Or consider this variation: the troubled project manager walks into my office, tells me he hasn’t done anything extreme yet, but wonders if I’ll tell him that it’s okay to shoot the obnoxious member of his project team right between the eyes, and then defend him if senior management becomes unhappy about the situation. What should I tell the project manager?

Admittedly, these are extreme situations, and it’s entirely hypothetical. Maybe it happens in a war zone, but it certainly doesn’t happen in a normal IT project environment. In any case, it’s never happened to me. But the fundamental question still remains: where do you draw the line if/when serious ethical conflicts arise?

While the term “confessor priest” may be useful for the discussions in this series of blog postings, it’s important to remember that the consultants who play this role are not priests, in any official sense of the word. Nor are they journalists, with the legal option of protecting their “confidential sources.” It’s highly unlikely that they are psychiatrists, psychologists, doctors, or anything else that would allow them to claim that statements from their project-manager “sinners” were confidential.

It’s one thing to negotiate a consulting agreement with an IT organization, in which the “confessor priest” states that his conversations with the project-manager “sinners” are confidential. And it’s one thing to refuse a demand to divulge those confidential details to a senior executive in the IT organization. Indeed, the consultant who takes on the role of “confessor priest” should be prepared to resign immediately if pressed on this issue. But if you’re questioned by the police, or the FBI, or a lawyer in a courtroom, it’s a different matter altogether; while I’m not qualified to offer legal advice, I’m pretty confident that the confessor-priest will have to answer questions, and reveal confidences, in situations like this.

So it’s important for the project-manager “sinners” who are thinking of asking for help to know that the “confessor priest” cannot help them if they have broken the law, or violated regulatory procedures and restrictions — especially when it comes to capital crimes, felonies, and things of that sort. Obviously, most project managers don’t run around murdering the members of their project team … but it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that a project manager could misrepresent an expenditure on an expense account or a procurement request, in order to provide some much-needed personal relief (e.g., a weekend of R&R at the beach) for an overworked member of his project team, which would be automatically rejected if requested through official channels.

The real issue typically involves “administrative” rules, and bureaucratic restrictions that kill productivity, frustrate the project team, and dampen morale to the point where the members of the project team have no energy or enthusiasm for their project. For example, one of the project team members wants to work at home from his laptop for a couple days, because his wife and kids are sick with the flu. One of the programmers wants to disable the company-installed Muzak system, because it’s driving him crazy having to listen to Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby crooning over the PA system all day long. One of the network engineers desperately wants to take a day off in the middle of the week — against company rules — to attend a Rolling Stones farewell concert in a city 300 miles away, but says that he’ll make up for it by working both Saturday and Sunday.

These examples may or may not sound realistic, and they may or may not seem like issues worth making a fuss about. But there are issues worth making a fuss about, and the list of possibilities is endless. After he has agreed to such a request, the project manager may develop a guilty conscience, and may shuffle into the confessor-priest’s office and ask whether he has, in fact, committed a mortal sin.

The confessor-priest has to rely on his own experience, judgment, common sense, and gut instincts about what’s practical, what’s fair, and what “crosses the line” into areas that cannot be condoned or forgiven. Given the same situation, two different confessor-priests might make two different decisions; after all, we’re not talking about a formal religion, and there is no “Bible” to tell us exactly what we should do in every circumstance.

In my case, for example, I’m a firm believer in a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to overlooking infractions of minor administrative/bureaucratic rules; but if asked a direct and specific question about such an infraction, I won’t lie to a senior executive in order to protect a project-manager “sinner.” At the same time, if I thought I was going to be interrogated by senior management about every possible infraction that might or might not have been committed, I wouldn’t take the assignment in the first place; or I would resign from the assignment as soon as it became clear that such a “corporate culture” was in place.

Again, everyone will have different opinions, assumptions, expectations, and behaviors when it comes to such ethical issues. It’s something for both the potential confessor-priest and the project-management sinners to think about before the issues arise … because, sooner or later, they will arise.

