It’s been two weeks since I last walked out of the Live Earth offices and the “so what’re ya gonna do nows?” just aren’t getting old yet.

The idea of perfection or an ideal future/job/family is loaded with false hope and bound to disappoint, not unlike San Francisco in the summertime.

Is that a depressing thing to say? (Remember, I got my Master’s in skepticism at USC). Au contrair. I’ll never know exactly what I want for the foreseeable future. Or at least I’d never admit to it. I like to allow for a little free flow, leave room for spontaneity, live day-to-day to the max and give a bit up to chance. (Was also an English major). It only gets better.

Call me a pretentious music snob (and you’d be right) but I’m too existentialist to even list Top 5’s because, well, at any given time or place that list would be different.

OK, here’s the latest:

• Gulf Coast Benefit – on August 25th near you. I’m helping to organize west coast and promote.
• Social Media Week LA – September 20-24th across LA (and 5 other cities in the world). On the advisory board to make sure this is amazing.
• Two other opportunities that I will refrain from mentioning until I take the first steps toward beautifying their respective web presences, etc. (sorry no jinxies).

Am I getting paid? Not enough. Still looking? Yes. Happy? Hell yes. Staying in LA? I’ll go anywhere in the world for the right gig.

Hoping to set aside time to pimp out the resume and LinkedIn profile in the next day or two.

While the possibilities are endless as ever, a hunger for new challenges is met with a thirst for adventure. All good things.

I do appreciate everybody’s positivity, support, forwarding of job openings, and connecting of me to funded friends with promising start-ups.

Hit me up for lunch or to talk biz!

Photo by Trey Ratcliff, shared via Creative Commons license.

We’re humans. Creatures of comfort bound to act irrationally in a wide open yet unfamiliar place of such inebriating possibilities as the digital world. Attention, Stimulation, Information… we’re multitasking and we want more!

But how can we be the same if everything around us is changing?

You can break it down to the 0’s and 1’s. For business, society, government… this is a revolution. But I think it’s just a “shift” for interpersonal communication and the way we relate, react, co-create, and respond.

All of this info is ours at last and it’s still incredible to just suck it up and share it. We have instant audiences and can solicit instant feedback yet for the most part our tweets do nobody more good than ourselves. Sometimes you’ve gotta say it out loud to realize it. But for the hundreds of blogs in our RSS readers how many posts are we commenting on or better yet taking personally as invitations for feedback / collaboration.

In IMs and status updates and quick emails, much comes across out-of-context and is open to interpretation — even guessing. What does he/she mean exactly? But it’s a shift – we still “learn” each other in much the same way we might (or might not) in an extended face-to-face.

Everyday we know the future will be here tomorrow and that’s not to be taken for granted. But some things stay the same.

It’s easier than ever to make connections but it’s nothing compared to being “there” and making it all connect.

Part 1 in an series of posts and cross-published comments inspired by friends’ recent blog posts. This in response to “The Messages We Receive,” by Nicole Cifani.

Click here for day two coverage.

QUOTES:

• “I’m most amazed by, What I don’t know, What is my curiosity to know” – Charlie Rose (source)
• “…the smaller the screen, the less time you have to watch” – entertainment panel, (a href=”http://twitter.com/Bill_Gross/status/14628067891″>source)
• Funnyordie does $10M+ in ad revenues – (source)
• “tv will be on the internet as long as the advertising is there to support it” – Andrew Steele of FunnyorDie.com (source)
• “Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook are the four great horsemen of the Internet” – John Doerr source
• on GQ – 250,000 sessions since iPad launched. 40% on iPhone and 60% on iPad. Vanity Fair has had 35,000 since launch, 90% iPad – source
• Arrington welcomed Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz to the stage with a hearty, “How the fuck are you?” but Bartz got the last word in and then some. Search Arrington Bartz fuck off or just watch the instant classic below:

• We’re going to Craigslist the AP…. a monopoly that’s ripe for destruction by web platform – @scottkarp @publish2
• Judges responding to Publish2 with painful use of metaphors: “It’s sorta like selling new paint to the Titanic” – Phillip Kaplan; “It’s selling vitamins to the dinosaurs” – Jeffrey Bussgan (via nberg.us)

This week’s Google I/O keynote fiesta brought plenty of big, exciting, game-changing announcements, but nothing more immediately exciting to me than the launch of the Google Font API (Read Google’s blogpost). Suddenly adding sleek, new fonts to any web page is as easy as visiting the Google Font Directory, copying, pasting, and voila.

