The next big thing

I realize I haven’t made this blog public yet and, in fact, it might never go public.  But I want to be on the record as saying that I believe one of the next big things will be ANONYMITY.  How unknown are you?   How few hits can you get on  Google?  How few people can claim you as a “friend”?

Just so it’s out there…

-dave t.

More on Current

Joseph Weisenthal has some more detail on the CurrentTV IPO over at the essential PaidConnent

A Current affair

So, I just read that Al Gore’s CurrentTV is going public. I have wanted to like Current since its inception a few years ago, in much the same way I wanted to embrace Al Gore in 2000. Unfortunately, like the man who brought it to life, Current has never been able to get me excited or passionately involved…just vaguely interested.

I’m guessing that announcement of the impending IPO will draw many to revisit CurrentTV and I am sad to say they will see that little has changed. It still looks and feels like something you “should” like more than something you simple “do” like. Like it was created by high school teachers. From the set to the canned dialogue of the VJ’s to the eager earnest way they want to let you know it is all about “you” it just doesn’t work. It feels forced.

Even worse, most people I speak with have never even heard of the channel at all! And this includes lots of people who claim to be in the media biz. According to the AP, Current is still losing money annually and I’m just not surprised.

I’m far more curious to find out who is going to invest in this super-longshot.

The future is being written…

I’ve been a fan of what is most commonly called “CyberPunk” since I read William Gibson’s Neuromancer as a middle-schooler in the 80’s. I’d soon have my very first modem (1200 baud) hooked up to my Atari 800 allowing me access to what would become THE INTERNET but wasn’t called that yet. Mostly, I logged into a chatroom hosted at Dartmouth College – an early hub of the net and my hometown at the time. By the time I read Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash I was dreaming of a day when those crazy ideas would be a reality – perhaps not in my lifetime, but someday.

Instead, here we are with SecondLife, that, though a bit laughed at by the media at large, is an amazing realization of Stephenson’s futuristic vision – and it only took 20ish years from outlandish science fiction to reality (or virtual reality). That’s just plain awesome.

Now, I realize this isn’t a news flash but it leads me to my point that reading near-future sci-fi is one of the ways I continue to keep my head in the game and, whenever possible, ahead of the curve. The time-gap between these outlandish ideas and complete realization seems to me to be shrinking dramatically.

Once case is point to watch is a trend I have noticed in two recent releases, Gibson’s latest (and sadly not greatest) Spook Country and Vernor Vinge’s recent Rainbows End. Both novels, set only 20 years into the future and written quite recently both take the current notion of GoogleMap layers and related tech and bring into the world of realtime overlaying of the world around us via optics (implanted in Vinge and via headgear in Gibson) to give the viewer a completely personalized realtime world view. Whether this is selective data-tagging or actually laying a fantasy vision over the reality, the potential uses and implications really gets the mind spinning.

While I just don’t think we’re going to be living on Mars anytime soon (like so much sci-fi seems to hope) but I do think we will all be choosing exactly how the world looks to us in much the same way we currently chose skins for our homepage.