On to another aspect of the IT project confessional tomorrow…

1. The blatant sales pitch in most of the “keynote” presentations was pretty obnoxious, and a real turn-off. I’ll remember that for future conferences, and I’ll be sure to warn anyone I know to avoid them like the plague.
2. At least one or two product-related keynote presentations were okay, because (a) the products play an important role in the marketplace, and conference attendees did want to hear about them, and (b) they were presented without the blatant sales pitch. The best example of this was Microsoft’s presentation about Sharepoint 2010, by Christian Finn, which was titled “Seven Essential Truths About Enterprise 2.0″.
3. Several of the vendors and presenters gave interesting case-study examples of massive adoption of E2.0 tools and products in their organization. The afore-mentioned Microsoft was one: they’ve got 92,000 employees. And IBM was another: they’re rolling out their E2.0 products to a global workforce of 400,000 employees in 170 countries.
4. There are now lots of knowledgeable consultants in the E2.0 field, many of whom gave excellent presentations, and/or participated in various panel sessions, about real-world experiences helping their clients implement new tools/products, and dealing with the political and culture-change issues. On the exhibitor’s floor, I saw an Infosys booth, and I’m they had plenty of people ready to provide such assistance; but I didn’t see any booth staffed with people from Accenture, or PwC, or various other large consulting firms you might have expected to see.
5. Many of the small vendors who exhibited here last year are gone (or at least they’re gone from this conference). And I suspect that several of the small vendors I saw this year will be gone soon, too. This is not lost on the large customers: they obviously like the security and stability associated with large vendors like IBM/Lotus, Microsoft, Cisco, etc.
6. Most of the discussions and presentations seemed to concentrate on E2.0 products and services behind the firewall — e.g., how to use such products/services to enable better collaboration among employees, faster response to proposals, business opportunities, and/or problems. There was much less discussion about reaching outside the firewall to interact/collaborate more effectively with customers, suppliers, and business partners.
7. Microsoft had the most amusing give-away toy: a flying pig, which could be launched in a slingshot fashion, and which “oinked” as it flew through the air. I brought one of them home, and our dog has been looking at it suspiciously ever since he laid eyes on it.

As growing evidence of the popularity and acceptance of Enterprise 2.0, the conference organizers will be hosting another conference in Santa Clara, CA on Nov 8-11, 2010. You can get additional details here.

A postfigurative culture is one in which things don’t really change much, from one generation to another. Thus, aside from the rebellious behavior associated with adolescence, each generation expects to learn the “basics” of life from its parents and grandparents. Such cultures learn by looking back, to see how things were done in the past; and this worked reasonably well for most of mankind’s recorded history.

A cofigurative society is one in which things are changing rapidly enough that parents and children are forced to learn things more-or-less simultaneously. Immigrant families face this quite often, and it’s commonplace for the children of such families to adapt to new languages, new laws, and new social customs more quickly and more easily than their parents. Aside from immigration and chaotic disasters, Dr. Mead suggested that somewhere around World War II, the rapid pace of technology began to create an overall cofigurative society — at least in the advanced countries that were inventing, developing, and assimilating those new technologies.

Though there is still some debate among sociologists, many of us would agree that we are now venturing into a prefigurative society — where things are changing so quickly that it’s almost guaranteed that children will learn about new things before their parents do. Part of this is because learning something new often requires us to unlearn something old; and the generation of adults has a lot more “baggage” to get rid of, before they can accept and assimilate something new. Children, on the other hand, have little or nothing vested in old fashions, old styles, old customs, and old ways of doing things that were based on technologies that are being rendered obsolete.

Every adult has his or her own stories to tell about this phenomenon. When I was a kid, for example, I was told that I would not be allowed to drive a car until I could change a spark plug, replace a fan-belt, and fix a flat tire on the family car; and both at home and at school, I was told that I had to learn how to drive a manual, “stick-shift” car. All of the time and energy that went into that part of my basic “education” was essentially wasted: I haven’t had a flat tire in over 20 years, and I have no idea if my car even has a spark plug. (In fact, I don’t even own a car any more, but that’s a different story.) Today’s kids learn how to drive automatic-transmission cars, and I doubt that most of them could even find the spare tire in their trunk. When my older son bought his first car, he was dumbfounded when I suggested that he could save a few bucks by getting a simpler model with an old-fashioned “manual” crank to open and close the windows; for his entire life, every car he had ever been in had an automatic “button” that, when pressed, caused the windows to move up or down.

