Flashforward: Resolutions that I am sure, I will not live up to.

This column is going to be a little different today? Since it is the last day of the new year, I decided I would take a couple of steps back and look at my resolutions for next year. So hold on to something and brace yourself for this column might go into the Deep end.

So without further delay, here are some resolutions that I am sure not going to live up to in 2010.

1. I will be the mayor of somewhere on Foursquare. If you are not aware of foursquare and have the ability to go online with your phone, I highly recommend it(WWW.Foursqure.com). It is one half social networking and another half, one fun, cellphone game. It might be a few steps behind other social networking programs as far as communicating to other people are concerned, but it makes up for this with it's fun ability to map out where you have been and where you are going. It has been on my phone for a month now and beyond turning it on here and there, I have not stayed on it regularly. Hopefully this will change.

2. I will officially switch over to the Mac platform, sometime this year. Yes, you heard me! The Vio labtop I am working on has been my baby for the last year, but I am already thinking of my next machine and I am thinking of switching sides. I am ready to explore every bit of the mac's operating system and see what it has to offer.

3. The words "Settle down" will somewhow/somewhere be expressed by these lips...afterwards millions of facebook followers will gasp in awe. Or at least my buddy Jesse will, after repeatedly hearing me sworn off these words.

4. I will keep this blog up and running, and every twenty-five posts will involve a good beer.

5. I will watch the finale of Lost and promise not to be shocked, upset, and/or pretend that I knew this was going to happen the whole time(JJ Abrams do not let me down!). Afterwards a blog from me and a million others from around the world will debate if this was the greatest Science Fiction show ever.(sorry X-files)

6. I will teach my father the computer skills he needs, to the point that he no longer needs me or to the point, where he has at least an idea of what is going on.

7. I will volunteer at least 5 times this year and enjoy every bit of it, not saying I haven't enjoyed it in the past. I just have never gotten into the volunteer thing until recently serving some time at a Habitat for Humanity restore center.

8. I will oficially finish collecting Neil Gaimen's "The Sandman" and start collecting the Robert Kirkman's "Walking Dead" after hearing so many good things about it this past year.

9. I will start taking more pictures(with either my camera or cellphone), so I can relive every moment of my youth. Also I will create accounts with Photobucket and/or Flickr(Photobucket.com and Flickr.com respectfully).

10. I will not give my brother any discouragement on any girl he chooses, in his life, no matter where he meets her nor the circumstances. However...this resolution stands that I get the same treatment.

These are my ten resolutions. I am sure by the end of January I will officially of screwed all of them up in some shape or fashion.

Anyways, with the end of the year looming I want to say thanks to a wonderful year to all of my friends and family(way too many to list here, but you know who you are). Also thanks to Facebook(who I rediscovered), District 9(who showed Hollywood that you can make a good movie with a small budget) Foo Fighters, (for putting out a best of), my Iphone, (for allowing me to do anything,anywhere), and most importantly you my reader. Here is to a new year, Ladies and Gentlement! Be safe, be proud and most of all, be yourself.

Gossip Boys: How Social Media continues to keep stories alive.

*Note: This was Actually written last week, but due to Holiday Travel, is just now being posted.

Fame comes easy with the Internet. It is the Ultimate vessel for the aspiring movie director, writer, or artist. If you have something you want to create, be it a movie, book, or even a band, you can simply plug your product into the Internet and go from there. Nothing becomes famous overnight, but if you can create a little buzz, and chip away until you find your audience, anything is a possibility. There are so many possibilities that if you use the Internet, you can literally become famous in just about every venture. The Internet is the ultimate place to get noticed as people can literally comment and see everything these days on it.

The reason why I am writing about fame today, is because of the passing of Britney Murphy, a few days ago. If you are not familiar with her work, I recommend you going to IMDB.Com and looking up her credits, but her most notable performances came from "8 Mile" in which she played Eminem's girlfriend and "Sin City" where she played the Ex of cop killer Dwight. When I first heard about her passing, I was saddened to hear that we had lost another star, who seemed to have it all. The story just like any other story, seemed to be popping up everywhere on twitter and as one person put it "It is a slow news week, so I am sure we will hear more about this." When I first read this, I thought that that was so true. It is the Christmas, season, we have no news stories, that people seem to care about. But as I continued to think about this, I thought about how much us as a Social Network were adding to the buildup of the story. We will discuss and talk about her death on every Facebook account and message board, and with all of these thoughts, I could not help but think how much power that we truly have when we log onto the internet. True, we follow every product, and icon that we like, but in doing so we make them that much more powerful over us.

