Category Archives: Online Trends

What Happens when the Whole World Becomes Searchable?

First published September 21, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

There are a few items that crossed the threshold of my inbox recently that led me to speculate about search in the grand scheme of things.

First of all, fellow Search Insider David Berkowitz talked about online data storage, and how it could introduce reams of new content into online depositories, there to be connected to by consumers through search.

Secondly, Apple and Google are in talks about iTV, Apple’s new set-top box that allows you to view downloaded video on your TV, at the same time making it searchable.

Welcome to e-World

The fact is, the whole world is becoming digitized and indexable. It’s not a new trend, it’s been making inroads for the last two and a half decades, but there seems to be a tipping point of convergence that’s rapidly approaching. National and international news is almost fully digitized, and local news is following in the same footsteps. There are now digital editions of most periodicals. And Google is doing its level best to digitize every book ever written. So the print world is well on the way.

The Genetics of Music

For electronic media, music is largely in the digital domain, and the searchability of it is rapidly improving. The biggest bottleneck is in trying to categorize and rationalize what is largely a subjective experience. I either like music or I don’t. How do you make that searchable? Well, interestingly, Pandora’s Music Genome Project is trying to do just that. Since 2000, it has analyzed hundreds of thousands of songs based on over 400 attributes or “genes” (hence the Genome moniker) which include melody, harmony, rhythm, instrumentation, singing styles, lyrics and arrangements, to name just a few. It’s a large-scale attempt to make music searchable by something other than genre, artist or title, which is far too limiting for most of us. The Pandora interface, in its attempt to be intuitive, doesn’t allow for power searching, but it’s still a quantum leap forward in allowing us to help define our likes and dislikes in the musical universe.

What You See is What You Search

If you take this same approach to video entertainment, there is a much more complex, and therefore richer, content depository to mine. Think of the universe of movies, TV shows and documentaries that exists, each loaded with dialogue, topicality, visuals and styles. As complex as music can be, video explodes the content to be categorized and analyzed in a dozen different directions. It provides a huge indexing challenge, but therein lies the promise and profitability. And it appears to be a challenge that Google is ready to take on. Of course, we haven’t even touched on aspects like consumer-generated video content (the YouTubes of the world, which seems to be the latest overladen bandwagon) and social tagging.

We’ve Only Just Begun…

But that’s the globally visible world, the tip of an immensely large iceberg. There is very little in our physical world now that isn’t digitized somewhere. There is a virtual mirror for almost every physical presence. Store inventories exist in the digital domain, and have for some time. Aggregating those inventories and making them searchable turns the entire world into your personal shopping mall. We leave GPS trails as we move from point A to B. Our vehicles churn out detailed performance summaries via the onboard computer as we do so. Mobile computing makes the very stuff of our personal lives; our thoughts, our activities, our appointments, our contacts, all digital and indexable. At work and at school, we all produce content on a daily basis. My daughters are content producers each time they do homework, and increasingly, that work is in bits and bytes.

As the barriers disappear between our hard drive and the Net (the subject of David’s column) all this content theoretically can enter the public domain and be searchable. Increasingly, the question we ask ourselves is “where do I draw the line between my private and my online world?” File sharing becomes a substantially bigger deal.

Brain Melting Questions

Fellow blogger Mitch Joel calls these kind of questions “brain melters.” I like that. It captures the mind-numbing aspects of this stuff. Our electronic footprint is now bigger, and in some ways more real, than our physical one. There is this vast binary universe out there, terabyte after terabyte of data that grows each and every second, capturing the essence of who we are and what we do. And the sole door to that world, the channel we all must pass through to gain entry, is search. In the act of searching, we connect to that universe.

Cast the search question in that light. Realize that we have yet to scratch the vast potential of this fundamental glue that holds the Internet together and bonds us to it. Imagine owning the solitary access point to everything!

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are jockeying for position to do just that. It should excite the hell out of their respective shareholders, but it should scare the hell out of us. Do we really want this much power in the hands of so few?

These are big questions, and I’d love to get your viewpoint. Leave your thoughts on the Search Insider blog, or drop me an email at gord@enquiro.com.

What Happens When the Whole World becomes Searchable?

My Search Insider column today was big picture stuff, looking at how search can connect us to a digitized world.

