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Provided I can sneak out of work early enough to hit the gym and make it over; I'll be at Greater DC Cares tonight as they host an OLPC Learning Club event, including topics of OLPC laptops for social change, developing content for the OLPC XO and power options and accessories for the XO, as well as (mesh) networking.
I only wish I had my own XO to bring and play with!
The original goal for the G1G1 project was hoped to be around 40 million dollars, making for almost 200,000 "get one" laptops -- and they set that goal well; with a final count of $35M and 162,000 laptops donated (and another 162k sent to donors). In an interview with Forbes, Negroponte responds to whether this met his expectations:
It is and it isn't. It's stunning to do that. On the other hand it doesn't quite create an economic model which could run the whole thing. If we had done a million units with G1G1 you could then maybe say the $100 laptop becomes a zero dollar laptop. So it didn't do that well in terms of the economic model to go forward.
But there's more missing in this "small" number than economic sustainability -- the laptops themselves.
This is for various reasons, as preventable as second lines of addresses being lost and bad programming to lost orders to unverifiable/PO-Box addresses to insufficient stock, evidentially due to a miscommunication between their logistics contractor and their production line.
So, the orders were under the goal and far from the ideal economically sustainable project, and nevertheless we're seeing months-long delays due to poor internal communication, with very difficult to get a hold of support staff?
After a round of very displeased customer complaints, OLPC has started sending out email updates and being in general more proactive in their communications; this somewhat bilious post was brought about by this morning's email:
Please accept my apologies for the delay in receiving your XO laptop. Give One Get One was such a phenomenal success that we over-taxed our order processing and payment systems. Demand exceeded supply.Additional XO laptops are being built now and will be delivered in 45 to 60 days. If you wish to reconsider your contribution in the face of this delay, we will issue a refund to you. We have set up a dedicated phone line for these requests. The number is 1-800-883-8102.
In the meanwhile, please know that laptops are in the process of going to Mongolia, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Rwanda and Haiti as part of the "give one" side of the equation. Fortunately, OLPC's mission of getting laptops to the children in these countries has not been delayed. In Mongolia , the children are already enjoying themselves and learning new things with their XO laptops. Please see: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Ulaanbaatar.
Eliminating poverty through learning is gaining wider acceptance thanks to support like yours.
So now at least you can get your money back. I wonder if you can un-give the whole amount, or just get the $200 cost-of-the Get-one side back; though I'm sure that with enough yelling they'd refund the whole shebang if that's not the default refund.
Stepping back; this does not bode well for the project in general; and I really hope that they have a better production/distribution process for overseas.
Are you, too frustrated about the logistics of the G1G1? Share your stories at OLPCNews.com's shipping forum which is tracking still-unfulfilled orders to try and get a real number of how bad it is.
OLPC will now also be available to US schools:
"For one thing, we are doing something patriotic, if you will, after all we are and there are poor children in America. The second thing we're doing is building a critical mass. The numbers are going to go up, people will make more software, it will steer a larger development community," Negroponte said.
I think you may have that backwards, priority-wise. This smells like the latest scheme to get minimal production numbers for the OLPC out. First it was the minimum-million-laptop order, then as that didn't work, smaller and smaller orders were accepted, then G1G1 to get double benefit from people willing to pay for two to donate one and get one, now OLPC is opening up the US educational market; going head to head against Intel and other one to one laptop programs already on the ground here.
OLPC-US is now promoted as having always been part of the plan:
But although the U.S. was not the focus of OLPC in the beginning, it has always been in the plans. "To have the United Sates be the only country that's not in the OLPC agenda would be kind of ridiculous," Negroponte said.
But this just isn't the case, to quote Negroponte from 2006, when he presented at the OAS:
For me to change education in the United States would be very hard. First of all, we have thirty thousand school districts. I can't change the United States or Europe. They're entrenched. Worst, we admire countries like Korea and Taiwan, whose children are absolutely brutalized but do very well on the tests and teach to test is a fundamental mistake. Now tell that to the United States? Tell that to this administration? Tell it to a European country? They won't agree with you.Brazil gets it. Argentina gets it. Thailand gets it. Nigeria gets it. So we're finding, in fact, even though our mission is developed and developing countries, that we find more open reception to new ways of learning in some of those countries.
