In about ten days time, 2017 will begin.

1st of January 2017 is a Sunday, chill out and relax, it’s a Sunday.

What is top of mind for 2016?

Trump/Clinton; Brexit; Olympics; loss of Bowie, Frey, Ali, Rickman, Prince; on-going conflicts: Syria, Yemen; I could go on!

Top of mind for 2017? Let’s stick to steemit!

The Steemit outlook has a wide scope to consider:

Globally, people are consuming more and more media. The struggle is to grab attention and then KEEP it.

Snapchat has grabbed a lot of subscribers. Video technology seems to be taking us into a real virtuality, as opposed to virtual reality.

Google are registering about 3.5billion searches per day – over one for every two people on the planet.

More people are turning up to watch live video gaming than a baseball game. There are live streams of people doing a feigned sex performance and getting judged on it.

What lies ahead for paid User-Generated Content?

In 2017 ‘busy’ will go live in beta, it looks like a cousin to steemit, and running on steem, the same cryptocurrency. There is an imminent launch for ‘yours’ – looks a steemit competitor.

Newzulu, the user-generated news platform has supposedly got itself together but with the arguments over News and Fake News and who dishes out what, there must surely be a new fight over Trusted content? How will we receive stories which matter to us? Will we be able to decide?

I have advocated a more user-friendly platform to include direct messaging, voip, proper topic/tag management and a folder system for posts to be read later or archived.

The problem with my proposals is that they do not produce anything upon which one can vote. They are all personal facilities. What will this achieve other than increase blockchain volume?

This treads purposefully along to you … what do you want?

One thing which seems to be the curse of information sites is that content is prescribed. You get fed what you get fed by the shareholders and the advertisers.

Truly local and menu-driven content seems a distance away.

In the meantime, imagine this: your homepage is a console. To your right are all your social media access points; half right are your social media apps; central are your news feeds; to your half left are all your search functions and to the left are things like bank accounts, tax reporting, insurance – all the boring but vital stuff.

Above this is a concave screen which brings you your ultimate online life. You divide it up into segments to suit you!

This leads fluently as a brook to a stream - hardware ... it is clear that multi-connectivity is as important to success as being engaging and relevant.

There is no point in selling a mobile phone to a sailor unless it is waterproof and it floats!

Meantime … get out there because life is real. No virtual reality or real virtuality – it is a real reality. Don’t let it pass you by or it will byte you!