It´s tough to make predictions, especially about the future, said Yogi Berra, and Sam Goldwyn, and Niels Bohr. So I’m not making predictions about the year ahead.
But I will identify a few things I’ll be watching or looking forward to. I’m old-fashioned enough to be interested in many aspects of blogging. I expect WordPress.com to be my main blogging residence for 2008 and beyond. So I’m interested in Automattic, and how its 2008 will turn out.
I’m also interested in a couple of rivals to WordPress/Automattic. I recently noted ways in which Drupal/Acquia is similar. (By the way, I applaud Acquia’s determination not to employ spambots, and assume that Automattic has a similar policy.) Then there’s Habari, which is under development by a group including some former WordPress developers.
I’m looking forward to music in 2008. I’m not referring to any specific release, but to the state of the music industry. There’s a lot of tremendous music coming out these days, and the web makes it easier to find, try, and buy (or not) than it ever has been.
I just found out that a book I’ve been looking forward to as a 2008 release won’t be out until 2009. It’s Free, by Chris Anderson. I’ve just (re?)subscribed to his blog. Here’s a recent post musing on the complications of free.
Chris’ book is about free as in price of zero or as in beer, not free as in speech. But free/open source software also has an interesting year ahead of it. If I was brave enough to ignore the warning at the top of this post, I’d say that 2008 will see the tipping point for the mainstreaming of free software, and that the tipping will be due to devices such as the Eee PC.
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