As the year's end draws near, it is customary for journalists to list Top Stories from the year past and to make predictions for the year to come.

But those are passive activities. They're what professional bystanders do: play-by-play, color commentary, op-edification.

Journalists don't have to stand by any more. Their choices no longer are limited to writing or talking about What's Going On. They can be involved now. They can have effects.

I learned about effects early in my career with Linux Journal. Even though almost nobody in the Linux community knew who I was--and even though I had never written a word of code--my involvement was welcomed. And, I quickly learned how to be a player rather than a bystander. My role was helping the business world understand what Linux and open source are about. Hard to tell how much influence I've had, but there's been more than enough both to satisfy me and keep me challenged.

In the old days--the mid-late 1990s--"world domination" was an article of faith. Now it's a fact of life. There are still struggles, of course. But the ones that matter most are not at the operating system level. Linux is solid infrastructure now. For many--perhaps most--computing purposes, it's a default first choice. That choice will only get easier to make as Linux evolves.

The nature of Linux evolution was one of the biggest things I learned in 2005 and want to learn more about in 2006. As I reported in my November 10th SuitWatch (which also ran on the Linux Journal Web site, see Resources), Linux isn't a product. Nor is it just a development project. It's a species. It evolves over time in an adaptive way. Specifically:

I said a lot more than that, all based on what I learned from sitting in on talks by Andrew Morton and Ted Ts'o and especially in conversation with Andrew.

Here's another thing I already knew but learned more deeply this past year: the most productive journalism isn't final. It isn't the stuff editorializers and op-edifiers harrumph from their columns and features. Nor is it even the factual reporting done by editors doing their best to be objective. Although that work is necessary in the extreme, it isn't enough. If what matters most in life is progress and growth and improvement of ourselves and our societies, we need journalism to be speculative as well as factual, provisional as well as final. After all, that's how conversations move forward. And that's how minds grow and change in the process.

What I wrote about the kernel being a species was provisional. I was floating an idea. It happened to be one I believed was true, but it also was an unfinished one. It needed ratification by real kernel hackers, and it needed further explanation.

I got the former when this appeared on Greg Kroah-Hartman's blog:

Go read it now, I can't recommend it enough (see Resources).

I got the latter when Greg wrote this on the linux-elitists list:

The factual-reporter side of me wants to know more about what's up with the BIOS vendors, of course. Meanwhile, the provisional journalist in me wants to know more about how Linux evolves and how the market evolves along with it.

Because Linux isn't the only thing evolving here. The play of influence between species and ecosystem goes beyond symbiosis. BIOS vendors will adapt as well--and to forces other than their long-time partners at Microsoft. How soon and in what ways? We'll see, I suppose. And hopefully before the end of 2006.

There are other provisional insights, ideas and observations I've come up with in the last year. What I want to do in 2006 is pull them together somehow, because I believe they are all related, and I'm optimistic about progress if we can thread the pearls. Here they are:

1. Markets

I'll probably go to my grave being remembered best for "markets are conversations", the first thesis of The Cluetrain Manifesto, as well as Chapter Four in the book by the same name. That three-word clause was also provisional. It was so provisional, in fact, that it sat still for years before Chris Locke, David Weinberger and Rick Levine added fresh mass and torque to it, and the whole thing snowballed. To me, however, the most important statement in Cluetrain was one Chris Locke wrote:

I don't know for sure about the other guys, but this statement did more than anything else to adrenalize me for writing Cluetrain. And it still charges me up, because it's still not quite true. In the book we said:

We went on to claim that this fundamental understanding of markets was interrupted by the industrial revolution and all but forgotten in the industrial age that followed. We asserted that the Net and the Web were restoring real markets, natural markets, to the world. We believed that the reach of customers would exceed the grasp of marketers and that vast new powers would come to the demand side of markets, including the power to supply--and not just in the form of tire-kicking information shared worldwide.

In some categories this has come to pass in a big way. For example, to call a digital photographer a "consumer" is absurd. Digital photographers consume almost nothing, while producing like factories. Where film prints were shared once or twice with friends or relatives and then damned to storage in albums and attics, digital prints are vetted to the world on the likes of Flickr, where they can be reproduced, sold or whatever. (One of my own Flickr photos now graces the sides of trucks for a company in Boston.)

In other ways, however, the differences between customers and consumers remain an academic distinction. For example, airlines and car rental agencies conspire to create an on-line experience that replicates the airport experience in which travelers have been trapped for decades. Ideally, you would like to present your credentials and preferences to a whole market category and have vendors compete for your business. Instead, you're forced to flit from agency to agency like a bee buzzing between flowers, looking for the best car and the best deal.

