What better way for a technology column to look back on the events of 2005 than to let technology automatically do the looking back for it. Equipped with a five-year old version of Microsoft Office, that is exactly what we are about to do.
Microsoft's word-processing program has a spell checker that tells you about any word it doesn't recognize -- not just misspellings, but also, for instance, unfamiliar proper names. The company does a good job of keeping the spell checker up to date, adding thousands of new entries, many of them topical, with each new release.
I, though, am still using Office 2000, meaning my spelling checker doesn't know anything about the world of the last five years. (I know I can add new words to it, but I rarely bother.) Thus, loading all of this past year's Portals columns into Word, and seeing what words were flagged as misspelled, is a handy way of finding out about what was new this year.
It's like a software version of Rip Van Winkle.
There is, for instance, the word "blogs," which gets a wavy red underline each time it occurs. Blogs were virtually unknown five years ago; now they are unavoidable. In both politics and technology, bloggers have become crucial part of the conversation, which in itself is something of a blogosphere term.
"Blogosphere," of course, is another neologism whose acquaintance my Word has yet to make.
The biggest question about blogs has become not whether they will die out, but whether, on account of their proliferation, people have the time to read as many as they might want to. This is especially the case since people began spending so much of their time with their iPod, something else people weren't doing in 2000.
Apple's music player continues to be the biggest thing in the music industry, mostly because Steve Jobs gets so much attention with everything he does that there is no oxygen left for anyone else. This year, the iPod also became a video player, and began what will likely be a land rush of media companies selling movies and television shows on an "on-demand" basis. To the extent that consumers clamor for portable video on demand, the iPod will have some stiff competition from cellphones. If you insist on watching "Dial M for Murder" on a small screen, why not use one that will also let you dial?
No one, of course, dials any more; we push buttons on a keypad. Even that is in the process of changing because of the Word-unaware word "Skype," along with its technology cousins. Skype is a brand of software that lets you use the Internet to make free telephone calls. The company was bought by eBay during the year for roughly $2.5 billion, a sum that a lot of people, this columnist included, found to be on the high side.
No one, though, doubts the manner in which "Internet telephony" programs, of which Skype is one of the best known, are changing the world of telecommunications. John Chambers, the chief executive of Cisco Systems, has been saying for years that one day soon, because of the Internet, telephone service will essentially be free. For millions of people on personal computers, that day is at hand.
Now, if they could only get to work on making things sound better. In the decidedly still un-free world of cellphones, voice quality seems to be only getting worse.
Most of the new things in tech are good; as a reminder of the exceptions, consider "phishing," something that Word users in 2000 didn't have to know about, much less contend with. Phishing is the dismal science of getting people to divulge personal financial information on fake Web sites, most commonly, those masquerading as belonging to eBay.
One hesitates to declare victory prematurely, but one senses that with phishing, spyware and all other varieties of sleazy Web lawlessness, a corner may have been turned this past year. For example, one hears fewer tales of email viruses rampaging around the world, choking computers and shutting down email systems. One reason is that Microsoft has made security a priority: Angry customers gave it no choice. Another reason is that Web users, even newbies, have become increasingly scam-savvy.
Granted, there is still odious porn spam, along with those ridiculous come-ons for fake Rolexes. But with a little bit of luck, and a lot of clever programming, even these might become a thing of the past in the next year or three.
When it comes to these Word new-tech words, it's possible to make a game out of stringing them together. Such as, "I read on MySpace that Grokster is shut down and BitTorrent is going legal, too. Well, there's always Netflix."
Another amusing pastime is figuring out what next year's list might look like. That's something that software can't yet help with; either a real crystal ball or a real Rip Van Winkle volunteer is necessary.
Anyone feel like taking a long nap?
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Topic: A look back at the year in technology (Read 952 times)