Now I bring this all up because of the passing of Britney Murphy, if she had passed away in any other decade, it would of been just another young actress passing away, but we live in the age of Social Media where we are able to comment on just about everything, digest every fact, and even uncover the truth. Our gossip, our critiques mean more now. than ever before, with online reviews and the ability to comment on just about everything through social media and message boards.

At the end of the day, I wonder not just what people will say about Britney Murphy. Was she just another Hollywood actress to die or in this day and age of media relevance, will she become something more? Will the Internet empower her or will it even empower you? Only time will tell.

To go Private or not, that is the question,

Have you ever been bored and just for the fun of it googled yourself? I mean, c'mon, you know you have. You probably answered one of those Myspace surveys and found question number 36 asking you to find out what was the first link you found when typing in your name. It is okay to admit this, because just like skipping school, everybody has done it at least once. Now as long as you are not a public figure, and I am guessing you are not, you either found references to some company you had never heard of or a link to some weird sexual device, but either way, you did not find yourself...but wait...that is about to change.

I mention all of this because information in real time is about to change. As of last week, Google, with the help of Twitter, has entered Real Time Search. This means, you can now get up to the date updates on searches. Now imagine the on-going Tiger Woods story, instead of just typing in Tiger Woods in Google to find out the latest and getting a variety of hits, you can now find the latest story, article, or even the latest twit, on the item you are searching for. Now you have to no longer wonder which hit/link has the latest information on a particular story, because you just need to search the Real Time Search engine and find out. Try it out, if you have not. Simply go to WWW.Google.Com/Trends and type something relevant in the box. I recommend a hot news story. This technology, I suspect, will be groundbreaking once perfected, instead of just getting a list of links, which will lead you to the story, you are looking for. Imagine getting up to the date story on the latest news from the Afghanistan war or the Climate talks going on right now in Copenhagen. Now this was announced and went live last week, so I am sure there are still some kinks to work out in the system, but Google could not have picked a better partner in this program than Twitter. Twitter does not have the users that a Social Network application like Facebook has, but if you have used twitter before, you know it is a really good application for spreading news and other small bits of information. Now imagine another Social Network device trying to go public like that...say Facebook going public and changing it's privacy statements on all of it's users. Well...wait it did..a few days later after the Google announcement. Facebook revamped it's privacy statement in the thought of giving users more ways to share information, however just like the Y2K virus...these changes seemed to be better on paper as many people are now enraged that the default privacy statement, that all of there profiles have reverted to, is allowing more information on their profiles to be public now, than ever before.

Now before anything is said Facebook and Twitter, despite the fact that they are considered Social Networking applications, are two different applications altogether. Twitter at it's best, is a simple way to convey quick and small chunks of information to a large number of people. Twitter was, and in my current opinion, the best application to enter Real Time Search and I am interested to see what this will mean for Twitter's account numbers in the future as Real Time Search continues to grow. Facebook on the other hand is a more personal application where you store your pics, address, and to some people even their phone number. Now imagine this information being public and even showing up in Google...wait it does.

Now I am bringing up all of this, because the main question is, in all of this, do you want to be a part of this? Do you want to be a part of Real Time Search? If not just go into your privacy statements, no harm, no foul, but in doing so you are not becoming part of the discussion. This is going to be the burning question in the future and the one that you have to decide on your own.

It seems, in the end, that the Real-Time search is going not just going to change the way in which we get information but also the way in which we share information going forward.

Send it: The Life and Death of E-mail.

When you go online and need to get a hold of somebody, what is your first thought on how to reach them? Five years ago the answer was simple, you would simply go to your E-mail account be it AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, or any other E-mail server, and you would send the person an e-mail. E-mail is a simple concept, instead of mailing somebody a letter, that will take them days to get, send an e-mail that takes seconds.

Now revert back to today's society, if you need to get a hold of your best friend, who lives on the other side of the state, do you E-mail them today? More often than not, you will log on to your Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, or whatever other social networking site you use, and send them the message. I had written in last week's columns about the use of Social Media and the growing number of people who are using it today to share information, but I never touched upon the creature it destroyed in the process, the E-mail. But what exactly happened to E-mail, on it's way out?