So, what does this mean in terms of the future of IT? Well, it means that if we’re in the business of inventing/creating new IT-based products or services, or if we are in a (management) position that attempts to control or restrict access to those technologies, we’d better not assume that they’ll react and respond the same way we do. Fortunately, there are lots of market-research firms, academic institutions, and industry-analysts out there polling the public about their attitudes, behavior, expectations, likes and dislikes — and then slicing and dicing the results into different age groups, income categories, and other demographic distinctions.

So we need to devote some time and energy — on an ongoing basis — to reading these polls, and talking directly to the more articulate members of the younger generation, and then think carefully about what this means, in terms of the assumptions we’ve made about new technology. We read, for example, that today’s generation not only does not memorize the phone numbers of their twenty or thirty closest friends (as my peers and I did, once upon a time), but a significant percentage of them don’t even know their own phone number. Why should they? It’s all programmed into their mobile phones, complete with the textual name associated with each number, and a photo of the individual associated with that number. What are the implications of this behavior? Aside from the annoying reality that when people lose their cellphones today, they have no idea how to reach any of their peers, it probably does have some deeper meaning … but I haven’t figured it out.

Similarly, we read that most young people today don’t wear a wrist-watch — because their mobile phone displays the current time. And perhaps that explains why 91% of mobile phone users today keep their phone within a one-meter distance of themselves, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (see Mary Meeker’s presentation at the 2007 Web 2.0 Summit conference for this statistic.) And since it’s only a (short) matter of time before virtually every mobile phone has a built-in GPS device, we’ll always know where everyone is — even if they don’t know exactly where they are. We may think we know what this means, from our perspective, in terms of potential new products, new services, new laws and regulations about privacy and security and control … but what does it mean to the younger generation that’s most likely to have these devices in their pockets?

On a deeper level, all of this will have a profound impact on the way future generations interact with their peers, their parents, their employers, and the “authority figures” in their lives. We’re already beginning to get a sense of this with the attitudes of today’s “digital natives” — i.e., the generation that was born during the period that PC’s were beginning to be introduced, and which has thus grown up in a world that always (from their perspective) had computers. As Gary Hamel explained in a thought-provoking March 2009 Wall Street Journal blog entitled “The Facebook Generation vs. the Fortune 500,” we can already see a number of younger-generation attitudes that are very much in conflict with the “traditional” attitudes that we find in large business organizations:

• All ideas compete on an equal footing – (every idea has the chance to gain a following; ideas gain traction based on their perceived merits, rather than political power of their sponsors)
• Contribution counts for more than credentials — (when you post a video on YouTube, nobody asks if you went to film school)
• Hierarchies are natural, not prescribed — (some individuals command more respect and attention than others; authority trickles up, not down)
• Leaders serve, rather than preside — (no one has the power to command or sanction)
• Groups are self-defining and -organizing – (no one can assign you a boring task, no one can force you to work with dim-witted colleagues)
• Resources get attracted, not allocated — (the Web is a market economy; people decide, moment by moment, how to spend the precious currency of their time and attention
• Power comes from sharing information, not hoarding it — (to gain influence and status, you have to give away your expertise and content)
• Opinions compound and decisions are peer-reviewed — (truly smart ideas rapidly gain a following no matter how disruptive they may be)
• Users can veto most policy decisions — (the only way to keep users loyal is to give them a substantial say in key decisions
• Intrinsic rewards matter most — (money is great, but so is recognition and joy of accomplishment)
• Hackers are heroes — (online communities frequently embrace those with strong anti-authoritarian views)

Undoubtedly, there are a lot of business executives and parents and “authority figures” (politicians, religious leaders, pundits, and op-ed columnists) who will respond to the list above by saying, “Well, that’s not how we do things around here — and we never will!”