Here’s an excerpt:

There is this vast binary universe out there, terabyte after terabyte of data that grows each and every second, capturing the essence of who we are and what we do. And the sole door to that world, the channel we all must pass through to gain entry, is search. In the act of searching, we connect to that universe.

Catch the rest of the column at MediaPost.

The column drew some interesting responses, both on the Search Insider blog and emailed to me.

Martin Edic truly thought globally

In the spirit of creating a ‘brain melter’, imagine the extension of search created by GPS and satellite imaging. Suppose I want to create a search engine devoted to global climate change. If I can access these sources I could literally do a planetary search that included both digital data a geographoc, geological, weather and other environmental data all viewable as imagery, maps, text, etc.

David Gust took exception to my plaudits for Pandora: I initially thought Pandora was great, but eventually it became monotonous. A descriptor genome for the music is great, but it doesn’t decipher the music consumption genome in me.

My point is that indexing means little without context. Context is about behavior and that is where the true focus must be placed to truly unlock value of “Indexing the World”

Derick Harris,w ho obviously has a lot of time on his hands, took me to task for my “pointless” vision of an Orwellian future

I do wish that these marketing rhetoricians of search, such as Mr. Hotchkiss, would “think first” about what they are asking, in terms of “big questions” — instead of wasting our time with patently pointless essays that amount to self-serving indulgences posing as questions that really amount to a whole world Googleized into an information hell.

…Ouch! Sorry Derick, I obviously hit a sore spot.

And in the spirit of wired “Big Brother”, Warren Peace (come on..that can’t be your real name. But if it is, kudos to your parents!) shared his vision of a database schema for a “global object database” or GOD for short…

whereby every kind of digital data could be stored, indexed and cross-referenced, and rated for accuracy (couldn’t find funding for it, though). One issue is that many things are analog, not digital, and digitizing them means losing important information. An image of a person and a list of their interests is NOT the person, just an avatar. Do we really need an avatar of every living thing?

Perhaps that’s what the real “God” is – an analog, searchable object database that details absolute accuracy.

Talk about your brain melters!

Online Video Needs Critical Mass

More on the topic of online video. It seems the majority of stories I’m seeing in this space recently have to do with moving video to the Net. A recent one was the agreement between YouTube and Warner.

YouTube is as hot as a high grade viral infection right now, which is what it essentially is. It’s the latest Net “Buzz” poster child, and it’s reaping huge amounts of traffic. That’s a great step towards sustainability, but as we’ve seen in the past, the Net’s traffic patterns are notoriously fickle. The tide can turn overnight and head to a new spot. What YouTube has to do is grow up without growing old. Kafka gets it right in his article.

Kudos to Warner for understanding the ebb and flow of the Internet. You have to watch where the new communities of interest are gathering, and shift your strategy to be in the right place at the right time. Presently, YouTube is the right place. The only question is how long is the “right time” window. YouTube in it’s present form is all hype and little substance. We’re still playing with the novelty of online video. We still get a kick out of watching teenagers lip sync to a popular song (or the theme song for Pokemon) in his/her bedroom. That will get old fast. Not to mention the questionable legality of most of the content on YouTube.

Warner is smart enough to realize that the consumer is at the wheel and will control where distribution occurs. They’re laying their bets on YouTube, and it’s probably a smart bet. At least, it’s a smarter bet that where the competition is placing their chips. Universal is still trying to maintain the illusion of control by going head to head with another red hot property, MySpace.com, with threats of legal action due to copyright infringement. EMI and Universal has also gone with SpiralFrog, a start up. They have obviously given up traffic for greater control.

But for YouTube, the trick will be to provide more meat as it transitions from a viral novelty to an internet mainstay. This trick has been successfully pulled off only a few times in the past. One was Google.

Google and the Future of Video

The talks that Google and Apple are currently in about video will likely start defining the future of video entertainment as we know it. And it’s just one more example of “push” going to “pull”.

The news story is about iTV, the new device that bridges the gap between the TV and the PC, letting you viewed video from your hard drive on your TV. It’s the continuation of convergence that I’ve been talking about for some time now.

But what is interesting about this to me is not so much the hardware as the extension of searchability to online entertainment. It’s just a matter of time before the walls come down between something like YouTube and the world of broadcast TV. They’re already crumbling rapidly. And setting your viewing preferences based on searchability opens up a whole new world. I’ve had just a taste of it through Microsoft’s Media Center and I like it. You can search up to two weeks of programming by keyword, looking for a particular topic, director or actor.

