertarian blogosphere, or some totalitarian Bush-led junta, or whatever.

That being said: It seems alarming when “protect the children” is used to justify censorship of any kind, much less automated, unsupervised, algorithmic censorship of the entire internet.

boingboing, boston censorship

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