As another year comes to a close I thought I'd share some brief thoughts on what I anticipate for the world of technology in 2010:

The Might of Mobile

Mobile technology will continue to be a dominant trend as smart phones go from being tools for professionals, to devices that just about everyone has or wants.

A lot of the growth in the mobile sector is driven by applications. A related platform that I think will thrive in 2010 is Augmented Reality (o/k/a AR).

Augmented Reality is an effort to bring the qualities of the web to the physical world by literally adding a layer of hypertext on top of our material reality. Often described and associated with the concept of the "Internet of Things", the idea is to unlock web-based information associated with each object or location.

As a concept AR has been receiving a considerable amount of attention and investment. The recent announcement of advertising in AR will have a powerful and also normative effect.

In this regard, "hyper-local" advertising will be a big trend in 2010, and it will be driven by mobile and AR applications. This will be a way that Twitter starts to cash in, for example, bu having localized ads that target people in particular cities or neighbourhoods. If you don't want to be exposed to these ads, you'll be able to pay a premium and get Twitter with spam filters.

Tablet Computing

I'm kind of excited about the (re)arrival of tablet computers. Apple has one coming out in the spring, Google is rumoured to have one out in early summer, and I've been playing with Nokia's N900, which calls itself a tablet.

What excites me is the combination of mobility with traditional computational power and abilities. On the one hand, it will further drive the development of mobile applications, with the tablets marketed and treated like mobile devices. On the other, they enable a truly rich multimedia experience with their expanded touch screens and user interfaces.

One of their impacts will be to continue to accelerate the rate of technological change as evolution happens faster and companies push out new products and upgrades to keep up.

I've been thinking a lot about what makes the work I do and the ideas I have different from my contemporaries. Rather facetiously, I talk about the internet as a new religion embraced by the masses in search of salvation. By resisting internet orthodoxy, I deliberately try to see our society and its relationship with technology in a unique manner.

This begins with refusing to use the same jargon and phrases as others, and playing with words to find more accessible and meaningful ways of explaining trends and phenomena. The internet is full of technical concepts that have exclusive and rigid meanings.

Yet the power and resilience of the internet is derived from its open nature, so it only makes sense that we embrace freedom when we talk and think about related ideas and concepts. I do this by generally distrusting technical authorities, including early adopters, technology executives, and I.T. admins. I respect their knowledge, but always question whether their perspective has the potential to be transfered to people who aren't in a position of technical authority (the vast majority of us).

When it comes to the world of social media, which is both technical and non-technical, elitist and also accessible, I find myself consistently frustrated by the level of "group think." In contrast to other technical areas, social media accommodates anyone and everyone, so jargon isn't an acceptable vocabulary to control the discussion and analysis.

What you commonly find is a spoken and unspoken orthodoxy, rules that dictates how tools should be used and people should act. The problem is that this stifles innovation and doesn't allow for the kind of true experimentation we should be seeing in this sector.

Public relations, marketing and advertising people lament the rash of social media experts who project their own industry orthodoxy onto an emergent discipline. Few understand the dynamic involved when in a long chain of diverse individuals and organizations who have a range of expertise culturally acclimatize their own networks and friends.

The seeds of this kind of internet orthodoxy were sown in Ursula Franklin's definition of technology as being "how we do things around here". The variable comes in how we define where we are, with the internet collapsing space into time and everyone being "here" at some point in time.