Ordinarily I’m a skeptic when it comes to futurism, crystal ball gazing or prescient punditry. However Problogger, a blog on blogging, issued an interesting challenge to fellow bloggers to write a Review or Preview post on our own particular subject matter. I thought about it and decided to jump into the swirling center of the Time Tunnel and then report back what I saw.

So I just returned from December 20, 2007. Here’s the headlines:

• President Bush has decided against all advice to again increase troop levels in Iraq. This time he is calling back all veterans of any age to fill the ranks depleted by the war.
• Al Gore has developed an entire stand-up routine made up of his answers to whether he is going to run for President based on his huge popularity. He regrets that it took the destruction of Miami’s beach front communities by Hurricane Inofhe to put him squarely in the spotlight.
• The country is still reeling over the news that VP Dick Cheney’s death was kept secret by the White House for 3 months until his daughter finally got someone to anonymously spill the beans.
• In Europe, public panic over the rapidly falling temperatures due to the rerouting of the Gulf Stream is only somewhat offset by the reemergence of the Alpine ski business.
• I had to mow the damn lawn twice before I headed back in time. In late December!Bummer.
• Techcrunch just posted its 200th post thanking their advertisers
• The blogosphere is reeling over the bursting of the mommyblog bubble
• Google just completed acquisition of Fartzi, the three month old social networking site for adolescent boys. The $2.2 billion in stock they spent is considered a smart purchase given the 100 million daily pageviews. They’ll figure out that revenue thing later
• It was decided by everyone in the Valley to skip web 3.0 and go directly version 4.1 (beta)
• SEO has become so refined that the top ten natural search results for any given search keyword are totally incomprehensible due to algorithmic optimization
• Apple has released the quad core iMac shufflephone, a miniature device that does everything and can survive a drop from a ten story window. I’m very happy to report that the stock is hovering around $299 per share.
• A Turkish engineer unveiled his home built super-efficient gas powered car that gets 400 MPG with no emissions. Mysteriously, something fell from space and demolished his workshop, killing him in the process. Onlookers described the object as a long steel rod traveling extremely fast and totally silent.

I could go on and on as it truly has been an amazing year. Who knew Barack and Hillary were an item? That Bill would become the head of the UN? That the Bills would have a 12-0 season? Can’t wait to live through it all…

This advice is pretty bad. We’re seeing great headline writing being replaced by keyword headline writing, i.e. generic swaths of keywords used to attract search traffic. The problem is that this is gaming the system which will force the system to change and then the whole thing will repeat. Eventually those gaming the system will get so far out of touch that writing will only be comprehensible to bots. Then there will be a backlash from humans who want intelligible writing and the great wars between humans and robots will begin.

That it- the Matrix started with bad headline writing.

This great slide show from BusinessWeek covers the Japanese mania for teeny-tiny cars. As much as I love the idea of a Smart Car these things make them look big. Unforunately I can also imagine getting smooshed by some cell phone gabbing housewife in a Navigator who will later claim she couldn’t see me.

They are very cute though…

I love this one. These guys have built a personal blimp. It’s filled with hot air and has a small engine so it can, theoretically, be steered. A four year project with lots of photos and video.

Given the complexity of setting it up, storage requirements and manpower needed, you’d really have to want one a lot to go through all this. Then again, hot air balloons probably involve similar complexity and there’s a lot of them out there. And you can steer this thing!

Click the pic for a larger version.