Now, let’s extend this the next logical step. Let’s open up the rapidly exploding world of video. All the movies, all the tv shows, all the documentaries ever made, as well as the crushing wave of consumer generated video content, all as searchable as the web thanks to Google. You in the mood for a show about 9/11 conspiracy theories? A quick search and you’re watching Loose Change. Plus, Google suggests other shows you might be interested on based on your topic. It’s just a matter of time before somebody does for video what Pandora is doing for music, allowing you to explore the world of video entertainment based on similarities to what you already like.

Social tagging opens up more possibilities, allowing you to tap into the most popular choices of the various online communities you belong to. The buzz effect takes over (as we see currently on YouTube) and suddenly watching online video becomes a communal experience.

It’s a revolution in video distribution, and the seeds are being sown currently in the chat that Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt are likely having as we speak.

Schmidt Takes a Bite of Apple

Eric Schmidt now sits on the board of Apple, which is leading to a flurry of speculation about what potential partnerships between Google and Apple may be in the offing. So far, the speculation seems to be rather mundane meanderings about integrating Google search technology in iTunes, possible assistance for Google in assembling a suite of apps to compete with Microsoft, and possible entertainment content distribution deals, with Jobs ties to Disney.

To me, the potential lies in the possible creation of power positions on Microsoft’s outposts, rather than assembling the forces for a head to head onslaught on the heavily fortified desk top app market. Even with Apple at their side, Google faces a daunting task in taking on Office with their tremendously entrenched position. At best, I would see them capturing a good percentage of the relatively small “alternative” market, but unless something shifts in market positions, I don’t see them swinging many main stream customers away. These apps are squarely in the pragmatist market, and the customers adverse to the risks inherent in a switch, especially when there will be a seamless upgrade path offered by Microsoft to a live version of Office.

But the cozying up takes on a more interesting dimension when you explore the possibilities beyond Microsoft’s power positions. In the mobile computing world, Microsoft has been struggling to gain market share, and the step from an iPod to a full mobile pc is not that far. Tie that together with Google’s work in creating compelling mobile apps and a web based application matrix and some interesting possibilities present themselves. We’re not far from the horizon where mobile computing starts to replace the desktop. And mobile distribution of entertainment content is rapidly moving through the early adopter stage. A chasm crossing of significant magnitude isn’t far away. I’ve got to believe that Jobs is visionary enough to see this. Apple never managed to beat the Wintel cartel on the desktop, but the hip pocket is a whole new ballgame.

Also of note is what this means for Eric Schmidt himself. Is this move solely for the benefit of Google, or is Eric positioning himself for life after Google? As the Times articles states, this moves him into a pre eminent position as a Silicon Valley power broker, and he has had political aspirations in the past. While Schmidt has done an admirable job in minding the kids at Google, the power triad structure has never been that elegant, leading to questions of its stability.

Whatever the outcome, in the swirl of partnerships that have recently been announced, this emerges as one of the more interesting developments, with some intriguing long term possibilities.

Google as the Connector, not the Creator

The TV biz is the latest to get nervous about Google. Marissa Mayer is currently in the UK, assuaging skittish TV execs who are worried about Google’s muscling in on their turf. Mayer’s message is that Google is a technology company, not a media company.

If you look at the nature of Google’s position, you would realize why it doesn’t make sense for Google to try to churn out content. Google’s point of strength, and the one they should be focusing exclusively on, is to retain it’s position as the preferred connection between users and content. It’s a connector, and as long as it continues to function as such, it’s holding all the cards. Google is the pipeline that the lion’s share of web traffic will pass through, even momentarily. And that’s the beauty of Google’s plan. It doesn’t have to worry about producing content, it can focus on facilitating the connection, and then monetizing that connection.

If you’re a connector, there’s no overhead. There’s none of the costs or headaches involved with producing the content. You just have to point the right way to it, and collect your toll for each head that passes through. It’s clean, it’s simple and it’s tremendously profitable. That’s why Google can afford to cut some pretty sweet revenue sharing splits with current content producers. If they can corner the “connection” market, they can effectively cut out the competition.