In April 2007 at the OLPC Analyst Meeting (transcribed at OLPCTalks), he got more wishy-washy, and in an unusual show of imperfection, admits during the Q&A that OLPC is flip-flopping on the US educational market:
Question: Didn't Mitt Romney commit to buying them in Massachusetts, as a publicity stunt? Because you're not saying that... before you always said 'no'. But I don't hear you saying 'no'. [laughter!]Negroponte: First of all, let me tell you the story about that. You're absolutely right. [... in] September 2005, we get this phone call saying, "Would you like to come up to the statehouse tomorrow when Governor Romney announces One Laptop Per Child for Massachusetts?" So we had our then industrial designers whip up overnight a model, and I arrived beautifully, thinking that I'm going to be like the flowers, you know, the decor, like a little sort of rubber plant at this whole thing. Instead, he puts me on stage, and says to the press corps, "We'll now hear from Professor Negroponte."
[...] [A]fter Quanta came onboard, after we started to do it, we said, "No, let's not do the United States." [...] We've now been saying constantly 'no', so the gentleman who said we changed our minds is correct. But on the other hand, we're changing our mind again. And we're going back to 'maybe', and we're looking at it very seriously, as we talk. I mean, we're looking at it right now.
OLPC has moved from a definite No (Romney and governors) to a maybe, and now to a definite yes in Alabama and perhaps other states with the new OLPC-US office in DC.
Can the OLPC XO provide a useful service in the US, where it will have to compete with Intel's ClassMate, the Asus Eee, and other low-cost laptops without the situational drivers that support the XO in less developed nations? The OLPC has been designed with the developing world in mind with it's adaptations to low-power-reliability, dust and humidity, and the like. It still will have an edge over more traditional US-centric low-cost laptops, but that central, must-have feature is simply less important. Mark Warschauer dismissed it out of hand in his latest book on laptops in the classroom as being underpowered for the US market. Time, and Alabama, will see. I'll leave you with a snippet of Tom Lehrer's lyrics from "Who's Next?"; a comic song about nuclear proliferation (yeah, that's not a phrase you see very often):
Egypt's gonna get one too,
Just to use on you know who.
So Israel's getting tense.
Wants one in self defense.
"The Lord's our shepherd," says the psalm,
But just in case, we better get a bomb.
Who's next?
Luxembourg is next to go,
And (who knows?) maybe Monaco.
We'll try to stay serene and calm
When Alabama gets the bomb...
You normally don't expect such staid bodies as the OECD to go and start talking about Web 2.0 and user-created content (or "UCC" in their terminology), but then they go and create a huge report doing just that (Via DG):
This study describes the rapid growth of UCC and its increasing role in worldwide communication, and draws out implications for policy. Questions addressed include: What is user-created content? What are its key drivers, its scope and different forms? What are the new value chains and business models? What are the extent and form of social, cultural and economic opportunities and impacts? What are the associated challenges? Is there a government role, and what form could it take?
While it's not as groundbreaking or waxing-visionary as Benkler in Wealth of Networks, it is interesting to see how OECD is perceiving peer production:
User-created content is already an important economic phenomenon despite it originally being largely non-commercial. The spread of UCC and the amount of attention devoted to it by users appears to be a significant disruptive force for how content is created and consumed and for traditional content suppliers. This disruption creates both opportunities and challenges for established market participants and their strategies.
The OECD as one should expect ties it back to innovation policies, and doesn't shy away from talking about copyright and fair use:
The rapid rise of UCC is raising new questions for users, business and policymakers. Digital content policy issues are grouped under six headings: i) enhancing R&D, innovation and technology; ii) developing a competitive, non-discriminatory policy framework; iii) enhancing the infrastructure; iv) shaping business and regulatory environments; v) governments as producers and users of content and vi) better measurement.[...]In the regulatory environment important questions relate to intellectual property rights and UCC: how to define “fair use” and other copyright exceptions, what are the effects of copyright on new sources of creativity, and how does IPR shape the coexistence of market and non-market creation and distribution of content. In addition, there are questions concerning the copyright liability of UCC platforms hosting potentially unauthorised content, and the impacts of digital rights management.
Of particular interest, the OECD seems to support a strong fair use doctrine; "For example, copyright issues arise when users post unaltered third party content on UCC platforms without authorisation" (emphasis mine) -- meaning that altered content; content with value-added creativity by the users, mashups, and the like, would not be copyright issues in this context. Score one for the OECD!
