CES 2010 has come and gone, but from it, it was clear that this year marks the beginning of the era of 3D entertainment. Before Hi-Def TVs have infiltrated, thoroughly, into every home, watch out! Here comes a new format that companies will say is a "must have."

The conspiri-sensationalist will brush it off, saying that Big Corpoate is at it again, trying to capitalize on the success of "Avatar." They (with a capital "T") are going to be hell-bent on duplicating it, trying to cash in on the hype. For that we'll all have to upgrade our home theatres yet again, while the Illuminatti gloat in their capacity to provide "bread and circus" and make a buck off of it, too.

Didn't we just finally get our first set of Blu-ray disks into our media library, and now we gotta shell out more bucks (which frankly, we don't have in the Bama Bust days) just to keep up with the Jonses? Even the tech pundits who thive on breakthroughs talk wearily about yet another vector in the format wars.

But, all the misgivings aside for the dopped-up, hyper-innovation atmosphere where every step is a leap for mankind, CES 2010 - and the companies' showcase of their R&D jewels - marks the end of Web 2.0 and the beginning of Web 3.0. For better or for worse, the world will never be the same again.

Let's take a moment to observe how we're using the Web today. In other words, why would companies feel confident that the introduction of a programming-deficient 3D TV is ready for prime time at this particular moment in the digital revolution? It's not just for the sake of finding yet another way to keep getting consumers to buy at top prices - though that's part of it. It's not because people aren't able to shell out the cost of going to "dinner and a movie" and that production houses are looking for new angles to retain the popcorn-munching audience - though that's part of it. It's not because precocious engineers one day woke up after a Da'Vinchi-esque dream and suddenly realized the elegance of a motherboard that could handle computations for 3D on an LCD screen. It's not even that The  System - in a Noam Chomsky-ish way - has some grand, providential plan for us little people in their machinery - though that's part of it.

Really, what's happening with 3D TVs and their entrance into the consumer electronics catalogue is that the Web 2.0 world has reached that critical moment when the gears are so revved up that it's just begging that the cluch gets pressed while the stick gets put into a higher grear. The pistons of Web 2.0 and it's transmission is giving it all she's got, and you just know in your gut, as the driver, that to get to 60 mph, you gotta get higher gear into the mix.

Web 2.0 was a phenomenal success. It made interacivity, crowd sourcing, collaborative work spaces and user-generated content as staples of the World Wide Web. It also produced, in the process, what one author succinctly labels Wikinomics, or open-sourced knowledge for the sake of crowd-sourced innovation.

Well, if most of us who have chosen to go the route of being plugged in are being good about it, we all have our little "audience space" in the form of a social networking account like Facebook and a blogging or micro-blogging tool like Twitter or Tumblr. At the very least while we, individually, reap a sense of connection and chamaradery with these tools, and we also, inadvertantly, add value and spurn innovation to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr and so on. Without us, the user, these sites would be meaningless, and that's where the Web 2.0 made its sociological breakthrough. It convinced us that we wanted even craved to connect to our friends, family and strangers through these tools.

They've open-sourced content production, and in return the crowd has produced it - in an over-abundance. In the business of being Facebook, we have to love adding the tags for our photos that ultimately produce targeted ads. This Wikinomics, in short, puts the "experience" into the service. And for the plugged in, mind you, it's become effortless. It's not just a way of life; it is life! or at least a part of it like going to the mall or the bookstore or go bowling or to the ice cream parlor are all a part of life.

In addition, Web 2.0 has treats with such value the voice of the individual - my voice and your voice - that products/restaurants/retail stores/you-name-it reviews are also becoming a part of life. Hell, eBay has made reviewing vendors and your purchase experience almost obligatory. And, with geo-location games such as Foursquare and Yelp making you "mayor" or a location-go-to consultant based on how many times your thumb depresses the capacitive touch-screen's pellet ... Well, it's pretty evident that Web 2.0 has completed it's circuit of, generally getting everyone to pitch in and make the Web a dynamic, living thing.

