This past year has brought about many changes. Early in 2005, when we started up pingVision, Katherine and I had a clear vision of what we wanted to achieve in five years, ten years.... Those plans are still there, still in the works. But wasn't clear back then was how we ourselves would work our own ways down both the internet and television paths towards the inevitable convergence, when interactive television -- the medium combining the hyperlinking freedom of the web with the full-motion video of television -- becomes a reality.

The television path was fairly clear. DVD authoring was a natural choice, given its nascent interactivity (and the fact that our experience, equipment and training made it possible). The future of the DVD format is still uncertain, but once a format is settled, growth in the HD DVD area will explode, and give us the first glimpses of what new kinds of interactivity will be possible -- and, more important, will catch on with users. Count me as one who is really looking forward to NAB this coming year.

After much anticipation, the Drupal distribution for community and campaign websites, CivicSpace, has released its new version. The exciting development here is the integration of CiviCRM, the Open Source Customer/Client/Community/ "Constituent Relationship Manager." While a Drupal module managing such integration is available, what's new is that CivicSpace has it integrated in the basic installation already.

The trend online is towards more use of online applications to do our work. Adding a CRM may seem odd to folks who think of websites still as being just brochures or blogs. But when you have a community site with dozens or hundreds or more people using the same data core, it's a natural development for community sites to start empowering users with collective information and networking tools that traditionally have remained in the realm of intranets.