Questions I wish people would ask me :

Q : Phil, in 2000 you were going on about how important weblogs were going to be. Now they're winning the US election. Two years ago you started ThoughtStorms and told us WikiIsTheNewFrontier. Now everyone is saying that.

So, what do you predict is going to be big another two years down the line?

Phil (impossibly smug) : Why, since you ask so nicely, little literary device, I will enlighten you.

* PollsAndCompasses

* TypedThreadedDiscussion

Q : But Phil, why?

Polls and compasses have been used for fun. But they can do real work a) collecting information about people and b) teaching people about themselves. Now that social networking services are getting lots of people together, polls let them classify themselves.

A new wave of polling software, tied to other social software will distribute and amateurize psychology.

Everyone will try their hand at categorizing and typing people. Some of the classifications will turn out to be bogus. But some will turn out to be usefully predictive of what or who people want to know, or the things they'd be good or bad at.

As to discussion. There are many new venues for it to take place. Blog comments, GMail, YASNs (like Tribe tribe discussions) etc. But they're all using models of discussion which have been around for 20 years. And consequently they're generating huge amounts of new material and knowledge which is still hard to follow or mine.

TTD is the quick hack. A minor variant of threaded discussion which can generate a lot of useful, structural meta-data for almost no extra cost. Wait for one of these venues to discover it and then watch for the explosion of useful knowledge.

Q : But does anyone ever ask you this question?

A : Nah. Everyone's a prophet these days. But you can discuss this using TTD here