If I were the TV execs, it wouldn’t be Google I would be worrying about. It would be the millions of bored teenagers that have a camcorder and nothing better to do in an afternoon than make a stupid video. These are the clips that dominate the all time most viewed videos on YouTube. It may be easy for the established production houses to dismiss this content as amateurish and inconsequential, but these clips are precursors of the democratization of video production, as consumer generated content becomes better and more readily available. Again, it goes back to my view of the deconstruction of tradition distribution control points. Video used to have only a handful of distribution points, so tight partnerships with content creators were possible. The internet is moving the distribution point online and away from the traditional control points, and Google is very wisely trying to grab a big piece of that pie. They can remain agnostic to the source of the content, as long as they can control the access.

The thing that worries me a little is that the execs in charge of the traditional control points don’t seem to realize the magnitude of the change that’s coming. They’re focusing their attention on an easily identifiable but false threat coming from Google, without realizing that the rules of the game are being completely rewritten and the real threat is coming from their own audience.

Life after SEW for Danny Sullivan

First published August 30, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

This Tuesday, a bomb dropped on the search marketing community. It started, as so many stories do now online, with a simple blog post. After 10 years, Danny Sullivan was leaving Search Engine Strategies and Search Engine Watch. Jaws could be heard dropping around the world. Danny is synonymous with both the shows and the site. And ten years is an eternity in this biz. We just always assumed that Danny’s involvement with the two franchises was like bedrock, so permanent you take it for granted. There were others involved–many others–all integral to the success, but make no mistake, this was Danny’s gig. The thought of SEW and SES without Danny just didn’t jive. Within hours, there was a litany of tributes to Danny Sullivan on his blog. It was almost as if a head of state had passed on. We collectively caught our breath and wondered what was next.

By the time you read this, this will no doubt be old news, so I won’t go into the details or reasons of the departure. I’m not really privy to them anyway. What I would like to do instead is look at some of the back history of how Search Engine Watch began, because I think it’s a great Internet story.

A Webmaster’s Guide To Search

One of the things that is wonderful about the Web is how it evens the playing field and creates opportunity. If you’re smart, if you’re a good communicator, and if you’re passionate about something, you can pick your niche and carve out your own slice of celebrity. Danny was all three. In 1996, Danny Sullivan’s notoriety probably didn’t extend much beyond his family and friends, but that was soon to change.

In 1995, Danny left journalism behind to go into Web development. Ironically, that was about the same time I left traditional advertising behind to focus on the Web. Soon, for both of us, we encountered the inevitability of search engines. As sites were developed, Danny recognized the importance of search engines as a traffic source and began experimenting to achieve higher rankings. For four months in 1996, he tweaked and tested codes, achieving some success, and published his findings online, collectively called “A Webmaster’s Guide to Search Engines”. In the next year, it was rebranded Search Engine Watch and started to take up more and more of Danny’s time. It soon became the reference site for a number of nascent search engine optimizers (myself included) and became Danny’s full-time gig, supported by a handful of subscribers. At the end of 1997, it was purchased by Mecklermedia and Danny continued as editor.

The launch of SES

Search Engine Strategies launched from the base of support built by the site. The first show was in November, 1999 in San Francisco. The promo page is still live, if you’re interested. Since then, the show has grown from a few hundred attendees and a handful of exhibitors to attendance in the thousands and a jammed exhibit hall. As I wrote just a few weeks ago, it is the must-see search event.

In the intervening years, Danny has chronicled the birth and growth of an industry. Through the past 10 years, search engines have come and gone, but Danny Sullivan was always there, making sense of an occasionally nonsensical business. He has been the constant. Like I said, he’s bedrock. He’s also a search celebrity, one of the best known names and faces in a region of the online world that has since become a focal point of global interest. You want to know about search? Ask Danny. Major newspapers, magazines and TV networks beat a path to his door. When John Battelle decided to chronicle the history of search for his book, The Search, a long visit with Danny was a no-brainer, and John makes his debt to Danny very clear in the foreword.

The creation of a community

But Danny had no special education, or credentials to become the pre-eminent expert on search marketing. He has a degree, but there’s no Ph.D. of Search. He simply had a passion, a curiosity and a knack for communicating what he found. The Web gave him a voice, and he found his audience. Through the past 10 years, he has never failed that audience. Almost single-handedly, he opened the communication lines between the search engines and Webmasters and helped to create the community that now exists. From his beginning efforts, people like Brett Tabke and Matt Cutts have taken up the torch and continued to keep the communication flowing. Danny Sullivan has taken on the stewardship of what he began, continuing to nurture the SEM community, and there are many who are in his debt.

