Technology Futures

Cory Doctorow, writing in the Canadian Globe and Mail, says that some of the more than 4.5 million World of Warcraft players are taking aim at Chinese communist censors. The popular multiplayer online game has a worldwide audience of participants, including many in China.

The gamers intend to subvert the censorship rules against discussing certain topics like freedom and democracy on China's Internet by embedding forbidden information in the game itself. Players can import texts and images and carry them around as they play. As they do so, they can pass that information on to other players.

The information can be blocked, but it will be very expensive to do so. Blizzard Entertainment would be forced to spend much money to block the information passing, or risk losing American players who are angry that other American companies like Cisco, Google, and Yahoo! are working with the Chinese government to not only censor information but identify Chinese users who are writing about forbidden topics.

In at least one case, a Chinese citizen turned in by Yahoo! was imprisoned and tortured. The gamers are forcing Blizzard to take a moral stand. It will be interesting to see how this plays out--in this case, literally.

Florida is synonymous with the space program, and Lockheed Martin's replacement for the space shuttle will be assembled and launched from Florida. The U.S. has not designed and built a new space vehicle in two decades, but the shuttles are nearly worn out. The new launch vehicle is a more traditional rocket design that will carry six crew to earth orbit.

This is part of the plan to have two different vehicles to support the space program. One will carry crew to and from earth, and the other will stay in orbit and will be used for satellite repairs, space station support, and travel to and from the moon.

Blogs certainly have not caught on the way blog advocates thought. A Gallup poll says only 9% of Internet users read one regularly, and those numbers have not changed in a year. In Internet time, that's a very long time.

I have always been more interested in the technology that enables blogging, rather than the blogging itself. The weak link in blogging is the writing.

The fact that it is easy to blog does not automatically make us all bloggers. Good bloggers are good writers, have something to say, and are able to say it in a way that is of interest to more than their immediate family and friends (a very fickle audience at that).

But as blogging has become common, the tools to blog have also become much better, and are having effects on other parts of the Internet and the Web. It turns out blogging tools are perfect for newspapers, who usually have a few good writers sitting around drinking coffee, smoking, and chasing interns. More and more papers are finding out blogging tools are part of the answer to their question, "How do we move the paper to the Web?"

And almost anyone who maintains a Web site for community, civic, or personal use can do it better and with less effort using blogging tools, even if the site itself is, strictly speaking, not a blog.

Blogs are not going away, and the number of blogs will probably shrink to a number that is more representative of good writers, rather than who spent five minutes setting up a free blog site.

We still have only barely scratched the surface of how technology and the Web can enhance and improve community life. There is still much to do and many opportunities to pursue. Blogging and vlogging (video blogs) will play a part.

Benedict College, in Columbia, South Carolina, is hosting a Technology Summit that is focused on how broadband and technology can improve and enhance life in urban neighborhoods and rural small communities. I'll be giving the opening keynote talk next Tuesday.

Out in Vancouver, British Columbia, a broad consortium of public groups, government, and businesses are hosting the 2006 Summit on Community Technology. Canada has committed substantial sums to improving broadband access in rural communities, and a hot topic at the meeting will be how to make best use of those funds. I'll be delivering the opening keynote at that meeting as well.