But, what about these 3D TVs? Well, even Google Earth has it's own pipeline for user generated content. It's always been rather perplexing that this offering of Google has remained in the mix and rather highly billed whereas stuff like Google Notebook has been canned. What can you do there, or what has anyone seen of this app beyond some cool images and a way to contribute more peices of the puzzle? Why not just ditch Google Earth and make the "street view" or the newly unveiled "store view" of Google Maps the last stop for virtual walk-throughs of this 3rd rock we're already trying distract ourselves from by staring at a computer screen all day long.

Now here comes the 3D TVs and the goggles to enjoy them with. Suddenly, Google Earth is no longer a fashionable geek toy, but an immersive landscape - the first virtual world that somehow seems eerily like our own. Come this year, we will increasingly be able to sit on our couch and gaze into our next vacation with an experience infinitely better than any IMAX show.

And, if we've truly learned our lesson well with Web 2.0, we will demand and pound our fists from the get-go that we will be allowed the "right" to graffiti on the walls of, or create new experimental social models for that virtual patch of real estate in Google Earth for which we are the Foursquare Mayor in the real world. Shouldn't we have that right? After all, we were the ones who contributed the photos of the "interior" or private spaces that has yet to be defined in this virtual world. We put the sweat and hardwork in, and now that is now accessible to anyone's avatar in an immersive way, shouldn't we be able to own are intellectual property? Aren't we the ones who added the sound effects to make it authentic? Didn't we tweak out the design of the space with our own artwork splashed with some AdMob to make a buck or two out of our labors ...

Prometheus has brought fire to the mortals in CES 2010, and there's no turning back.

The Gods tremble, powerless to watch as we, collectively, build and shape the Web - a world - in our own image. The Web is no longer merely an information super-highway, it is a vast universe of our own, personal design - a place for humanity to congregate and express it's deepest nature.

But before we rest in our collective hubris that we have surpassed the Gods themselves - that the Web has achieved its apex - we are still at the very beginning of this journey. The personal computer said "Let there be light!" And it was good. Then came HTML, and from this firmament, the waters were separated into day and night. Then the TCP/IP protocol invoked the formation of earth and the sea. And Web 2.0 is mearly the arising of the creatures that populate the garden. Man has yet to be fashioned out of clay, nor has Eve been made out of his rib.  But, despite the absence of Man from his own creation, this genesis is in full swing. We are only a couple of years from inhabiting a universe - a new one that's ours, fashioned in our own image and built on pure human reason.


This is going to be cool!

While networking face-to-face always involves a delicate hand on the elbow while shaking of the hands in the final stretch of a beautiful conversation, social networking demands posting, posting and more posting.

Podgnosticast offers this tip on being a cultured and a refined socialite on the FB:

Etiquite Tip #1.0:

"It's not enough just to accept a friend request. Write on their wall the first chance you get!

The Facebook "Wall" and its variants on other social networking platforms like Linkedin is a public form; it's a social network broadcast, that not only brings warm fuzzies to the friend who had wondered before clicking your profile if you'd accept them as a friend with thoughts like, "He loves me. She loves me not," but it also is a quick, easy way to solidify to a whole swath of mutual and be-gazing degrees of separation that bond that you and your new social network buddy have and have had (like way back when Z Cavariccis, trench coats and mullet cuts were in vogue.


Your best and closest friends and family are already in your Facebook or Myspace audience-space. Take a moment for a few sincere words for that laggard to your Rolodex. They will thank you in their heart for being recognized - a hot commodity in prosumer-space, and hopefully their sphere will honor you as a guest as well.

After all, that function in the real world where deals happen has that happy bow-tie of business cards and spilling champagne for a plastic flute, but the social sphere has "The Wall."

A question arises from the not just the deluge of information coming at us, but also from the deluge of information we all are putting out: is there a burgeoning psychological specialty for addressing the problem of a time poor audience?

Take a listen:



On the one hand, the field opens up for tremendous interactivity and connectivity. TV and twitter unite. The discourse gets lively and multi-dimensional.

On the other hand ... the detachment from what our immediate experience is as in watching TV while surfing the Web and twittering and writing e-mails at the same time defies the what most spirituality prescribes: rapt and focused attention as being the cornerstone of a general feeling of connectedness and serenity.

