Here are a few things that I think will happen next year.

1. Netbooks sales will continue to rise and may overtake notebook sales (at least for one month in ’09).
2. 2007 and 2008 were years of huge online video growth. 2009 will be a year of trying to figure out how to better monetize this media platform and how to stand out among the crowd (hint: dense, quality content will win out).
3. We are going to see more Hulu knockoffs that will fail for lack of good content
4. This whole Twitter/microblogging thing still won’t be figured out.
5. The US will officially be out of its economic “recession”, but not until the 4th quarter.
6. Styles from the early 90′s will be back in vogue.
7. 2009 will be the year of the thinker and the innovator. We will see more creativity as unemployment rises and people have more time on their hands to come up with the “next big thing”.

This is a very short list, so please add to it. What do you think will happen next year and what are you looking forward to doing differently yourself in 09?

Back when we started Wide Open Mind one goal we had was to become more familiar with using the gear, editing and being on camera. Well, I think it’s time to start using some of this experience that we’ve gained to make a short film (I know, I’ve been talking about this for a while, but I want to at least start the writing process). I’m just in the idea phase at the moment which is what I need your help with. Once I settle on an idea that has potential, I’ll flesh out some of the details in an outline and then start writing. Here are a few ideas for just general themes:

• Hacker movie (in the vein of Antitrust or possibly based off of something like “Little Brother” or Scroogled)
• Story based on my life growing up (our family had some unique experiences which might be interesting if embellished)
• I have a few short monologues written already (Soul Safari) with a story around them that could be turned into a brief (10-15 minutes) sci-fi flick
• A story driven mostly by character development (think Garden State/Sideways). I have a few ideas for characters, but I’d like to hear what you think are interesting personalities in people to see onscreen.

What thoughts or ideas do you have for a film? Any thoughts on the very general themes I’ve presented above?

Ever since I’ve started using Twitter to microblog, I’ve really slowed down a lot on the full blog posts (I’m trying to change that though). I’m still trying to figure out which places are best to place what online content. Right now, I use Facebook to contact people who I wouldn’t normally get in touch with or just to make it easier to talk to people who use it as their main form of communication rather than email. Then, I use Twitter to let people know what I’m up to (and chat with people). I feel like my actual blog (what you are reading now) is reserved for only the topics I feel are either really interesting or important to me.

On a slightly different topic, I’ve been watching (very closely) what is happening in the netcasting and more importantly the vidcasting arena lately. There is a growing shift towards live streaming of content as it is being created or streaming coverage of various events/meetups that happen around the US. Content producers who distribute solely on the Internet are coming up with new and creative ways to foster community around the content they are producing. One example of community is the recently launched TWiT Army…a microblog focused around the TWiT enthusiasts. Live meetups with the producers of shows are another way that content creators encourage community. I’ve experienced this with Pure Pwnage cinema showings in Toronto and I know vidcasts such as Geekbrief have had various meetups around the US as well.

As I’ve seen these online communities emerge, I’ve wondered how we can take advantage of some of these same ideas with our vidcast Wide Open Mind. We have some ideas in mind that you will hopefully see emerge over the next couple of months, but please share your thoughts on building online community and any ideas for live video streaming content in the comments.

Recently, I was trying to start a service in Windows and kept getting this error: “System error 1075 has occurred. The dependency service does not exist or has been marked for deletion.” Hrm, I said to myself…what on earth could be causing this. After looking in the system log, I saw which dependency service was being referenced, and that service most certainly did not exist. However, it did not show up in the dependencies tab of the service I was actually trying to start either. So, here is the fix: Run regedit. Go to HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services and find the service you are trying to start. There should be a multi-string value in there called DependOnService – open this and remove the service that is no longer installed. Of course, your other option is to re-install the service that is missing. Hopefully this is helpful to somebody else who is having a similar issue.

So, my laptop died today. The screen went black. I thought it was just the screen saver, but when I tried to revive it, nothing happened. The laptop was still running. I furiously pounded the shift key to try and wake it from its restful sleep, but I had no such luck. The cool thing is, if you tweak the laptop for a while (bend the casing, etc…), eventually something will come up on the screen. It’s like all the external I/O stops working (network, audio, video, etc…). Oh well, at least it’s under warranty. So, I’m working off of one of our newer laptops which is really nice since it has 2 Gigs of RAM instead of just 1.