More light holiday posting ...

Technology Review has published its list of top 'infotech' stories for 2005. They note:

1. Municipal Wi-Fi. "Now there are more than 300 U.S. cities considering municipal Wi-Fi, which would provide inexpensive wireless Internet access anywhere, for anyone: in a park, library, home, or car."
2. Silicon photonics
3. Social machines. Yep ... all that social, collaborative, participative, Bloggy stuff.
4. Search. Notes the emergence of vertical search (e.g. Technorati for blogs), mapping, and the importance of user-contributed data in the form of tagging or other input. It is interesting that books are mentioned here as a vertical search area, as mass digitization initiatives emerge.Feeds. RSS. Podcasts. "subscribable online media": increasingly you will not need to know or recognize RSS. (Subscribe is the new search.)

What I find interesting about this list is how much of it is about making information, communication and computational resources available in the flow of our everyday work, play and learning.