Friday, December 30, 2005

I am not a geek. Much.

I may have whined a little about the pressure of choosing the most important technological innovation of the year for Blogcritics. (See I don't like Mondays for refresher whininess.) I did end up sending something in, hoping the bigger SciTech geeks would do “the heavy lifting,” as Trevor suggested in a comment. Well, turns out not many people responded to the challenge – possibly because the SciTech section is brand new and few feel an affinity for it yet, but probably mostly because technological innovations tend to develop over a period of time, so finding something that was launched in 2005 and is already recognized for its revolutionary nature is difficult.

Anyway, check out Blogcritics Best Tech of 2005 for geekier more intelligent responses, but mine was this:
I break out in hives at the thought of picking THE most important technological innovation of the year, but since my own SciTech nerddom is fairly specific to the entertainment industry, I'll say one of the biggest in that area is the video iPod. Not so much the device itself, but more what innovations it signals: the TV industry is getting serious about legal downloads by embracing the technology and selling recent shows as content. Taken with the fact that more networks are offering free, legal downloads of some shows on their websites, and that the Motion Picture Association of America has joined the Internet2 consortium to look at new technologies for content distribution and rights management, things are looking up for an industry that has been reluctant to use Internet technologies to their full advantage.
Yeah, OK, it's pretty geeky too, plus I dodged the real question a bit. Hey, it was a hard assignment for a pseudotechie!