As I said at the beginning, I don’t know the details of the split between Danny and Incisive Media, and it’s not appropriate that I comment on them. I don’t know what will happen with Search Engine Strategies and Search Engine Watch. But I know that Danny’s passion for search will continue, and it will resurface soon. In a very interesting way, Danny Sullivan and the Internet grew up together, and each has helped in the development of the other. It is a true symbiotic relationship, but in this case, we’ve all benefited, and I hope we all will continue to do so.

SES-SEW without Danny: What the Hell is Going On?

My jaw dropping news of the day is that Danny Sullivan is leaving SES and SEW. He posts his reasons on his blog. In the 7 hours since he made the post, there are already dozens of testimonial comments from the who’s who of the search world.

I won’t really comment further, but it’s somewhat ironic that I just wrote a column about the SES franchise and Danny’s involvement in it.

Danny Sullivan is as much a part of the industry as anyone. The SES/SEW franchise has helped shape the industry. It’s one of the Internet’s great stories, and one that I’m happy I got to see first hand.

Godspeed Danny.  You’ll be missed in one part of our virtual world, but I know you’ll be helping create another.

Gore Impatient about the Speed of Change with Internet Video

Here’s an interesting op-ed piece from MediaPost’s Tobi Elkin on the blurring of the lines between the power of television and the power of the Internet, this time from Al Gore (hey..didn’t he “invent” the Internet in the first place?). It’s not that long, so to save you the hassle of logging in, etc, I’ll just quote the whole article:

So former Vice President Al Gore addressed a group of British TV execs yesterday in Edinburgh, Scotland and told them that while the Internet is a great democratizing force, TV remains the most influential form of media and people should have more control over its programming.

Gore, whose Current TV venture hinges upon participatory/citizen journalism and user-generated video, told the assembled execs that so far, the Web can’t replicate “television’s power,” according to a Reuters report. “Most of what’s happening in the encounter between television and the Internet has been the Internet cannibalizing television,” Gore told the execs.

Gore recommended finding ways to use the Internet to give consumers access to TV and the way it’s programmed. He suggested that citizens can participate in the democratic process by challenging inaccurate comments made by politicians, particularly in TV ads.

Gore noted that while user-generated Web communities and sites are powerful , they don’t reach mass audiences. “You can stream that, forward it, store it, time-shift it, you can do lots of things, but you cannot broadcast in real time to millions of people over the Internet,” Gore told the execs, according to the Reuters report. “The Internet is now creeping into the television domain, but it’s still not creating the change that many anticipate will come.”

Still, YouTube is streaming about 100 million video clips a day, and Current TV reaches nearly 20 million homes; nearly 30 percent of its programming is user-generated.

Is Gore underestimating the power of Web communities and the power of the Web to attract mass audiences? Or is he merely issuing a clarion call to denizens of the Web–all of us–to wake up and make our comments and opinions count? Either way, it’s clear that regular people have the power to create and distribute media and make it matter. I think Gore is looking to put a fire under us to challenge the status quo and en masse, call out politicians–and anyone else, for that matter, who veers from the truth. It’s a good fire to light, and we’re up for the challenge.

Do not, I repeat, underestimate the power of the Web and its denizens. Internet users are capable of calling politicians, and anyone else for that matter, on the carpet–and biting them in the ass.

Tobi Elkin is Executive Editor, MediaPost.

I agree with Tobi. Trying to assess the Internet’s future role in shaping interaction with, and the creation of, television programming is like trying to forecast the effects of a tsunami before it’s begin. We simply have no idea of the forces that are being unleashed here. What Gore is referring to are the first few ripples in what’s to be a full force tidal wave in the next two decades. The whole notion of programming, who controls it, and who calls bullshit on who are all about to be twisted, torn up and reformed in a way we won’t recognize.

The other issue is the Web’s ability to attract an audience. Again, the nature of engagement with video is just being defined. I for one think there are some fundamental issues with how we engage with essentially linear media in a multi-tasking environment, the infrastructure required to deliver high quality video to us, and some pretty basic human-computer interface challenges that have to be addressed. Again, we’re seeing ripple effects, but just below the surface, an earthquake is ready to erupt. Given the nascent stages of this communication channel and how our society is adopting it, the fact that YouTube is streaming 100 million clips a day should be scaring the hell out of someone, rather than prompting Gore to complain about the “creeping” pace of the Internet. This is all about tipping points, and we’re getting very close to one.