During the early days of the Internet, E-mail was the standard of communication and you had many servers to choose from as your E-mail host including AOL, Yahoo, and Hotmail. If you were online, you had an e-mail account, it was as simple as that. The Internet was a communications tool and its vessel was the E-mail, which you would use to send messages to various places around the world in minutes. However, during this time the Marketer came in and knew that they had something here. A mailbox that people were sure to check every day, if not multiple times during the day? Hmmm...he thought. Shortly after, the Newsletter was born and then Spam. Spam might not have been the deathblow of E-mail, however E-mail's decline started shortly afterwards. Spam was a great concept in the beginning, send an advertisement directly to the customer in their e-mail. Interested in the book deals at Amazon? Sign up to Amazon's newsletter and get up to the date updates on their latest deals. People check their e-mail almost everyday, why not? Well what started off as an e-mail once a day became multiple e-mails being sent daily, many times from companies that the account holder had not even visited online or even heard of. To avoid this many e-mail servers created what is now known as Spam boxes, to help receive and filter your e-mail, however this technology is still a work in progress as important e-mails can sometimes be filtered as well. The average person, to combat this threat also started creating multiple E-mail address', one professional and one commercial, in order to filter the Spam that was being sent to their accounts. If a website asked for an e-mail address, you would just give them the dummy one, to filter out the span and try and avoid the company's E-mails to be sitting beside an E-mail of the Sale at Macy's next week.

E-mail is still considered, the proper business tool when talking to clients, however it has lost its personal persona for many people. E-mail might of lost it's soul with Spam but it lost it's heart with Social Networking, as social Networking soon became the choice when talking with friends and contacts. Instead of having multiple accounts, most people have one account in which they can customize and edit, to fit your own personal needs. Social networking also created status updates and a million other ways you an communication your emotions, thoughts and feelings to people without having to send an e-mail. The forefathers of Social Networking learned a lot from E-mail, on the pros and cons of communication. If you do not want to talk to somebody simply do not add them or make your profile private. Want to get a hold of a company and not just be "another e-mail"? Send them a message on Twitter and at least allow yourself the tranquility of knowing that they got it and have read it, instead of it sitting in a box unread, as many E-mailers do.

Does E-mail still have its purpose in this day of Social Networking? Yes it does, just like it's predecessor the mailbox, but how much longer is the question.

Welcome to Cloud Nation

If I asked you to log on to your computer right now, could you tell me how much hard drive space you are using on your computer? Now first, subtract the operating system, we do not need that, but include everything else, even those thousands of songs you have on your Itunes account, also do not forget those PowerPoint presentations you from last year, count those as well. Now add all of these various applications together, along with all of your personal stuff, and imagine all of those, not on your computer, but on the Internet, all saved in one spot so you can easily access them from various computers around the world.

Now this simple concept, the idea of offering everything online, is the simple idea behind cloud computing and what many people believe including Google, IBM, and Apple is the next big evolution of technology. With everything stored online, you have no reason for that high end Pentium 4 anymore, simply dust off the old clunker in the corner, to go online and have access to everything you will ever need. Imagine signing into your Google account and having access to everything that the Pentium 4, could do and more. Want to save all of those old pictures on your hard drive? Just save them to Google Wave. Need to finish that last minute Chemistry paper? Well just switch over to Google Docs and finish it there. All you will soon need is an Internet connection, and the possibilities of what you can do from there are endless. Now I have to ask though, are you ready for this? Despite the 350 million people Facebook claims to have and the growing number of people getting on the Internet, are you ready for cloud computing?

Now Google despite being the current forerunner in this push for Cloud Computing is not alone. Apple, who is best known for there Quicktime and Itunes applications, is not one to be left behind in this evolution of technology, so they recently purchased Lala.Com, in hopes of keeping up in this race. Lala's premise, if you have never visited it, is really quite simple, just pay ten cents for a song and you can listen to that song online as long as you want to. You do not own the copyrighted song however, you cannot copy it, you cannot move the song or hide it in your folders, however you do own the song online for free and as long as you have an Internet connection you can listen to it as many times as you want to. This move, however small shows just how much Apple is interested in keeping up the pace when it comes to Cloud Computing. Itunes might be a huge success, but in the future where everything is online, Apple has to keep up, if it wants to be successful.

Now I tell you all of this simply because again, I have to question, are you ready for this? Are you ready for every application you need to be readily available online for free or at a small cost? Where does the marketer come in all of this? How much will each application cost? Will we have to pay for each application individually? There are a thousands of questions still left that we need to see answered before we can say more. But in the end are people ready to get rid of their USB drives and hard drives, and are seriously ready for all of their information to be online and to trusted with a various company to protect it. Now I want to say that again, if you are not paying attention DO YOU TRUST ALL OF YOUR INFORMATION WITH ANYBODY BUT YOURSELF? That is the question we have to really ask. Scary isn't it? Ladies and Gentlemen the future is here, welcome to Cloud Nation.

