Today's examination of cultural fluff comes courtesy of YouTube.

Ask.com has decided it's tired of playing second fiddle to other, more successful search engines and has decided to start a campaign to let people know exactly how good their search engine is:

Boxjam's Doodle, by the Great Blue One

The last month of the year is a time for quiet, thoughtful introspection and cautiously optimistic speculation on the year to come. Unless you're writing for a computer magazine, in which case introspection be damned -- and as far as speculation goes, caution is for techno-sissies.

In that vein I have decided to put forward my own list of predictions for the year 2007. Ten of them, to be exact: and I promise that my list of predictions is every bit as reliable as any other predictions list you'll read this month.

So without further ado:

EVISCERATI.ORG'S TOP TEN PREDICTIONS FOR 2007

General Protection Fault, by Jeff Darlington.

From College Roomies From Hell!!!, by Maritza Campos.

This message is for all my friends in the email spam community -- you know who you are -- and I hope that you'll read what I have to say very closely.

Guys, I know my spam. I've seen a lot of your work over the years. I've seen it grow from simple, direct advertisements for various products (mostly porn) to more complicated forms that attempt to masquerade as personal messages from people who really want you to know about various "cool sites" (containing mostly porn) to the strange and cryptic emails that are nothing but randomly generated words, to the current crowning achievement of your craft, the Nigerian Money Laundering Scam.

A little bit of research -- just a little -- should back up my credibility here. A simple search through your databases should find at least one of my email addresses on every single mailing list you have. I'm saying this because I want you guys to know that I'm very familiar with your work, so I have the background to back up what I'm about to tell you.

You guys are getting sloppy. It's embarrassing.

From General Protection Fault, by Jeff Darlington.

If you're reading this site it's unlikely that you're someone who is new to the Internet, but they're out there. Every day, more and more people are signing up and taking a look around... and what they find is usually strange, fascinating, frightening, and largely incomprehensible.

(And pornographic. Let's be honest... you can't swing a cat in the internet without hitting porn, and if you try to swing a cat there's probably someone out there willing to pay to see you swing said cat on a webcam. So yes, new users will find porn. A lot of porn. Whether they're looking for it or not. And eventually, if they've been on the net long enough, the porn will come looking for them.)

The internet can be a shock to a lot of people, but this shock can be minimized when more experienced users take them in hand and give them a basic structure to work from. To that end, and as a public service to my readers and the people they know who are taking those first, faltering steps as they peer into the great digital abyss, I would like to impart one of the great truths I have come to know over my many years online. This truth, known as "The Laws of Gender Discernment," can be summed up as follows:

Everyone you meet on the Internet is a man... with one exception.

From Kernel Panic, by yours truly.

Just a very quick note, since I'm working on a much longer, more complicated article going up on Friday: last month -- July 14, to be exact -- the MP3 file format officially turned ten years old.

In related news, yesterday I broke a hip while yelling at those damn kids to get off my lawn.

When landmarks like this come around, it's tempting for people to start pontificating on the significance of the event. For example, next year, when Help Desk turns ten years old, I'll be tempted to look back and ruminate on all the vastly important and ground-breaking work I've done, like...

... um...

... well, I'll worry about it next year.

My point is that the MP3 file format turning ten is just the kind of milestone that provokes people in the know into coaxing out Deep Thoughts Concerning the Significance of the Event as it Pertains to History. And sure enough, over on CNET the technology editor for MP3.com wrote an article called "Top five ways MP3 has changed the world."

As it stands, the article is almost entirely wrong. Not because the points he lists didn't happen (though a few of them are... odd), but because he makes the common mistake of giving the tool all the credit.