Is all this "connectedness" a recipe for an acute diagnosis of "alienation?" Only time will tell what the "new studies" on the nightly news turn up about the consequences of the digital age.

For the record, this posting was made while listening to the embedded report from NPR, it's first lines penned before the newscaster was finished.

I'm looking for a therapist now. Anyone with more than two years experience in this new specialty?

The most recent issue of Wired magazine has an article on emerging rules of etiquette in our Web 2.0 environment. While its clear that it's a hot topic and one worthy of continued discussion, there remains something from Old Tech that could underwrite the rules that become applicable to these new avenues of communication.

That is, I spied a sign posted on plywood walls used to enclose a construction site at a busy intersection in Brooklyn. It said, "Lost Dog," and went on to describe in an artful print out, complete with a picture, the dogs breed, its idiosyncrasies and a description of how it went missing. While this is an Old Tech appeal to the neighborhood, whoever compiled the document did something extraordinary: they wrote in Sharpie over their public notice, "We found her. Thanks."

While it might have well been just as good to tear off the print out, there was a very humane sense of good will and completion in being notified that the collective "us" had accomplished the mission of returning this beloved dog to its rightful owner.

Likewise, when it comes to the general ease with which we can add our comments to Web artifacts such as friend's status updates, their blog posts or twitters, or even mainstream media articles, what seems to still be downright alienating from all of this is those statements like, "We found her. Thanks."

That is, a status update is not just completed by the act of being commented on; a text or email message is not sent; a blog post or its comments has not been read; a dropped phone call is not over until, at some level, all of these ways of communicating have been issued an "signal received, end of line."

As such, a rule of thumb added to the Wired article for etiquette in these things is this: make it known when a text has been received with a simple response, add a closing comment to comment threads, find a way to say the tide and true "goodbye" to drop calls; in short, make it known that in cyberspace, you, the originator of the transmission says, "10-4. Over and out."

When bacteria talk, they cast their vote. And when their individual votes are numerous enough, they act, and they act in unison.

It's probably the holy grail of marketing to discover the precise mechanisms of viral videos and viral anything on the Internet, and if these erstwhile marketers had had any interest in their one and only biology course in college or any interest in biology whatsoever in the form of a TED talk, they might have gleaned from the primordial world a clue as to how individuals congregate into united action.

The nomenclature of Digg.com votes and the use of "viral" in viral videos, it would seem, is no accident.

Here's how it works on a microscopic level: the simple bacteria, in the average course of a work day, dispenses a chemical particular to its species into its environment. That chemical is identical to the one's that others of its like secrete. The purpose of this chemical is to merely announce to the world of bacteria like it, "I am here."

When enough of the bacteria are in close quarters secreting this chemical, the density of this, hormone or pheromone, as it were, says to all the bacteria to perform an action that their single-cell, one-and-only function dictates like becoming phosphorescent or to initiate their virulent attack on their much larger host - something no individual bacteria has hopes of doing alone.

The biologist's term for this activity is called the "Quorum Vote."

The human equivalent is called the "Digg."

The ramifications of a Digg being ascribed to a specific behavior or set of actions to be done when Digging gets to a certain level; that is to say, if Digging it not only pulls it to the top of the list, but also is a call for some sort of action, or product for that matter ....

Digg, at the end of the day - if as below, so above with our bacteria friends then the presumption is by our innovative advertiser or new-media periodical, that a threshold of diggs constitutes an action on the part of the producer of the content.

Bacterium, it's been understood thus far, were, as a phylum, independent, single-cell organisms whose function was merely to consume enough that mitosis would kick in and it could copy itself by splitting into two. That is, on its best day, the high school biology class would swoon with excitement at witnessing under a microscope the act of a ripe bacterium, fat with eating, decide that it was going to expand the scope of its singular DNA by making two of itself.

I suppose it's a strange model to pitch these days - that the audience for advertisements and news articles - could initiate collective activity spearheaded and organized by the agency producing the media, but in this enterprising age ... Anything's possible.