Wired is running a story on how social networking technologies support, rather than diminish real-life networks of people:
Technology makes it more fun and more profitable to live and work close to the people who matter most to your life and work. Harvard economist Ed Glaeser, an expert on city economies, argues that communications technology and face-to-face interactions are complements like salt and pepper, rather than substitutes like butter and margarine. Paradoxically, your cell phone, email, and Facebook networks are making it more attractive to meet people in the flesh. [...]In big cities, our communication tools are especially helpful because they keep us from getting lost in the crowd (which is not something you worry about in a one-street town). There are even services that tell you where your friends are by locating their cell signals.
New technologies can strengthen ties within your business, too. A 2007 study by economists Neil Gandal, Charles King, and Marshall Van Alstyne looked at the networks formed by 125,000 email messages from the staff of an executive-recruiting firm. It found that email's real value isn't in communicating with Kuala Lumpur but with Betsy in the next cubicle. The most productive workers have the densest intracompany email web.
This is nothing terribly new; it's reaffirmation of Jane Jacob's view of economies of agglomeration in cities; as well as more recent studies showing essentially the same things; the "weak links" of email and other online communication bolster local interaction.
Bunnie Studios (e.g. Andrew Shane Huang), who just finished his Ph.D at MIT's Project Ares group, has published an insightful review of the hardware design of the XO
The review skips over the basic disassembly and looks more at the components and hardware design itself; concluding overall that
"its mechanical design is brilliant. It’s a fairly clean-sheet redesign of traditional notebook PC mechanics around the goal of survivability, serviceability, and robustness [...] When closed up for “travel”, all the ports are covered, and the cooling system is extremely simple so it should survive in dusty and dirty environments. [...] That’s thoughtful design."The innovativeness of the design includes the oft-lauded power and heat management, where the XO really shines, such as the low-heat Geode paired with a heat spreader letting the cpu be more flexible in where it was placed in the design.
Beyond just the ruggedizing of the laptop, it's also designed to be field serviceable to a large extent, focusing on making the parts most likely to fail easy to replace, including the shock-mounted LCD (and its backlight).
Andrew found that despite the high sensitivity of the wifi antennae, he
had some trouble getting the native UI to associate the OLPC to my access point, and to get it to stay there."Besides, everyone knows that the only real outstanding question is, in comparison to the iPhone, will it blend?
He further was under-impressed by the software and ease of adding new tools, seeing it as "appliance-like." To an extent, however, it is an appliance, and designed to be less of the super-over-flexible Linux desktop style. Not unlike the Eee, you want to drive the new user to very safe and stable actions.
The XO does allow advanced users to install their own software (or even their own non-RedHat/Sugar OS). If anything, there's a lacking middle layer enabling easier addition of known-safe programs that aren't packaged into actions as yet:
Overall, the software on the OLPC is clever but very “appliance-like”: there are some pre-loaded applications and it’s not immediately obvious how to add new applications using the native UI (it’s hackable from the command line but that’s not very beginner-friendly).In the comments section, he returns to this topic, adding an interesting angle on the need for novelty to sustain interest:Then again, it does include some education-oriented scripting languages that kids can use to write programs, even if it does lack a local gcc installation, and it includes the basic infrastructure for chat, video, audio, and photo sharing functionalities.
I guess my strongest gut reaction is that once the novelty of the few preloaded apps wears off, what’s there to keep you coming back? [...] It feels like the pre-loaded apps on the XO are geared toward more advanced curriculum–not quite something I’d see being the focus of entry-level curricula, and I don’t see entry-level teaching staff necessarily generating new applications on the fly.Ideally, and as he discusses in his post, Squeak/eToys will provide the base for lots of mostly-easy-to-create (and share) software and tools, but it would be handy to have some more things ready out of the box that tie into curriculum needs as well as an easy, straightforward way to discover and install new tools.
Also published (with some discussion) at OLPCNews.com
Being the geek that I am, I got a copy of Mark Warschauer's latest book, Laptops and Literacy, having been a huge fan of his insightful commentary on the "digital divide" in Technology and Social Inclusion.
You might remember Mark from his New York Times article which he clarified here at OLPCNews, as well as his recent posting of a case study-like look at the Intel Classmate at the Newport Heights Elementary in Newport Beach, California.
Laptops and Literacy Overview
Laptops and Literacy is a different kind of book. Where Technology and Social Inclusion was more of a framework or theoretical book, L&L focuses on case studies of one-to-one laptop studies in the United States, focusing on some school-based programs in California and the statewide initiative in Maine which has often been help up by the OLPC Foundation as a perfect example of the power of the one laptop per child model.