If you hear this from the authority figures in North Korea or Iran or a few other such places in the world, they may be right. But to a greater and greater degree in the rest of the world, it’s an outmoded way of thinking. For better or worse, technology has empowered the younger generation — and they will not only vote with the ballot box (or electronic voting machine), but also with their pocketbook and with their feet. They’ll walk away from their job in stuffy, conservative, technology-fearing company X, and they’ll get a new job (even if pays less) in open, friendly, collaborative company Y.

Thus, the ultimate question for us to ponder when we think about the future of technology is not “What will it be?” but rather “How will the kids react to it?”

For example, we know that “social media” — Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and several other examples — are becoming ever more popular, and also ever more important as an “influence” in society. As of January 2010, for example, Twitter had 75 million users (see “Twitter now has 75M users; most asleep at the mouse“, in the Jan 26, 2010 issue of Computerworld); and while Computerworld felt it was important to emphasize that “a lot of current Twitterers are inactive,” it’s also true that those who do Twitter have a disproportionate influence. It’s not just Oprah and Ashton Kutcher, with their multi-million Twitter armies, but the fact that that protesters and dissidents and ordinary citizens are using Twitter to communicate news more quickly and more effectively than the traditional media.

Cynics might well argue that 75 million is actually a very small fraction — just over 1% — of the global population. But Facebook has a user base that is estimated to be approaching 500 million. True, that’s still less than 10% of the global population; but as of April 2009, it was the fifth largest “country” in the world with a mere 200 million users (see “200 Million Strong,” in an April 8, 2009 posting on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s blog)… which means that, by now, it’s the third largest country in the world, with only China and India ahead of it.

Of course, Facebook (and MySpace, and the various others like it) is only a “virtual” country; it doesn’t have an army, it doesn’t have a Parliament, and it doesn’t have a seat at the United Nations. But maybe it should … and maybe it will. Probably not in the next 5-10 years, but it does suggest that we should start paing more attention to the blurring of “real life” and “virtual life.” Thus far, most of our attention has focused on the “virtual life” of individuals (see, for example, the excellent book, Life on the Screen, by Sherry Turkle), or relatively small “virtual communities” of individuals, in places like SecondLife.

We’ll know that things have changed irrevocably when Facebook (or MySpace or Twitter, or whatever) achieves some significant political accomplishment, such as getting a major politican elected or thrown out of office. Note that that’s completely different than the “top-down” efforts by politicians (e.g., Barack Obama) to use social media to help promote their own campaigns.

The social/political impact of future IT will, of course, become all the more important as computing becomes more ubiquitous. You’ll recall that I discussed this in part 5 of this thread of blogs (you’ve memorized all this stuff, right?), and suggested that in another 5-10 years, we might well find that a majority of the human race will have non-trivial computing devices, even if it takes the form of a mobile phone. So, if Facebook (and/or its cousins) grows from 500 million users to 5 billion users, there are bound to be some significant social/cultural consequences — the details of which I’m incapable of predicting with any specificity.

One thing is fairly obvious, though: if we’ve got 5 billion people using computers, the majority of them will be located in what we casually refer to as “third world” countries … or, more politely, “developing countries.” That means the applications that dominate the worldwide computing environment probably won’t be the ones that currently dominate the marketplace in advanced/developed countries. They might be “simple” applications that we have relegated to a back corner, like e-mail or texting; or they might be games that we’ve never seen before. Or they might be something else entirely … in any case, what creates this dominance will be culture, not technology.

One last observation, which I’ll just summarize — even though it probably deserves several blog postings on its own: the relationship between government and members of society will change, and the boundary between government and citizens will blur. I can make some educated guesses about the general nature of this change, but the details of how and when … I simply don’t know.

As for the “relationship”: recall that in part 12 of this thread, we discussed the phenomenon of resistance to change. Specifically, to the extent that new technology threatens to disrupt established political (power) structures, and/or social and religious cultures, it will almost certainly threaten to disrupt established laws, regulations, and other forms of codified behavior.