Recently I talked to the top marketing guy at one of the car rental agencies. When I told him my ambitions for "fully empowered customers" that could engage several agencies at the same time, and that this would be good for his business, he was horrified by the idea. To him, customers were consumers, period. "We're in a tonnage business", he said. He made it clear that his company didn't want to get any more personal than it needed to.

So I think there is undone work here. First, we need to understand what networked--conversational--markets really are. I think they are so different from anything we saw in the vendor-dominated industrial age that we have to all but zero-base our new understanding of them. I also think there must be some original and creative work being done by economists on the subject. In fact, I'm told there is. But I haven't found it yet. So that's a project for this next year.

2. Identity

At the end of last year, Steve Gillmor was short of guests for his weekly Gillmor Gang podcast. I volunteered to gather a bunch of folks who were active in the growing user-centric identity conversation. A large number showed up, and the result was an "Identity Gang" that is now driving a bunch of products and standards forward. It even has a clubhouse wiki at Harvard's Berkman Center.

The core premise for all the gang members (including Kim Cameron of Microsoft, whose Identity Metasystem was the subject of my September Linux For Suits feature) is that healthy markets depend on fully empowered individuals, and those individuals cannot operate at full power unless they control their own identities.

Independent identity is not only a huge subject on its own, but one highly tied to the market topic. Right now, even to many free market advocates, "free" means "your choice of silo". And nothing does more to trap customers in silos, and relegate them to consumer status, than identity systems that vendors rather than customers control. Today, our wallets and purses are thick with decks of credit and membership cards, each representing silos to which we belong--and in which we are held captive to a large degree.

There is a connection between independent identities and healthy markets. We need to explore and build out that connection. This is another thing I want to work on this next year.

3. Metaphor

Nothing I wrote in the last year--or since Cluetrain--caused more buzz than "Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers From Flushing the Net Down the Tubes", which appeared November 16 on the Linux Journal Web site. In it I detailed the carriers' plans to turn the Net into a private transport system for favored cargo and for fencing off the Net's wide open market spaces, much as the US fenced Native Americans into reservations. I also detailed an optimistic alternative, which almost nobody commented on, probably because there's a preponderance of evidence favoring the pessimistic scenario. Then I suggested a third scenario: fighting with words and not just deeds. I said the main reason Larry Lessig and his colleagues lost Eldred vs. Ashcroft was that the other side worked better metaphors. Copyright was simple property, they argued. Against both law and evidence, the other side prevailed in the Supreme Court, 7-2.

I suggested that we can save the Net we know by conceiving and describing it more as a place--an environment where free markets thrive--than as a transport system for "content".

Again, this idea was and is provisional. There is a lot of work to do here, and it has to be done by real linguists, real economists, real lawyers and real technologists--and not just by journalists such as myself. This next year I want to reach out to folks in all those groups to help substantiate a popular understanding of the Net that supports free markets and not, once again, "your choice of silo".

There is a lot of experience and thinking in the Free Software and Open Source communities that will come in handy here.

4. The Live Web

"The Live Web" was a term coined by my son Allen, back when he was working on his own start-up: a service that would allow anybody to get any question answered immediately by somebody out there on the Web. (He's still working on that, for Wondir, which recently was purchased by Steve Case's new company, Revolution.) When Allen first told me about his idea, I realized instantly that the Web we knew and that we described in real estate terms--sites with locations and addresses that we design, develop and construct--was like the trunk of the Web's tree. It was basic, fundamental. It also would need to support live activity as well; activity that was different in kind from the Static Web we know through the search engines. The Live Web would begin with the journalistic stuff we do on the Web: write, publish, author and syndicate. This last few months I realized that the last of those--syndication--had in fact defined the Live Web as a branch of the Static Web. For evidence, look no farther than the Live Web search engines--Bloglines, Blogpulse, Feedster, Pubsub, Icerocket and Technorati--plus the Live Web search engines at Google and Yahoo. The latter especially testify to a branching of sorts.

The Live Web meme is just starting to gain traction. By whatever we end up calling it, I'm still sure it's real, important and critical to the first three topics as well--plus the countless new technologies and standards that will build on the infrastructure that wouldn't be there if it weren't for Linux.

So that's another understanding I'm interested in helping push forward in the next year.

Am I missing anything? Far more than I'm getting, I'm sure. Which is why I look forward to learning--from many of you--as much as I can.

"Cruise Report 3: New Species Discovered at Sea"

Linux is a species and here

"Independent Identity", the September 2005 Linux For Suits Feature

"Saving the Net"