'Feed' frenzy

Keep your eye on "feeds" in 2006.

They're subscription based and let you receive content from a multitude of sources. Keeping up with more than a few Weblogs all but demands feeds such as RSS (Really Simple Syndication), and they're spreading into everything from photos to news sites; even podcasting works with feeds to deliver home-brewed audio. Check FeedBurner (www.feedburner.com) for information on more than 170,000 content sources.

Better online security

A new poll shows that half of all adults in the United States refuse to buy online because they're afraid of losing personal information. And no wonder, when 2005 saw headline-grabbing data thievery at Bank of America, ChoicePoint and other financial powerhouses. We're not just dealing with hackers anymore -- this stuff is getting organized by increasingly skillful criminal networks. Expect consumers to demand security solutions with teeth.

Wireless everywhere

Wireless is useful at home and in Wi-Fi enabled cafes, but watch it go citywide in the coming year. Google wants to build a free, advertising-supported network in San Francisco, and more than 300 U.S. cities are looking at the advantages of low-cost municipal wireless.

New Orleans was a high-profile example; the city saw the advantages of building a free Wi-Fi network in the aftermath of Katrina to aid in the rebuilding effort. Service providers are eyeing the revenue sure to come as wide-area wireless mushrooms, but legal battles over who can build what may get messy.

Medical advances

Matt Nagle, a quadriplegic who refuses to stop fighting, became the first person with his disability to control an artificial hand using brain power alone. The chip implanted in Nagle's motor cortex lets him grab things with his artificial hand by visualizing the action. Couple implants with advances in nanotechnology and you begin to see why previously intractable conditions may one day be surmounted.

Digital rights management

Sony's decision to slip copy-limiting software onto music CDs in the form of a hidden program that, once on your PC, can send information about you to the company, met with a huge outcry and caused Sony to issue an uninstaller. But Sony's hacker-like trick wasn't just nefarious in its own right. It highlighted the growing anger over schemes for management of digital copyrights that curtail customers' ability to use material they have bought. Invasive DRM will be a major source of user discontent in 2006.

More flash

Flash drives, the thumb-sized data gadgets housing up to 2 GB of information, are sure to come into their own this year. What better way to ensure the safety of your documents than to carry an extra backup in your pocket, replenishing it whenever needed? They're cheap and reliable, and take up little space, and they allow this writer to carry every word he has ever published in his pocket. Consider it a backup of a backup.

Targeted searches

2006 may become the year of the targeted search engine. Google rules the search roost, and the company knows that searching works best when it hits close to home. Thus Google Local (now available through the main site), which pops up maps tagged with geographical information, phone numbers, Web sites and more for the places you enter. And Google Earth makes it clear that we're in the process of such tagging for the entire planet, a high-visibility task that will inspire interesting competition in the New Year.

Web-centric office

Working on different computers at home and in the office highlights the beauty of networked data -- it's always available, no matter what your machine or operating system. But can the model translate to office documents? Google and Sun Microsystems, some think, are considering a Web-based version of OpenOffice, and Microsoft is preparing its new collaborative service that workers can use to create and edit documents on the Net. For safety's sake, I want full backups on my hard disk, but the advantages of a more Web-centric office should be widely touted by year's end.

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