This year's tech news, in brief

This perhaps goes against the grain of this blog somewhat, but... Good grief, I'm getting bored with tech / web stories lately!

It's not that there aren't new ones to read - quite the reverse. The sheer quantity never changes much. But somehow the content doesn't change much either, at base. Almost every new story I read could be one of any number of other stories I've read before - with nothing changed except the website / company / app involved, the conclusion to the new scientific study, or the version number of the product it's going on about. To paraphrase Yogi Berra: it's just déjà vu, all over again.

So to save everyone the bother of reading the 90%+ of it that's seemingly stuck on a loop, here, in no particular order, is the coming year's tech news:

• 2009 2010 2011 will be the year of hyper-local / the semantic web / Web 3.0
  
• Apple / Microsoft to release new product / new version of old product
• New Apple / Microsoft product has minor / major fault
• Feverish, mainly groundless speculation about next new Apple product starts up again [see also: Microsoft, but much less feverish]
• Google wants to buy Company X
• Company X resists Google's overtures
• Google buys Company X
• New Google product, based on code from Company X, not the Facebook-killer / Apple-competitor analysts insist Google is definitely working on; Google shrugs, says that was never the intention
• X is the new y
• X isn't the new y
• X is brilliant, but what will happen when its venture capital runs out?
• X is overvalued
• Is the 'tech bubble' back?
• Video games / the internet / social networking bad for us, according to latest study / book
• Video games / the internet / social networking good for us, according to latest study / book
• Correlation is the new causation [the Daily Mail position on tech*, and anything else]
• Human behaviour / human nature never really changes, just the technology we invent to enact it [the Clay Shirky position on tech scares]
• Thing that wasn't in the cloud is now in the cloud
• Is our data safe in the cloud?
• Established website / company is losing popularity
• Established website / company does x in attempt to revive popularity
• Established website / company is still losing popularity, but even more so
  
• Facebook tweaks yet another thing / adds new service, causes outcry about compromised privacy [see also: Google, but less often]
• Google is evil
• Google isn't evil
• Suggestion is made that tech debate shouldn't be so reductively binary, no-one listens
  
• Social media makes political protest easier, more effective
  
• Social media's influence on politics and protests is overstated / counter-productive
• Important person at Apple / Google / Microsoft retires, leaves, or moves to Apple / Google / Microsoft
• Traditional media / music industry / publishing is dying
• Traditional media / music industry / publishing still isn't dead yet
• Satirical zombie movie to be made about traditional media / music industry / publishing
  
• Remark on Twitter / Facebook is mistaken for news
• Remark on Twitter / Facebook is mistaken for news
• Remark on Twitter / Facebook is mistaken for news

Lather, rinse, repeat - ad nauseam, ad absurdum, ad redcutio, etc. and so on. Or until 2012, at the very least. Probably.

And in other news: The Weekly Links Post will return soon. Because I'm a hypocrite.


*Not that real newspapers aren't sometimes guilty, too. Especially in pretty much any story that begins: "A new scientific study..."

The (Just After The) Weekend Links Post: No. 34

Welcome, again, to another entirely subjective selection of 15 links, humanely culled from my week's online reading and roughly collated under the seven broad categories seen below. A little late this week, following some 24-hour live-blogging (32 hours awake, in all, but definitely worth it):

Selected Highlights from Guardian Technology (Because otherwise I just don't get around to reading it now it's no longer in the print edition).

As smartphones get smarter, how will their innovations transform our lives and the 'social web'?

Evgeny Morozov explains his new book The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate The World; plus, Tom Chatfield's review.

Who can you trust on Twitter? Peer Index releases list of most authoritative journalists on Twitter.

Universal and Sony Music to make new singles available as soon as they hit the radio - only highlighting exactly how slow the big record labels have been at facing piracy and the shift to MP3s.

Clay Shirky on the birth of Wikipedia and its 10th birthday.

Social Media

Tunisia: the revolution that's being ignored by social media. More here.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

The 2010 Digital Book World Publishing Innovation Awards 2010: the longlist.

Electric Literature's very literal approach to the question: "Can a book save your life?"

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

Search Engine Blacklist: remove content-farms and other spam results from your Google searches [Chrome extension]. (Also see: Marco Arment of Instapaper on the problem of Google search spam.)

Music

Gogoyoko: DRM-free, ethical online music store and social network - with free album streaming.

The Recombinant DNA of the Mash-Up: an interactive timeline of the major milestones of the past 104 years.

Games & Other Distractions

But That Was Yesterday: interactive art game about moving on from painful memories (the beginning seems impossible at first, but you'll figure it out soon enough).

Miscellaneous

From a theremin wristwatch to a violin playing cockroach: a rundown of The 2010 Kickstarter Awards.

Collective buying power: a new trend in crowdsourcing?