Tiger Woods, my Father and the future of News.

It happened last Friday, around 12 o'clock, right before lunch, I checked my twitter feed and saw that is when I saw it. "Tiger Woods in critical condition after car accident at 2:30 am." Just like everybody I was shocked by this news and immediately shared it with my father, who I was enjoying a post-Thanksgiving lunch with, "Tiger's been in an accident." "What?" He said, shaking his head. In his usual, shameful, where has society gone voice. My father has never been a huge sports fan like me and my brother, however he knows the big names and it is hard NOT to know Tiger Woods' name. Now I am bringing this all up in reflection to last Tuesday's blog. My father after reading it Tuesday, commented, what are we turning into? Are we just electrical pulses that spew random bits of information, like gears in a cog? Well, I argue no. Social Media is allowing us more individual freedom and it is allowing us to gain all of the information, that we as individuals want faster and quicker than ever before. Look at the Tiger Woods incident, before the day and age of social networking the story would have hit the 12 o'clock news if we were lucky, or we would have to wait five or six hours to watch it on the nightly news. In those twelve hours a PR "spin team" can come up with a number of excuses and false stories for Tiger Woods, "well he was off to get some milk for his baby." Now it is not my purpose here to judge Tiger Woods, however it is my part to react to how fast this story broke, using social networking. Like I said earlier, I did not hear about this story from the newspaper or TV, I simply like thousands of others found out about this story from my Twitter Feed and no not from the New York Times Twitter feed, but from fantasy sports analyst Mattew Berry(@MattewBerryTMR) who simply tweeted the breaking story, to his followers. I cannot help but wonder what would of happened, if we had this technology during the OJ case, or even going further back, what if Bernstien and Woodward had a twitter account? Would Bernstein have tweeted DeepThroat's words, to the populace? Can you imagine news breaking in an instant? And not just news, but opinions, thoughts, emotions all breaking the minute that they are conjured up, because this is the that society we now live in The day of getting news the old fashioned way is gone. Billions upon billons of newspapers are losing money as more and more people are turning to the Internet for their news, and that is now even changing with social networking. Before the newspaper where did we get our news? It was from word of mouth and twitter/facebook and various other social networking applications are simply adding to that. Do you remember the family reunion, when your family use to sit around and tell stories about what they had been up to and all the crazy hijinks that happened in their personal lives. Well that part of our lives is simply gone. Change a job? Update your Facebook status. Have baby pictures? Upload them to Flicker or PhotoBucket. News and information is not changing us, it is becoming more of a reflection of us as a whole, as a society. True, we have to straddle that line on how much information we want the the world to have access to, and that very line seems to change everday, but at the end of the day in the Social Media any information you want is there.

The Future is here.

If you have never read, Transmetropolitan the 60 issue comic book series written by Warren Ellis, I highly recommend it. The story follows a man named Spider Jerusalem, who has lived in the mountains for the last five years and for reasons I will not reveal, he has to revisit the city, after leaving for the mountains years ago. Now, that is all of the plot you are going to get from me. The point why I bring this up is because of the city that Jerusalem has to revisit and live in, once again. At the time of the publication the city was set in the future and ends up becoming a character of its own. The city is filled with viral information everywhere, we find out, as Jerusalem first enters the city and later goes on to explore it. it is literally a social networkers' dream as commercials are beamed directly to the head, people are getting constant updates about the world from "The Feed," the book even goes as far as the main character going, "walking out in the city, is like walking out of sensory deprivation," later even simply remarking that there is noise everywhere. And the reason, that I bring all of this up, is because this age of getting information directly to us, is where we are ladies and gentlemen. The days of not knowing what is going on in the world are long gone. Got a radio? Better yet, got a computer? Heck, got a cell phone? Technology is taking us to places where we never thought. You can pull out your phone and find a variety of info, from the latest news, to what time the movie is playing tonight. All of this leads to this blog. Now you came across it for a certain reason. Now, all I ask is for you to stay with me. As I write this, I cannot tell you what this is going to be about, but I will tell you I will throw a little pop culture, a little daily news, and sports news at you but from there, well we will see. But for now, all I can is that the future that Warren gave us in Transmetropolitan is here.