Of course, most societies have organized methods for changing their existing laws and regulations, but (a) it takes a long time, and (b) it tends to operate from the top down. Yeah, yeah, the people at the grass roots can elect new representatives, Presidents, and Prime Ministers; but unless you live in a society that operates with a “direct” town-hall-style consensus, the reality is that the day-to-day establishment of laws and codes and regulations comes from the folks at the top. And (a) they’re likely to be the same ones who were at the top five years ago, and (b) they’re likely to be 50 or 60 years old, if not older, and (c) they still haven’t figured out e-mail.

But all of that could change if you get a “Facebook army” that’s determined to make some changes. We got a minor taste of this when Twitter got used by the protesters in Iran after their controversial election last year … and I think that was just the beginning.

The other aspect of government is this: in the best of all worlds (without getting into the usual debates between liberals and conservatives), we expect government to do the things that we (individuals) cannot do for ourselves. I don’t expect a “Facebook army” to acquire guns or tanks or planes, and thus replace the government’s army and air force; and I don’t expect the “Facebook army” to start building the next generation of roads and bridges and tunnels.

But they might take on some of the responsibilities for repairing the roads and bridges and tunnels. Well, maybe even that is too much, since they’re unlikely to have the heavy equipment. But to the extent that any of this (even national defense) depends upon effective communication and collaboration — that much can be done by a Facebook army. What it means is that a lot of governmental organizations — bureaucratic committees and agencies and authorities — might find that their services were no longer needed.

Is this likely to happen in the next 5-10 years? Obviously, not completely … and maybe not at all. But it could happen little by little, without make a lot of noise, and thus without creating a lot of resistance. Want an example? Take a look at Clever Commute, and subscribe to the Clever Commute blog — I think it’s an exemplar of things to come.

But there’s another perspective — the social perspective — in which we find ourselves asking, “How will we know when the future has arrived? Will we recognize it? Will we welcome it? What will we do with it? Will our children want to do the same kind of things that we do, and will we care?”

One way of approaching this part of the conversation is by reminding you of Clarke’s Laws, which were first published in his 1962 book, Profiles of the Future (the hyperlink I’ve provided here is for Amazon’s vintage-2000 paperback reprint):

• When a distinguished but elderly scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong.
• The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
• Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

There are, unfortunately, many many ridiculous predictions made by “distinguished but elderly scientists over the years. Here’s a representative list:
• In 1895, British Postmaster General Arnold Morley said, “Gas and water are necessities for every inhabitant of the Country. Telephones are not and never will be. It is no use trying to persuade ourselves that the use of the telephone could be enjoyed by the large masses of people in their daily life.” (see “Public Ownership and the Telephone in Great Britain,” Chapter VIII, p. 117)
• In 1903, soon after the first Wright Brothers flight, Rudyard Kipling predicted that airpseeds would reach only 300 mph by the year 2000.
• In 1927, J.B.S. Haldane predicted that the first landing on Mars would not take place for 10 million years.
• In 1943, IBM Chairman Thomas Watson may have said, “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” (see this Wikipedia article for discussion of alleged comment.)
• In 1945, FDR’s naval aide, Admiral William Leahy, said about the atomic bomb, “That is the biggest fool thing we have ever done … the bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives.”
• In 1949, “Popular Mechanics,” forecasting the relentless march of science, wrote “Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.”
• In 1977, DEC founder/CEO Ken Olsen remarked at a World Future Society conference that “There is no reason why anyone would want a computer in their home.”
• In 1981, an obscure computer geek named Bill Gates allegedly said, “640K bytes ought to be enough for anybody.” (But see this article for Gates’ denial that he ever said such a thing.)
Here are two other things to keep in mind as we think about the social aspects of future advances in technology: first, the people least likely to anticipate how new technology will be applied are the very inventors of the new technology.