"One need not agree with WikiLeaks' modus operandi to acknowledge its service to democracy": Twelve theses on WikiLeaks.

The Year End Links Post

Ah, Christmas: the season of lists, predictions, and lists of predictions! By which definition, I suppose, a Links Post might not be wholly unfestive - especially one slightly more bloated than usual, and full of lists and predictions:

From Guardian Technology (Because otherwise I just don't get around to reading it now it's no longer in the print edition).

Guardian Technology's 20 most-read articles and 10 most-viewed photo galleries of 2010.

Forecast for 2011: The Guardian asks tech and web experts to make their predictions for the coming year.

"Media is a form of design... everything is a form of design": Justin McGuirk examines the argument behind Designing Media, a new book of interviews with major players behind the ongoing media revolution.

Merriam-Webster dictionary's Top 10 definition searches for 2010 speak volumes.

The best short films on the web: how the web is enabling a revolution in short film making and distribution.

Social Media

Facebook overtakes Yahoo as the third largest website in the world.

And it's now the most-visited too, according to Hitwise.

2010 in Twitter trending topics.

The 10 most-shared links of the year.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

"The publishing industry is in trouble - but not just because of the digital revolution": an illuminating interview with John Thompson, author of Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century.

The 10 most popular publishing stories of 2010 on GalleyCat, month by month - and some predictions for 2011.

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

300+ resources to help you master WordPress, collated by Webdesigner Depot.

2010's top new and updated apps for Windows, according to Downloadsquad.

Disconnect: "a privacy patch for the web", available as an extension for Chrome and RockMelt (Firefox and Safari to follow).

Music

Gorillaz record an album on an iPad - then give it away to fanclub members. (Or you can stream it here, in exchange for your name and email address.)

And here are the 20 iPad music apps the band used - $120 for the lot.

Rundowns of the year's top albums, from: Drowned In Sound, Pitchfork, The Silent Ballet, Fluid Radio, eMusic.

Games & Other Distractions

20 free indie games you may have missed in 2010, selected by IndieGames.com.

Miscellaneous

11 'risky' tech predictions for 2011 from TECHi.com.

2010: the year in ideas, from The New York Times.


And finally...

"Seasons Greetings and a very Happy New Year!" from all at Radix.

The Weekend Links Post: No. 32

Welcome, again, to another entirely subjective selection of 15 links, humanely culled from my week's online reading and roughly collated under the seven broad categories seen below:

Selected Highlights from Guardian Technology (Because otherwise I just don't get around to reading it now it's no longer in the print edition).

Gawker's Nick Denton on the future of blogging.

CEO of Creative Commons Joi Ito on fair and innovation-friendly copyright tools for the web.

Google moves to stop bad customer service turning into good search rankings for online retailers.

Chromaroma game tries to achieve the impossible: making travel on the London Tube fun.

Social Media

Facebook wants to trademark the word 'Face'. (The cheek of it... etc.).

The persistence (or otherwise) of digital memories: preserving the digital self after death.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

A lengthy interview with William Gibson, cyberpunk writer and inventor of the word 'cyberspace'.

A veritable treasure trove of Samuel Beckett plays on film.

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

The Top 50 free apps Lifehacker is 'most thankful for'.

AX: a free, time-saving utility for anyone who regularly has to type accents and special characters.

Music

Google Translate now speaks beatboxer... well, sort of.

Games & Other Distractions

The Infinite Ocean: an atmospheric, deeply-layered philosophical point-and-click mystery (more of an interactive narrative, than a traditional game).

Miscellaneous

Ads they'd never allow today, probably not even on Mad Men.

Virgin launches iPad-only magazine (to mixed reviews so far).

Man sells virtual asteroid for $635,000 - a $500,000 profit on his original purchase.

The Weekend Links Post: No. 31

Welcome, again, to another entirely subjective selection of 15 links, humanely culled from my week's online reading and roughly collated under the seven broad categories seen below:

Selected Highlights from Guardian Technology (Because otherwise I just don't get around to reading it now it's no longer in the print edition).

The internet's cyber radicals: Aleks Krotoski begins a new fortnightly column on how the internet is changing our world (reader contributions to each column are invited at the link).

Facebook 'one of several threats' to the principles of the web, says Tim Berners-Lee.

'Cloud gaming' services enabling users to play games beyond the spec of their own machines.

Earth as Art: an online gallery of US Geological Survey satellite images.

Has the Times increased profits with its paywall? The latest figures tell us nothing, says Cory Doctorow.

Social Media

Serendipity and human connections: the new sites following in the wake of Chatroulette.

The Viral Spiral: 'the most shared video ads from each of the years 2006-2010.'

Books, Writing & Storytelling

Three book industry experiments with online crowdsourced funding.

Lulu Titlescorer: find out whether your novel has the title to become a bestseller.

