As long-term readers of Cites & Insights already know, I don’t claim to be a prophet–and my ability to predict what will happen even within a publication 100% under my control has proven to be, shall we say, minimal.
At the start of this year (or, rather in C&I 6.1, January 2006, which actually appeared December 20), I reviewed my track record for predicting what C&I would be like for the year ahead. One year yielded good success at promises based on a reader survey, but I think the result was a weaker volume (2003) and, frankly, enough less fun that I considered killing off the ejournal. The next year I managed not to promise much of anything, and kept the non-promises. The other two years ranged from 0% to 50% success.
So for this year, under the title “No Year’s Resolutions,” I kept it minimal again. Ithought. “No fewer than 12 and no more than 30 pages per issue; no fewer than 12 and no more than 16 issues; continued foci on copyright and net media without abandoning other interesting areas.”
And the very next issue was 32 pages long!
I’m not going to apologize for that, since the overlength issue has apparently been read by more than 17,000 people, five or six times the usual readership, and is already cited in lots of places…but it does say something about my predictive powers for items under my control.
(Net media and copyright? Not quite as much on copyright as I expected, but maybe more than enough for readers; “net media” turns out to be fuzzier than I thought, so it’s hard to say. And there are three issues to come…)
So I thought I’d go for short-term predictions: What I believe will show up in the October issue.
Or, just to leave some flexibility, what I believe will (might) show up (probably) in the October and November issues, plus some other stuff…
- An offtopic perspective summing up the second half of the sci-fi 50-movie pack.
- A new department or running name for perspectives, “Old media/New media,” with notes tracking high-def optical disc and most likely (maybe as a separate perspective) some thoughts on ebooks, print books and bookstores–and maybe some other stuff as well.
- Net Media commentaries (maybe separates) on wikis (especially the big one) and blogging, and maybe some comments on an interesting piece on phishing
- Copyright stuff–I’m not sure what-all, but lots of it.
- Libraries & scholarly access
- PC Progress
- Interesting & peculiar products
- A five-year follow-up on the “arc of enthusiasm,” spotlighting what are now called open access journals that have been around for eleven years or more–and what else has happened within the small universe studied in 2001.
- Some of the usual departments…
When I started this idle Saturday nonsense post, I was going to predict the October issue’s contents. If I did that, I’d probably be about half right. By making it two issues instead of one, odds are that at least two-thirds of what’s listed above will actually appear in that time frame, along with stuff I haven’t even dreamed about yet.
Which does make it enough fun to keep doing!