Part 2:

A co-founder of Twitter, Evan Williams, is vocal in his experience of seeing his simple concept - answering the question "What are you doing?" in 140 characters or less - be used in innovative ways - in bacterial ways, if you will. While Twitter would on its surface seem to suggest that answering that question might yield rather banal offerings like "brushing my teeth," or "deciding on Newman's Own spaghetti sauce or Barilla," it would seem that when banal and ordinary individual are in extreme circumstances, the Tweet can, like the bacterial pheromone, unite individuals into common action.

One of the examples Williams cited were the Tweeters would announce gasoline prices they'd observed while driving around town. The utility of such reports by individual "cells," as it were, is evident when in fact the colony of Atlanta is, like everywhere else, suffering from the toxicity of the fueling-the-car-environment to their pocket book.

No doubt, the Tweets, like the bacterial chemical counterpart played a role in shaping the behavior of drivers of like mind, and perhaps opens an insight into means engineering collective behavior derived from the animal kingdom.

Time should reveal if there's a model to be uncovered through mechanisms such as Twitter. There might even be avenue for networks of tweeters united towards the same goal - especially if that goal happens to be, like in the bacterial realm, the mastery by individuals over a much larger, more complex and infinitely massive cultural trend or idea that no One Man Army could ever challenge alone.

You have to admire the tenacity of humatity's base nature to come up with an electronic appeal to our animalistic side. Surely, this is but one of the many ways in which we will stamp our special species-self on the things we make.

Observe iBoobs on the iPhone

Recently, Zarathustra came out of his cave, had a sudden shiver run down his spine; he yawned, and in the last hurrah of his expiration, he sighed, saying: "Circuit City is dead."

Shopping is at last in the hands of the people, he thought; no longer a dictum of the mega-conglomerate Gods, but dictated and shaped by the terrestrials: the user, the blogger, the five-starred volunteer reviewer.

And so, with this thought, Zarathustra walked down from his aerie towards the nearest village to spread the good news that commerce was now in their hands, and that by their own hands they destroyed the monolith of hegemony. Individuality was restored, he thought, and though the products - the manna - that the Gods of commerce would continue to shower on their target demographic with nifty electronics, at last, the marketing rested in the hands of an individual's personal story - their experience in the form of a review.


At last, he thought, shopping and trade were now the responsibility of the people and the villages, and he hastened to tell them of it.


The first villager he encountered scuttled out of a shopping frenzy of 30-percent off 30-percent that would make city pigeons lusty with envy that they no longer held the scavenging title for a while.


And when Zarathustra approached him, the feverish-eyed villager rushed passed carrying an oblonged box under his arm and looking like he had just gotten away with murder. He was hastening to stash his eBay auction before anyone noticed it was in his possession.


Zarathustra spoke: "Good man, what haveth you under your arm?"


The villager smiled with pride. "I just got the HP TouchSmart IQ816 for next to the price of dirt. You oughtta run to Circuit City before they run out."


"Are they going to forget how to make them, or will computers or even electricity to power them disappear," Zarathustra asked mildly.


"No, but Circuit City's gonna run out of them."


"Precisely!"


The villager frowned. "After that, dummy, we'll have to wait for Best Buy to liquidate before you can get your brand new wares at close-out. And if that happens, then you'll just be buying direct from manufacturers and distributors. No more playing with them in-store and getting the best deal online."


"Or buying them slightly used on eBay or reconditioned from the manufacturer," added Zarathustra.


"Right!"


"So what are you going to do with that one under your arm?"


"I'm going to flip it by posting it to eBay. Make a few bucks off of it."


Zarathustra began to get glassy-eyed and his soliloquy waxed with pathos. He began to unravel for the man the UberShopper - the one that buys direct from the manufacturer or from an outlet or from another, fellow villager for the best deal; and that the purchase is informed by his fellows who have used the product and his fellows who have reviewed the merchant. He unraveled the phenomena of price-at-cost of materials, labor, and delivery without the problems of overhead and marketing campaigns. He began to unravel the issue of The Long Tail, but he cut his soliloquy short because the villager walked away frustrated that this dude was saying nonsense, and he was forgetting, by the distraction, the description he had planned for his eBay posting.


Zarathustra watched the villager walk off huffing and puffing in dismay, and considered his discourse in a different way.