Mark stays away from the OLPC project in his books. Indeed, in all of L&L, he only mentioned OLPC in passing, excluding it from his US-centric study as "unsuitable to the U.S. Market" (p.152) (to be fair, the book went to print long before Alabama got interested), and obviously before the recent announcement of OLPC America. Regardless, he drives home some important points for the OLPC project by revealing what makes a 1:1 laptop program thrive (or not) in the U.S.
Maine provides the "flagship" 1:1 laptop program for the U.S. with a statewide mandate providing laptops to all seventh graders for six years this fall (and to all eighth graders for 5, and was extended to 31 of 176 high schools in 2004). Nevertheless, Warschauer and his team of graduates are the only ones with independent research on the Maine program.
Warschauer also draws heavily from 1:1 programs in California, where the average socio-economic stats (SES) is lower in the schools he users than the Maine schools. The California schools also have much higher diversity and language challenges ("Maine is 99% White and English speaking, California is a majority-minority state ... [and] has poorly funded schools with large class sizes" (p.30)). The California 1:1 programs are individual school projects, often with the financial support of the parents, ending in both laptop- and non-laptop classes of the same material.
One to One Computing Results
Maine test scores have remained flat through their 1:1 laptop program, and there has been no evidence that laptop program improve reading or writing skills (or harm them). This can be interpreted as technology not adding anything to education, or as standardized tests failing to measure the skills learned using technology.
Laptop programs do improve students' abilities to deal with information and to collaborate, but fail to fulfill their promise of increased equality between high- and low-SES schools:
Simply put, low-SES students and school that served them were often less prepared than higher-SES students and schools to take advantage of the full capability of laptops. Students in these schools tended to have fewer language and literacy skills, and this limited what they could accomplish with laptops. [...]Warschauer stops short of concluding that laptops increase the inequalities between low- and high-SES schools from a lack of quantitative and solid outcome data. He makes it clear that he believes computers will play a near-ubiquitous role in education in the future, unlike previous attempts to inject media technology into education, which have remained at the edges (TV, radio, and film for example). This inclusion of computers will not cause education reform by itself; "Laptops are not a magic bullet to solve our educational challenges" (p. 153).For all these reasons, the implementation of laptop programs at the low-SES schools was more challenging, and the outcomes more mixed.[...] These differences between low- and high-SES schools run against one of the common rationales of laptop programs, repeated to us many times by teachers and administrators in this study: Laptop programs help overcome educational inequality.
Yet such differences are consistent with what has occurred following other reforms involving technology or media, which though targeted at low-income populations are often best exploited by the more privileged sectors that can leverage their preexisting educational, social and cultural resources. This outcome became famous in connection with the Sesame Street educational television show (Cook et al., 1975) and since has come to be known as the Sesame Street effect" (Attewell & Battle, 1999 p. 1).
Laptops as "Amplifying" tools
The examples and case studies woven throughout the book remind us that the laptops are tool, very powerful, incredible, "amplifying" tools, embedded into curricula and used in conjunction with other resources by a teacher to improve their student's education.
Laptops are not by themselves a full education system, and their usage depends heavily on engaged teachers, school administration, and sufficient support structures;
"In one case, at Freedom Middle School in California, a number of the laptops were stolen or damaged; and lacking replacement funds, the one-to-one program ended." (p.150 ).Another example from California, Mr. Molina's laptop-enabled classes at River Elementary discussed at length for its innovation (p 43-48) fell apart when Mr. Molina moved to another school; after a year of unuse, they were redistributed by the school district to his new school for him to resume using.
Follow the discussion at OLPCNews.com
Even NextBillion.net has weighed in on the Intel/OLPC divorce and included the full interview with Negroponte, even as Slashdot dredges up last year's "scandal" when some other bloggers found out that Wayan's (former) organization had Intel as a partner, calling OLPCNews an astroturf, Intel-backed anti-OLPC blog. While we're pretty critical of the OLPC project, you'd think that if OLPCNews was indeed Intel-backed; we'd (a) at least be earning money for the time we spend on it instead of it being an unpaid labor of love and (b) we'd be critical of the OLPC hardware. I don't know about you, but I think the hardware is amazing and a very needed step. Further, being an ex-Austinite, I'm very happy to see AMD stepping up to the challenges of low-power developing-world situations, both with the OLPC's processor and their previous 50x15 (50% of the world's population online by 2015) projects, including the good-idea-left-in-the-dust, the AMD PIC. Intel is just now waking up to this market, and their early-morning tossing and turning just happened to slap OLPC in the face.