And second, when you dramatically improved technology to people (e.g., a tenfold improvement), they first begin using the new technology to do the same old thing they were doing before, but somewhat faster or cheaper or more conveniently. It is only later that they begin to recognize entirely new and different things that are made possible with the new technology.

The first observation is not so surprising when you think about it. The inventors are desperately trying to persuade skittish investors, conservative business managers, and mainstream consumers that their new technology will be “useful” — so they try to imagine various applications and uses that could be seen as … well, “productive” and “serious” and “efficient”. Thus, Thomas Edison people that his newfangled invention, the phonograph, could be used to record the minutes of a business meeting, or a lecture by a university professor, or various other “serious” things. Using the phonograph to record music was way down near the bottom of his “top ten” list.

The second observation is often referred to as Fubini’s Law, which goes like this:

1. People initially use technology to do what they do now – but faster.
2. Then they gradually begin to use technology to do new things.
3. The new things change life-styles and work-styles
4. The new life-styles and work-styles change society.

… and eventually change technology.

As we’ll discuss about three or four blog postings from now, much of this behavior comes from the fact that adults have a “legacy” of experiences and lessons and guidelines and “common sense” about how to live their life, how to succeed, how to get things done. Through their own Darwinian behaviors, they’ve weeded out the practices and behaviors that have not served them well, and emphasized the ones that have served them well.

Thus, if you give them technology that is substantially more powerful than what they have now, their instinct is to make an incremental change in the practices and behaviors that have worked well in the past. There is an understandable reluctance to abandon everything that has worked well in the past, and try something “wild and crazy” with technology that is — or at least might be — then times better than what they had before.

With children, the situation is likely to be different, because (a) they have little or no legacy to guide them or hold them back, and (b) they have a natural tendency to rebel against anything and everything their parents are doing. We’ll discuss this further in a future blog posting…

Here’s a summary of the additions, changes, and corrections that I made in V54; for convenience, you’ll also find that they appear in red in the PDF materials, so you can see what has changed since V52 and V53:

1. On page 70, I added Google Maps to the list of Ajax examples.
2. On page 84, I added Google App Engine to the list of interesting products from Google.
3. On page 85, I provided a new (working) link and details about Zimbra.
4. On page 87, I added a link to IBM’s new “Bluehouse” product.
5. On pages 89-90, I added two new pages of details on the iPhone 3g.
6. On page 91, I provided additional details on CIsco’s acquisition of Five Across.
7. On page 132, I added a bullet point with a link to Nicholas Carr’s article on “Is Google Making Us Stupid?“

I probably won’t do any more updates for another week or two, but this should keep you busy for a while. Enjoy…

Here’s a summary of the additions, changes, and corrections that I made in V53; for convenience, you’ll also find that they appear in red in the PDF materials, so you can see what has changed since V52:

