I don't think these guys are quite ready to go live just yet.

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

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General Protection Fault, by Jeff Darlington.

The thing I like most about the World Wide Web is that because entry into the medium is relatively cheap (relatively when compared to other publishing mediums, not when compared to, say, the price of milk) it's possible to just try something and see how it all shakes out. The penalty involved with "failure" on the web is usually that nobody shows up. That's pretty low-risk compared to the penalty for publishing failures in the real world, which generally involves suffering considerable financial loss.

One of the best examples of the Let's See How This Shakes Out school of publishing is National Novel Writing Month, or "NaNoWriMo" for those of us who can't be bothered to spell that out every time we refer to it.

What is NaNoWriMo, you ask? Well in 1999 a bunch of people got together and said "let's see if we can write an entire novel in one month." So they all tried. And in 2000, they tried it again... and more people heard about it, and joined up. And in 2001, that larger group tried it again, only this time more curious and decidedly masochistic people joined them. And in 2002, they tried it again, with even yet more people joining the fray, And in 2003, they tried it again -- and that's when I heard about, and joined up, and strong-armed two friends into joining as well... and in 2004, and again in 2005 -- each year the lunatics who invented it put up the website, managed the registrations, provided the software that actually tabulates the wordcount of your entry, and each year more curious and enthusastic would-be novelists joined in on the fun...

... why? Just because. Because it seemed like something to do. And that something grew far beyond what they expected to get out of it.

The rules for NaNoWriMo are pretty simple:

1. On November 1, 12:00AM (in your time zone), start writing.

2. On Novermber 30, 12 Midnight (in your time zone), stop writing.

3. To "win," you must have written a story consisting of at least 50,000 words.

That's it.

Although 50,000 words isn't really considered a full-length novel in publishing circles, 50K is a lot of words to write in a month.... and if you can write 50K in one, you can probably write 85K (which I think is the actual word length required for a novel) in two. NaNoWriMo is the Iron-Man Triathalon of writing, where the three competitions are Writing, More Writing, and Hey You, Don't Stop Writing.

I adore NaNoWriMo. It doesn't take itself seriously, it's open to anyone who cares to give it a try, it makes no pretense at being important, and despite the considerable amount of anguish involved, it's a hell of a lot of fun. And the exilaration you feel when you actually meet that goal is...

well...

... exilarating.

OK, so I couldn't think of a better word. That's what National Novel Editing Month (NaNoEdMo) is for.

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 embarassing.

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.