FROM WALL STREET JOURNAL

PORTALS By LEE GOMES

The Year in Technology:
Pirates, Flash Memory
And Hobbies -- Oh, My!
January 2, 2008; Page B1

It isn't that the iPhone or Facebook or the Wii aren't every bit as innovative or addictive or athletically enjoyable as everyone says they are. It's just that they are more than a little overexposed, meaning you probably wouldn't appreciate revisiting them yet again in a list of the most important technologies of 2007.

And so this column's list contains three less familiar technologies: piracy, flash memory and what might be called "hobbyist-generated content." All played important, if sometimes unheralded, roles -- for better or worse -- in the tech world last year, and surely will do the same in 2008.

Piracy makes the list because of the vengeance with which it has returned. This has happened in large part because of the peer-to-peer software known as BitTorrent, now on as many college students' computers as Napster was in 1999. But the software is useless without directories of where to find movies, music and software to be downloaded.

Enter Web sites like Pirate Bay, many of which are located overseas, where they have resisted all efforts to shut them down.

BitTorrent sites have become as encyclopedic as Napster was in its heyday. Any hit TV show, film or CD shows up instantly; even high-definition videos, such as Blu-ray, are starting to show up, though they can be up to 20 gigabytes big and take a week or two to download.

Some of the BitTorrent sites have a stick-it-to-the-man pose, and present themselves as freedom fighters unafraid to battle the copyright bogeymen of the entertainment industry. Actually, many are just garden variety Web sleazoids, making money by serving up porn ads of various sorts to the legions who come looking for free copies of "Superbad" or "Transformers." But their popularity and tenacity continue to vex the music and movie industries. One of the story lines of last year was the manner in which music labels were willing to throw in the towel and sell music online without any sort of copy protection.

The same thing has begun happening lately with movies, and BitTorrent gets much of the credit. The DVD release of the hit comedy "Knocked Up" came out without any form of copy protection -- not that the protection does much good, since free and freely available copying software can easily defeat it.

The producers of "Knocked Up" put a big sticker on the DVD's box boasting of the absence of copy protection. Presumably they think more people will want to buy the disk if they know they can make copies to give to friends. Whether anyone will need to buy it in the first place is the issue that the movie industry, and everyone else, will have to deal with.

One of the things people are doing with all those movies they are downloading is watching them on their mobile phones. Not only will people, especially younger ones, watch movies on their PCs, something no one would have believed just a few years ago, but they will watch them in a matchbook-size display.

Flash memory is making this possible. This is the sort of memory long found in digital cameras. It doesn't forget what it has stored when the power is off, unlike the RAM in computers. Flash is getting so inexpensive that it is starting to blur the distinctions between devices. Digital cameras, for instance, now have enough memory to capture significant amounts of video, making them competitive with camcorders.

In doing research, I was able, for just $40, to pop a two-gigabyte flash-memory card into my new BlackBerry, enough to take advantage of the device's underappreciated ability to play music and videos. You can store three movies in that much memory, and hundreds of albums. Four gigs are also available, and later this year, those numbers will double -- though through the miracle of electronics, the prices will stay the same.

This means that the digital abundance that has long been common on the desktop will be available everywhere you go. My Sony Reader, the size of the folder they bring you the bill in at the end of a meal, can hold thousands of novels, thanks to a flash-memory add-in card. It can hold music, too.

Hobbyist-generated content is my phrase for the way special-interest enthusiasts are bringing their passions to the Web. A great example of this is the explosion of blogs involving cooking and dining out. These play to the Web's great strengths and can be enormously instructive. The typical cooking blog, for instance, will document, with words, pictures and even video, every step in a meal's preparation, in the sort of glorious detail that even the glossiest coffee-table books and magazines can't match.

So much about food and cooking is online that the "mainstream media" of the food world are alarmed. In a recent Slate roundup of the year's best cookbooks, Cooks Illustrated founder Christopher Kimball began by damning his least favorite cookbook genres, like those from celebrity chefs, but adding a special "double damn" to "free Internet recipes."

It's not only cooking, of course, it's just about any other pastime you can think of. As a result, the Internet may make for a new golden age in hobbies.

Bon appétit, and happy new year.