Like Wayan, I'm pro-competition, and want governments to have a menu of low-cost computing options. I am worried about Intel throwing all its weight in to this arena and really pushing the Classmate, even perhaps as a loss-leader, just to capture the market at this early stage. Intel is enough of a processor-monopoly as it is, and I'd rather see increased innovation rather than a return to the same old.
What will be truly interesting is to see what happens when OLPC's former CTO, Mary Lou Jepsen, starts rolling her laptops, with OLPC-licensed technology, off of the production line at Pixel-Qi, and if she becomes further competition for the OLPC (her target price is $75, so if it follows the OLPC trajectory it'll come in at $150 or so). Will OLPC try to yank her technology licenses or otherwise play mean for fear of competition in the field, or is this a reaction specific to Intel's brand of underhanded competitive methods?
The GeekCulture comic mashes up the OLPC/Intel spat with the well-worn, "heartfelt" Chris Crocker - LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE! video that made the rounds a few months back. Wayan has already (and pretty accurately I'd say) compared Intel leaving OLPC's board to a messy breakup, and Chris D gives us some more staid business analysis. Nevertheless, the messy breakup comparison holds. The story has both sides pointing fingers and name-calling; less polite (via the BBC):
The head of Intel Paul Otellini said an accusation that the firm had failed to deliver on promises was "hogwash". "I don't want to get into specifics but we met every obligation that we were committed to," he said.Professor Negroponte responded: "My version of events is not hogwash. Why would I throw away the six million dollars they were supposed to give us yesterday? Why would I do all of these things unless I was stark raving mad?"
And like all bad breakups, it played out through third parties and -- worst of all -- email. Intel "accidentally" leaked their pending exit from the OLPC board to reporters first and then by email to Negroponte. Predictably, Intel later apologized for the way it handled the news, and no doubt wished it could just start again fresh and do it right this time.
At the heart is what Intel calls a "philosophical impasse about how the market gets served," (that's business-speak for "irreconcilable differences") and what OLPC sees as underhanded competition ("cheating"). The crux is that Intel is trying to sell to the same governments that have already promised to purchase OLPC laptops, often while the seat was still warm:
In Peru, where One Laptop has begun shipping the first 40,000 PCs of a 270,000 system order, Isabelle Lama, an Intel saleswoman, tried to persuade Peru’s vice minister of education, Oscar Becerra Tresierra, that the Intel Classmate PC was a better choice for his primary school students.Unfortunately for Intel, the vice minister is a longtime acquaintance of Mr. Negroponte and Seymour Papert, a member of the One Laptop team and an M.I.T. professor who developed the Logo computer programming language. The education minister took notes on his contacts with the Intel saleswoman and sent them to One Laptop officials.
It's important to note that Intel had been invited to give a quote for a computer project -- for Peru's secondary schools -- and added on a proposal to also do primary schools (where the XOs were being deployed):
In a telephone interview Friday, Mr. Tresierra said that his government had asked Intel for a proposal for secondary-school machines, and it had responded with a proposal offering the Classmate PC for primary grades.“We told them this is a final decision, we are running the primary-grade project with the XO,” he said. “She wasn’t very happy.”
Back on the OLPC Soap Opera channel, Intel was invited up for drinks with OLPC's BFF and got a bit too cheeky, and the BFF decided that OLPC would be better knowing about Intel's wandering hands. (OK I'll stop belaboring the comparison.)
This naturally shelves a prototype OLPC laptop running with an Intel chip inside that was to be demo'd at next week's Consumer Electronics Show (CES), and has OLPC looking around for other partners and open (again) to finding a way to run Microsoft XP on the OLPC XO machine perhaps.
Now, this whole partnership was dubious to begin with, as OLPCNews discussed when it began; you have a for-profit, publicly traded corporation partnering with a non-profit organization, and they both make low-cost educational laptops. OLPC was the first to focus on the developing world market, but that market has been attracting much more attention from the for-profit crowd of recent. This episode reminds me of the scorpion and the frog fable; where the scorpion kills the frog he's convinced to carry him across a river, explaining his illogical action away by saying "I could not help myself. It is my nature."
Intel must maximize shareholder profit; and to do this must find and exploit new viable markets (or at least appear to be doing so). OLPC made the developing-world low-cost laptop market look viable; therefore Intel must explore the possibility, even if doing so wrecks its partnership with OLPC.
People often ask me, as a technology geek, what kind of computer they should get, so I'm putting this post together as a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) to address the most common things people ask about when they're considering a new system:
I hope this clarifies things regarding what computer systems are the best value and utility out there.
