Predictions 2006

Over the holidays, I listened to a late-night radio talk show called Coast to Coast AM hosted by Art Bell. A number of years ago (back in the late 90s, I’d say), Art Bell was one of the hottest personalities on syndicated radio.

With an investigative style of his own design, Art Bell discussed UFOs, government cover-ups, science, pseudo-science, and conspiracy theories with an eclectic mix of guest experts and enthusiastic callers. Art Bell was seriously entertaining and hugely popular. However, while his popularity soared, personal and family matters forced him to retire.

But as the saying goes, “You can’t keep a good (radio) man down,” and so Art Bell, after numerous radio disappearances and re-appearances, returned to the airwaves, where he now hosts a weekend version of his show Coast to Coast AM.

This past weekend, his year-end show was all about predictions. He asked his callers to use their intuition and innate psychic powers to predict future events.

It was all in good fun (although a few prognosticators did offer some dire visions of future events). In the end, I thought to myself: “Uhhmm, sounds like a fun topic to blog about.”

Over the next couple of days, then, I will post some of my personal predictions for the upcoming year as they relate to the future of libraries, archives, Web technologies, electronic records, digital preservation and whatever else my “psychic twinkle” offers up to me. And I want to encourage readers to comment and/or post some of their predictions as well. What do you think will be the next big thing? Will digital preservation take a giant leap forward? Will Google take over the world?

Have a happy new year!!