Barrel Strength

I have spent the last four or five weeks on the wild frontier of Web 2.0 or Web 3.0 or pick a number - the Web of social media and limitless interaction. My bookmarks file is full of things like Twitter and Eyejot and Utterz and drop.io. To sum it up, it looks like every communications device everywhere will be able to link up instantly with every other device. A glimpse of what that means so far? OK, the other night on Twitter, a young California millionaire named Jason Calacanis posted a message saying, ‘join me for a chat’. He is an interesting man, so sure, OK, I clicked on the URL. He was videocasting live from his car - the camera, presumably in a cell phone - was wedged in the cup holder. When I somewhat tentatively sent him a text message asking him to drive carefully, he glanced down, laughed and said, ‘no problem, traffic is slow right now’ and carried on replying to other text questions on his screen. I have been watching a lot of live video streamed to the Internet from cell phones lately - this was the first from the driver of a car. While it is difficult to see the practical applications of this right away, except to lawyers, doctors and insurance underwriters, maybe it will prove a boon to humanity. How the hell would I know? As an oldie, all I do is broadcast TV from my desktop at http://live.yahoo.com. So 1999.