2005 literally took the world by storm. The tragedies of the Asian Tsunami, the Hurricanes that blew through the US Gulf Coast and the earthquakes that swallowed parts of Pakistan have left an indelible mark on 2005. While mother nature cast a shadow on 2005, it was technology that delivered the impact that resulted in a huge outpouring of donations. The world was touched by the human element seen real-time in pictures and videos. Today's technology was able to deliver the graphical grittiness that portrayed the nightmares occurring half a world away.

Technology is usually thought of as impersonal, but something needs to be recognized; without technology the personal elements of the 2005 tragedies would not likely have been conveyed to the extent and timeliness they were. Reflecting on 2005 and looking forward to 2006, technology will undoubtedly continue play a significant role in the future both on a personal and impersonal level.

In 2005 Blogs gave birth to splogs, where senseless web scrapers generated massive amounts of senseless content. Spam reached a whole new level, right along side the ethical debate of content scraping. Copyrights have been stepped on and I foresee a new host of tools that will emerge to protect content.

SPAM and phishing scams were easier to recognize, but to their credit, spammers showed off their creativity, finding additional channels to inundate. From splogs to forum spam, 2005 tech users saw spam as one of life's continued annoyances. Looking into a crystal ball, I fear that social bookmarking will become the spam vehicle of 2006, weakening the value of a collective voice.

Sadly the blog saturation has resulted in web clutter. Due to increased competition and vast quantities of blogs on free hosted blog networks services, bloggers competing for audiences and web traffic will result in significant abandoned content, cluttering the web with useless ramblings. The ease of blogging that resulted in saturation will be its downfall. Credibility will again become important. Journalist, who have suffered from the blogosphere in 2005, will have a reprieve as credibility becomes an issue for bloggers. In 2006 web surfers are going to look for multiple sources to confirm facts, and rely on reliable respected sources, community content, and collaboration like Wikipedia is going to suffer and become less relevant in 2006. While Wikipedia scores well in search, it does not perform as well with accuracy. The Wikipedia community is haunted by spam and like DMOZ, it's success will be its downfall. The relevance of successful community wiki's will fade in 2006.

Cell phones have become personal homing devices, and it is near impossible to locate a cellular phone that is not capable of manipulating or taking photos, videos, graphics and text messages in addition to the traditional voice calls. It is likely the PDA will become extinct in 2006, as travelers move to a single multifunction device. In 2007 MP3 players will likely be a common feature of cell phones.

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