There are a few key reasons why I’m so excited about this and I’ll elaborate a bit below:

1. The fonts are all open source-licensed
2. It works on all current browsers (cross-platform)
3. The fonts are cool and the possibilities are endless

There might be hundreds of fonts pre-installed on your Microsoft Office or Adobe Creative Suite software, but only a fraction of these will be recognized by most web browsers. Standards take time to develop and our perception of time in the web era is ridiculously skewed. It’s been less than 15 years since Netscape 2.0 became the first widely used browser to support tags in the first place! 1995 was also the year that the first standard HTML spec was published (HTML 2.0) and around the same time momentum started building for a CSS standard. In the earliest days of the web as we know it, it was all Times New Roman all the time.

Will somebody please build one of these neat little cars? How much fun would it be to buzz around the neighborhood or bog in the REVOLUTE? The really cool part? It has a clicker that reconfigures the wheelbase depending on how macho you feel. IMâ€s can be flashed on the side of the “car” too. Harsha Vardhan made the vehicle out of high tech materials, lexan, carbon fiber, etc. The doors roll out and it also work as a display screen. Inside are swivel seats. Pretty cool. Al Gore build this car!

Prediction: As sensing, storage and communication technologies get cheaper and better, individuals’ public and private lives will become increasingly ‘transparent’ globally. Everything will be more visible to everyone, with good and bad results. Looking at the big picture – at all of the lives affected on the planet in every way possible – this will make the world a better place by the year 2020. The benefits will outweigh the costs.

The mean response of 742 individuals is of uncertainty (46% agreed vs. 49% disagree). But it’s the substance of the varied & impassioned responses that set the course for what many believe is one of the most important issues of modern time and the near future.

Here is a link to credited answers. And here’s a collection of anonymous one-liners.

The answers range from amusing to asinine, but overall the essence is that transparency — while essential to and inevitable in an open society — is a double-edged sword.

In a rather oddly phrased question, a majority of respondents agree (to my dismay) with Thomas Friedman’s mostly-BS “The World is Flat” argument, aggreeing with utopian naivete, that, by 2020, “the free flow of information will completely blur current national boundaries as they are replaced by city-states, corporation-based cultural groupings, and/or other organizations tied together by global networks.”

Perhaps it’s only appropriate — in a very Sci-Fi-esque study, that there would be no more New York and China and Japan.

Other notable conclusions from the abstract:

* A low-cost global network will be thriving and creating new opportunities in a “flattening” world.
* Humans will remain in charge of technology, even as more activity is automated and “smart agents” proliferate. However, a significant 42% of survey respondents were pessimistic about humans’ ability to control the technology in the future. This significant majority agreed that dangers and dependencies will grow beyond our ability to stay in charge of technology. This was one of the major surprises in the survey.
* Virtual reality will be compelling enough to enhance worker productivity and also spawn new addiction problems.
* Tech “refuseniks” will emerge as a cultural group characterized by their choice to live off the network. Some will do this as a benign way to limit information overload, while others will commit acts of violence and terror against technology-inspired change.
* People will wittingly and unwittingly disclose more about themselves, gaining some benefits in the process even as they lose some privacy.

As Bruce Schneier said at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy tonight, “freedom equals liberty plus privacy.” Digest that…

The IEEE prefers their recently released “Bursting Tech Bubbles Before They Balloon” survey, authored by Marina Gorbis and the Institute for the Future’s David Pescovitz.

For historical reference, see PBS’ 1998 survey: Nerds 2.0.1 — a who’s-who of nerdtrepreneurs and their late 20th century musings on the future of the Internet.