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

Feather: Aviary's superb suite of online design tools now includes an embeddable photo editor, thanks to HTML5.

Music

Spotify still planning US expansion - with or without major labels - despite £16.6m losses in 2009.

Games & Other Distractions

Entries to the latest jayisgames.com Casual Gameplay Design Competition are now available to play online.

Miscellaneous

Lessons learned by The New York Times's David Pogue in his 10 years of writing about technology.

The US embassy cables: what Washington thinks of the rest of the world, as divulged in 'the biggest intelligence leak in history'.

Bad publicity can get you top ranked in a Google search, but is it a long-term business model?

The Weekend Links Post: No. 30

Welcome, again, to another entirely subjective selection of 15 links, humanely culled from my week's online reading and roughly collated under the seven broad categories seen below:

Selected Highlights from Guardian Technology (Because otherwise I just don't get around to reading it now it's no longer in the print edition).

Author Steven Johnson on: innovation and where good ideas come from.

The latest hype, facts and general speculation about Facebook's omni-connected uber-messaging thing.

Google Maps error leads to border dispute in Central America. (Possible consequences of Google's move into fashion as yet unknown).

Alan Rusbridger on: why media organisations shouldn't ignore Twitter (extracted from his lecture 'The splintering of the fourth estate').

Apple and Murdoch to publish new daily newspaper exclusively on tablet computers.

Social Media

Twitter begins inviting selected users to its official Analytics offering, and apologising to third-party developers.

'Facebook Messages? Erm, good luck with that', says experienced email developer.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

A year in digital publishing: The Literary Platform asks publishers for their digital highlights from 2010 and predictions for 2011.

Lifehacker rounds up some handy online tools for language geeks.

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

Quick tip: if your hard disk seems to be unexpectedly full, it might be worth checking that BBC iPlayer Desktop has been correctly deleting downloaded programmes from its repository. Another fix for the problem can be found here.

Music

All Day - Girl Talk: the latest release from mash-up specialist Gregg Gillis, free to download.

Games & Other Distractions

The Guardian's Tech Weekly podcast hosts a round-table discussion on storytelling in game design.

Miscellaneous

You Thought We Wouldn't Notice: a blog helping to expose art and design plagiarism.

'20 Things I Learned About Browsers And The Web': Google's new showcase of what we can expect from the web (and Google Chrome) post-HTML5.

What does Google know about you?

The Weekend Links Post: No. 29

Welcome, again, to another entirely subjective selection of 15 links, humanely culled from my week's online reading and roughly collated under the seven broad categories seen below:

Selected Highlights from Guardian Technology (Because otherwise I just don't get around to reading it now it's no longer in the print edition).

BT and TalkTalk force judicial review of the Digital Economy Act.

Google blocks Facebook from GMail contacts import data, admonishes Facebook for restrictive attitude to user data.

Major online travel firms unite against potential Google travel search monopoly.

Newsweek magazine to merge with The Daily Beast website. (See also: the Daily Beast's official announcement).

The trouble with tweets: the arrested Tory councillor; the cricketer suing for libel; a verdict in the Twitter bomb joke trial appeal; and "I am Spartacus", the protest.

Social Media

From Zadie Smith's excellent New York Review of Books essay analysing The Social Network, Facebook and Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto:

"Perhaps Generation Facebook have built their virtual mansions in good faith, in order to house the People 2.0 they genuinely are, and if I feel uncomfortable within them it is because I am stuck at Person 1.0. Then again, the more time I spend with the tail end of Generation Facebook (in the shape of my students) the more convinced I become that some of the software currently shaping their generation is unworthy of them. They are more interesting than it is. They deserve better."

Facebook to launch a competitor for GMail (but it'll have to be a vast improvement on Facebook's current mail system, if it's going to get anywhere).

Books, Writing & Storytelling

Spike Magazine: The Book - a free PDF download of the online books-and-culture magazine's "finest interviews, features and reviews."

More detail on what they're up to at Electric Literature. (See also: Weekend Links No. 28).

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

RockMelt: the Facebook-friendly social browser (that isn't Flock); currently in beta.

Music

Silver Lines - Anna Rose Carter: a beautiful, mesmerising EP of solo piano compositions (free to stream at the link; or a more than reasonable £4 to download). More details and tracks at her Myspace page.

Games & Other Distractions

Mid Morning Matters with Alan Partridge: Alan Partridge returns to our (monitor) screens, in a new series of made-for-the-web videos.

Miscellaneous

The New York Times begins a new column rounding up the best new made-for-the-web "TV" series and movies.

Your brain on ads: the not-yet-quite-as-troubling-or-futuristic-as-it-sounds science of neuromarketing.

"[T]he online newsletter of the Tories": Clay Shirky takes a look at The Times behind its paywall. (See also: a round-up of the online responses).