Over at OLPCNews, Wayan's written a wrap-up of the Give one, Get one (G1G1) program by the OLPC Foundation to date, and its successes and shortcomings. Here's my two cents (actually now 5 cents due to changes in the post, system upgrades, and increases in the raw cost of nickel):
In a way, the logistical and support problems of G1G1 will (hopefully?) be a long-term benefit to the project. Having the fact that the laptop does not automagically inspire creative self-learning in 100% of the cases, and that there are some confusing bugs that require Deep Linux Magic, and that physical distribution is a Hard Problem all sound familiar. They're are all issues that OLPCNews has pointed out as severely lacking in OLPC's nebulous implementation plan. I hope that the OLPC Foundation will learn from their mistakes (not that they have before), as they move from G1G1 geek early adopters, just about the friendliest, most forgiving, and technically competent crowd around; to government buyers who expect the hype to be real and expect things that they've paid big bucks for to show up on time (or at least on a schedule) with support materials and staff.
A few predictions for what we'll see online in 2008:
Facebook hits its limit. I predict some more ad snafus a la Beacon, and the 3rd party apps become overwhelming and all-too-reminiscent of MySpace. NB: The AdBlock Plus Extension and AdBlock Element Hider can block most FaceBook ads, and there's a GreaseMonkey script to reset MySpace pages to the default template.
Twitter is on the rise. Microblogging in general will increase, and someone will add in more community and meta-organizational features to it. There's a lot of 3rd party activity around Twitter to add in location awareness, tagging, and so on, so maybe Twitter, Inc. will take the hint. Also, with improved community/groups tools, lots of people figure out that Twitter's a fast way to have a mobile communications strategy, which will be much more important as iPhones and other web-capable phones are useful and popular enough to expand past the blackberry crowd.
Single Sign On gets closer OpenID has been quietly gaining steam, and will continue to do so. If Google and Yahoo decide to place nice, there's a big win. Microsoft will get pissy about this, but it might already be too late. Integration in general will become key. Evidentially, other people are thinking the same thing.
Social Bookmarking grows up Del.icio.us style and digg/stumbleupon style bookmarking sharing sites morph and follow my Twitter predictions; adding more social/community and organizational tools. They may even get mashed together.
GeoLocation is the new tag cloud 2007 saw everyone adding geolocation to their sites (Flickr Mappr, Google Maps API interfaces turning up everywhere, multiple FaceBook "where I've been" vanity maps, Twitter location tools...) with increasingly easy integration tools, adding mapping to anything remotely geographic will be in 2008 what adding tables and animated "email me" and construction-man graphics to your index.html was in 1998.
A new peer production site will show up Wikipedia and its ilk will continue going strong, but there's an increasing convergence of easy to use tools that enable users to collaboratively build information stores. It just takes one to hit a market ripe for user-generated content to really do well. My prediction? Education, spurred on by a need to support the implementation and follow-through lacking OLPC project and a global workforce that's been trapped doing creating and turning in make-work homework can now easily mobilize to add to global knowledge store.
Microsoft does dumb things in a quest to drive more people to buy Vista. This could include locking out non-Vista users to certain ActiveX driven webpages and/or their MS Office Online. Most of these will backfire and hopefully push more people to Apple and Linux. OK, so that one's almost a given. Update Microsoft's Office Service Pack 3 disables legacy file formats. Way to start the year, Bill.
Google buys Yahoo OK, that's a long shot, but it'd be awfully interesting, since Yahoo woke up to web 2.0 and made some strategic purchases (Flickr, del.icio.us...) and has done some great work with the Flock browser. I can only imagine Google getting a little territorial here. We're all in deep trouble if Google ever turns evil.
Also check out Ed Felten's Freedom to Tinker predictions
A recent thread of emails over on the 501 Tech Club DC email list brought more Web 2.0 resources to light. So in the spirit of sharing:
NetworkForGood has an excellent set of short articles on using social sites for fundraising.
http://www.cmswire.com/ Offers news on content management
http://www.squidoo.com/org20 Squidoo posts a list of top non-profits using innovative technologies; "These are organizations that give their volunteers and members a voice and get out of the way. They're pros at mobilizing awareness online. They're experimentors. Innovators. On a mission. They're fearless."
Beth Kanter has a good blog on web 2.0. Similarly, check out Contentious.com. There's some year-end roundups of Tech and social change links and , and the Zen of Non Profit Tech has a good year-end roundup too.
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