If Gore is telling us to wake up to this possibility, then go for it. But it’s way too early to be laying bets here. Still, that said, I do like how Gore is reinventing himself. Between the crusade behind “An Inconvenient Truth” and his awareness of the democratic potential of the Net, he seems to be grasping at the notion of the fundamental reweaving of society’s fabric that’s happening, and the potential to address some apocalyptic issues before it’s too late. He’s going for the big ideas, a refreshing change from the insular navel gazing that seems to characterize much of what’s happening in Washington.

Psst – Want a Hot Spot Paisano?

First published August 24, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Surgeon General’s Warning: Prolonged exposure to the Internet can lead to physical dependency and addiction. Use of the Internet can increase levels of anxiety and reduce attention spans.Hello, my name is Gord, and I’m addicted to the Internet. I didn’t realize I was addicted until I recently spent three weeks in Europe and had to go through withdrawal. But after hanging around hotel lobbies trying to get a hit from a local hot spot, I’ve had to face up to the fact that I can’t kick the habit. I need my broadband, baby!

Fear and Loathing in l’Italia

I didn’t go totally cold turkey. I had my PDA to keep up on e-mails, but it just didn’t give me the rush I was looking for. Here I was, surrounded by the culmination of centuries of artistic achievement, and all I could think about was where my Google hook-up was coming from.

I speak somewhat facetiously, but there’s a lot of truth here. Here’s an online definition of addiction:

    1. Compulsive physiological and psychological need for a habit-forming substance.
    2. The condition of being habitually or compulsively occupied with or or involved in something.

It seems to me that going online qualifies on both counts. There’s no doubt that being online is habit forming. But it goes further than that. I realized in the last 20-plus days that it’s hard-wired into my physiology. Not having instant access was as foreign as not having my right hand.

I use online a lot, mainly to access and assimilate information. I enhance what I see in the real world by researching it online, letting me place it in context for myself. And for the past three weeks, every sense I have has been bombarded to the point of overload by input. Art, history, locations, music, literature, architecture, it was all right in front of me. Paris, Florence, Rome: cradles of civilization that I was standing in the center of, and it was if I couldn’t fully assimilate them, because I didn’t have access to an essential part of my cerebral hardware: the right brain, left brain and “wired” brain.

What’s it worth to you, amico?

The analogy carries even further. Accessing the Internet while traveling in Europe is rather like hunting for illicit substances, in that it can be difficult to find and notoriously expensive. Five euros (a little over six dollars U.S.) for fifteen minutes, thirteen euros for an hour, thirty euros for a day… I have a price list for hot spots around the continent imprinted in my memory.

I wasn’t the only one that went through withdrawal. My wife and two daughters showed similar symptoms, but for different reasons. For me, it was losing a logical and information-gathering extension of myself. For them, it was losing a communication channel. They have adopted e-mail as a primary way of keeping in touch (and instant messaging, in the case of my oldest daughter), and they felt somewhat cut off. This was somewhat demonstrative of the way men and women tend to use the Internet, something I talked about in a previous column.

This is your brain on high-speed

But addictions aren’t always harmful. One could argue that we’re addicted to oxygen. Breathing is certainly habit-forming. So is there anything wrong with developing a strong dependence on the Internet?

One theory that I have is that our brains tend to gear up a notch when we go online. There is so much we do through computers that we have difficulty  maintaining linear thinking when we’re online. Even if we’re focused on one task, there’s the knowledge that there’s e-mail to check, things to look up, a hundred other things that we could be doing. Being online seems to increase our level of both anxiety and distraction, just because it’s so damn useful in so many different ways. Focus is a tough thing to maintain.

We have seen manifestation of this trend in the way people act when online. It’s nothing short of frenetic, skipping all over the page, multi-tasking, grasping information in a hundred little forays around the screen. It’s a different interaction from much of what we do day to day. Is it harmful? I’m not sure, but it does seem to be making permanent changes in the way we learn and communicate.

Anyway, I’m back in the office tomorrow, and will once again have my cerebral cortex plugged back into the Matrix. I’ll be wired again. I guess that’s a good thing, but I’m sure going to miss the espressos, Chiantis and Calabrese salsiccia.

Oh, well, everything in life is a trade-off.