This is a video that I made in 1989 looking at Polaroid's customer of the future. I had not seen it in many years, but when I looked at it again I was amazed at how well it predicted what was to come. Now my desktop looks much like the one we made up back then. Our biggest production problem was getting the printers to work properly. In the end I crouched under the table and "flicked" the photos through the printer openings. I sent this video to Ted Leonsis before he went to AOL. He said that he thought it was all wrong…

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I wrote recently about how I am using delicious to save, tag, and share bookmarks. This morning when I upgraded my Firefox browser to 1.5, (and added the 1.0.2 delicious extension) using delicious just got easier. One of the recommended extensions for the browser, adds link to your delicious page, along with tagging feature (so that you can tag anything that is in your browser window). So let's say I want to tag my favorite knitting store (which happens to be in Wales), Colourway.

All I need to do is click on the “tag” symbol next to my browser window, and a window pops up that allows me to tag and save the link to my delicious account:

Now this entry is listed in my delicious account:

And I notice that three other people have also saved and tagged it. I can discover not only who they are but what else they have tagged. This led me to a great farm that produces merino wool in update New York. The web site has fabulous patterns and kits at good prices.

One of the things I love about delicious is that it combines the recovery and discovery aspects of search. I can tag items for later recovery–going back to where I have been before. But I can also discover things and people I might be interested in.

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I believe 2006 is going to be the “year of the aggregator.” As more and more documents, news, and services become RSS-enabled, I expect to see very wide-spread adoption of desktop aggregators. To start off a new year of blogging, I am publishing the attached white paper, Aggegators: what are they, where have they come from, where are they going?

For additional information about aggegrators, please see our Learning 2.0 podcast series.

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