1. On page 6, I noted that the Michael Wesch “The Machine Is (Us)ing Us” video has now been viewed 5.6 million times, as of Jun 8, 2008.
2. On page 8, I added a bullet point indicating that while the “long tail” is not one of the main “Web 2.0 tools,” it is a “related concept”
3. On page 15, in the discussion of “risks of Web 2.0″ platform, I noted that the comparison between the Keynote/PDF version of this presentation, against the Google Apps version, was so bad that I recently deleted the Google Apps version altogether.
4. On page 17, I added a note to indicate that the chart showing usage of various technologies — including the Internet and Web 2.0 — was taken from a 2006 survey that had been cited on the previous page.
5. On page 20, I updated the Twitter example with a screen shot from my Twitter home page as of this morning.
6. On page 24, I updated the count of Twitter users to 1,811,515 as of Jun 8, 2008. I also added a new bullet point citing a Business Week article indicating that Obama and Clinton each had approximately 30,000 Twitter followers during their primary campaigns, but Obama used his more effectively.
7. On page 26, I changed the first bullet point to indicate that Zappos is a shoe-selling company, not a shoe-manufacturing company.
8. On pages 29-30, I updated the Dopplr example with screen shots from my Dopplr home page as of this morning, which shows that I’m in Rome, along with various other details about who’s in Rome, who’s in my home town of New York, etc.
9. On page 35, I added a couple of sub-bullet points about MySpace, indicating (a) that it’s larger than every other nation except China, India, the U.S., and Indonesia; and (b) that I had written a blog posting about this issue, titled “A United Nations Seat for Myspace?“
10. On page 37, I updated a note about Obama’s “Yes, We Can” video, indicating that as of Jun 8, 2008 it has now been viewed 8.0 million times.
11. On page 75, I added a citation to a blog posting entitled “Did Rails Sink Twitter?“
12. On page 80, I updated the first bullet point to indicate that the book Web 20 Design Patterns is no longer “forthcoming”; it has now been published.
13. On page 85, I updated a bullet point to indicate that, as of Jun 8, 2008, it was still unclear whether Yahoo would continue as an independent company, be acquired by Microsoft, or consummate some kind of marketing/advertising arrangement with Google.
14. On page 87, which discusses IBM’s activities in the Web 2.0 world, I added a note that IBM now has a Vice President of Social Engineering.
15. On page 88, I added a “placeholder” bullet point for the iPhone 2.0 that is scheduled to be announced/released on June 9th; and I also modified a bullet point to reflect my belief that Apple’s distribution of iPhone software apps via iTunes will represent an interesting example of the “long tail” concept.
16. On page 123, which discusses technology trends, I added a note to the bullet point asking whether computers might someday exceed human intelligence — noting that the June 2008 IEEE Spectrum journal has a special report, entitled “The Rapture of the Geeks: separating science from fiction in the technological singularity”
17. On page 127, I added a bullet point indicating that senior executives’ acceptance/non-acceptance of social networks & Web 2.0 will become a more and more significant differentiator; I also included a citation to a recent Wall Street Journal interview with Clay Shirky.
18. On page 130, I added a bullet point with a citation to another paper discussing the use of Web 2.0 in educational environments.
19. On page 134, I added a bullet point with the publishing details of Clay Shirky’s new book, Here Comes Everybody: the power of organizing without organizations.

• 4 headlines related to the “real” news associated with Governor Elliot Spitzer’s resignation today.
• 3 headlines related to the prostitute with whom Mr. Spitzer allegedly had his assignation(s).
• 3 headlines related to the latest debate about Hilary Clinton injecting racial issues into the campaign.
• 1 headline related to a story about a young woman who sat on a toilet seat for two years, and then found she was stuck to it.
• 1 headline related to the price of oil reaching a new record of $110 per barrel.
• 9 other headlines related to various topics from the sublime to the ridiculous.

As someone who lives in New York, I was naturally curious to see some of the details about Spitzer’s resignation, as well as the details of the Lieutenant Governor who will replace him. But I really didn’t need to see the details of Ashley/Kristen’s MySpace page, nor the interview with her mother, nor the identification of Client #6. How long will it be before we learn the sordid details of all the other prostitute-ring members with single-digit code-names?

Meanwhile, the news that the price of oil has hit a new record seems to be ho-hum stuff that American citizens and government officials accept as inevitable. George Bush may not be aware of it, but at this rate, we really will be paying $4 per gallon for gasoline in a few more months.

Normally, I would spend the time and effort required to provide hyperlinks to all of the items mentioned above — I’m sure there are a few readers of this humble blog who are muttering to themselve, “Hey! What’s the URL for Ashley/Kristen’s MySpace page? I wanna go there right now!” And there are probably others muttering, “You gotta be kidding about that toilet-seat thing, right? Where’s the link to the article? I wanna see it!” Well, folks, you’ll have to do your own homework this time; I think there are more productive ways for me to spend my time.

Maybe after we’ve all gotten over the tawdry details of Mr. Spitzer’s indiscretions, we can return our attention back to that $110/barrel price-tag for oil — and start figuring out what to do about it. And maybe we can convince the political candidates to stop their bickering and mud-slinging, and start telling us what they would do to wean this country from its growing addiction to ever-more-expensive oil.

But maybe that’s too much to hope for …