Inside View from Ireland: Five Down, Five Up

I'M APPROACHING ANOTHER MILESTONE, soon to notch up post #5000 on www.insideview.ie and I'm having a few thoughts about what that means in terms of what lies five years ahead. The 5000 items I've posted on my blog are part of a body of work numbering well over 10,000 items typed online. I need to do a better job at archiving the work I have here because a lot of it should be bundled together as third level work for the modules I teach in creative multimedia at Tipperary Institute. I'm starting that bundling process now, surprising some of my friends by printing pages into perfect bound collections of work. I've been in attics and barns (see evidence at left) where paper products survived. I haven't stumbled upon electronic products that date back more than 30 years and I have my doubts that DVDs or CDs will outlast archival paper. So this summer, I'm printing a few chapters dervied from this blog and I'm sealing the pages until 2014, when I'll look at a few predictions that I'm making today.

Prediction 1. I will send several forms of electronic content to standalone devices located continents apart. I can do that now with text messaging and if the user's settings are correct, I can send audio, video and still photography files now. But in five years' time, I don't want to send the items one by one. I want selected parts of my digital collection to go to daughters, cousins, and grandparents all by themselves. I don't want to send the items one by one. I want the system to know what should be shared and to just send the stuff.

Prediction 2. Calendar and location data will sync our family agendas. Within five years, there will be personal taxi runs sucking away parts of my day. I would like to get calendar information sent directly to my phone from my kids' calendars. That information should come with points of information that automatically load into my phone's mapping so I can see where I need to be.

Prediction 3. Facebook will be my primary lifestream. A lot of other Ajaxy subsystems will fit into this mix too but Facebook will be the big boy in the lifestream.

Prediction 4. My personal viewing preferences will load up in the home's media sever. At the moment, I have to clear memory and reset chron jobs. I would like to scan program guides with a handheld device and let the media server do its thing so that when I want to tune out of broadcast television from the dish, I can toggle to content on the local server.

Prediction 5. My e-book will get recommended passages from my reading list. Sometimes my e-book will get entire chapters or complete books but most of the time, my e-book reader will get just a teaser. I can decide whether I want to get the entire offering and most of those will be paid content offerings. A portion of my e-book material will come from local papers.

Prediction 6. My electronic music collection will expand, with even more exciting connections extending from services like Last.fm, Blip.fm and their descendants.

Prediction 7. My house will be smart enough to tell me when it's sick. I'll get some sort of advisory (probably by looking at an electronic schematic or through a text message) that tells me I need to take care of something, such as ordering more wood pellets or checking system integrity on a solar array.

Ok. I'm tucking these away until early June 2014 and setting up an embargoed post to see how I've done.