Imagine this is December, 2008, a full year in tech from now. Here’s what’s happened in the last twelve monthsâe¦

Early this year, at January’s MacWorld, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced not only a 3G iPhone, which finally appeared in June, but also a ultra-portable Macbook. It was a thin thing of beauty in an Audrey Hepburn sort of way, not in an Olsen-twins, needy-whippet manner. It took the best of the aluminum-encased industrial design of the MacBook Pro and added in the multi-touch goodness of the the iPhone and created a mobile device that finally breathed life into the struggling niche of tablet computing and gave amazon’s ass-ugly Kindle a run for its nickels and dimes.

It was a great year for Linux. Not only did it end up powering a collection of tiny laptops from Asus, Everex, the OLPC project and others, but it also solidly moved away from its nerd-hippie tendency to be easy-to-use until it really mattered (like when you want to run a Quicktime movie or get a wireless card working). Many people installed it on their parentsâe(TM) machine, telling them it was an XP upgrade.

Meanwhile, Microsoft was like a Goliath that kept getting hit by well-aimed rocks, none to the temple but a couple to the tender bits. Vista was officially labelled a wounded dog. It wasn’t put out of our misery, but it did let Apple’s and Linux’s marketshares both slouch toward two digit numbers. And, Redmond wound up looking like a white collar crack dealer in the Third World as it tried to run the Online Laptop Per Child project into the ground with its TFHWF (The First Hit of Windows is Free) program, that went head-to-head in developing countries with the Linux-based, under $200 laptop from MIT.

In Canada, changes to the Copyright Act, which were supposed to be introduced about this time in 2007, wound up being delayed, thanks to lobbying of activists from across the country. When the changes did get introduced, there were concessions to consumer rights, but the proposed alternations still had the stale perfume of the U.S. government and record labels all over them.

Bell-Sympatico, Rogers and Shaw all got a mid-year jolt when new upstarts who won the Canadian spectrum auction actually provided Canadians with real wireless choice, decent data plans and cellphones that didn’t suck.

Facebook, which lost its way in late 2007 with its retracted and privacy-invading Beacon ad program, failed to find its footing in 2008 and lost faith and ground to new social network platforms built on blogging tools like WordPress, Twitter and the video-based Seesmic.

Speaking of moving images online, video became the new conversation in 2008 as increased bandwidth penetration, cheap webcams, simple video-editing software and video instant message services like Seesmic and Utterz allowed spontaneous video conversations and communities spring up. Meanwhile, the television writers strike, which dragged on for months, combined with financial incentives from Google to produce compelling video content gave rise to a new group of young web-based writers and video producers who created fresh fodder for a “prime time on your time” online network.

Google won the bandwidth-formerly-known-as-UHF auction in the U.S. We’ve yet to see what it will do with the new acquisition, but with Android-based phones selling like mad over the last few months, we can expect it to be delivering its content and ads to cellphones on a network that thumbs its wireless nose at current carriers.

In other tech news, the hydrogen car continues to be a politician-placating pipe dream, the Beijing Olympics Games were marred by an outbreak of black lung disease in the Olympic Village and three Chinese athletes lost their medals when they tested positive for rhinoceros penis.

Closer to home, rabble.ca launched rabbletv and managed to pull off an open source and social media redesign thanks to the generous donations of its members, who had a wonderful holiday just twelve short months ago.

wayne

Wayne MacPhail

Wayne MacPhail has been a print and online journalist for 25 years. He was the managing editor of Hamilton Magazine and was a reporter and editor at The Hamilton Spectator until he founded Southam InfoLab,...