Something wicked 'smaht' this way comes

And now for something completely random:

Web and email have become a drug addiction with no cure, for me anyway. Take these things away, and I'm doomed ... DOOMED I tell ya!

My reliance on these tools has caused me to become impatient with their shortcomings, just like an addict waiting for his/her next score. The Web (or as my friends are fond of calling it ... the Interweb) is sooooooo young still. When you consider that the Internet in general, and the WWW in specific, was designed to connect disparate information to disparate information seekers, it's clear that our Net technologies are still a long way off. Let me give you an example:

While watching my Family Guy DVDs this past week, I was thinking about checking out the commentaries. But I have such little free time that I couldn't possibly get through all of them. Hell, I haven't even finished watching the episodes themselves, so what's a guy to do? Because this is the part that kills me the most -- I know someone has already watched all the commentaries, and I'm almost as certain that someone has already ranked which commentaries were the best. If the Interweb were everything we wanted it to be, I'd find that person in a heartbeat, select his/her Top 5 commentaries, and commence to watch just those.

And that's when I realized just how much in its infancy the Web is (and just how far a company like Google has to go before it successfully "organizes the world's information"). Let's face it, the true power of the Web is on the peer-to-peer front -- the ability to connect like-minded individuals with the straight scoop on a range of topics (as opposed to one-way access to approved marketing copy from a faceless corporate entity).

Again I bring up wikis and blogs, because this is where the good stuff is. The future as we know it. I'll be patient, but I definitely can't wait for Web 2.0 -- another trendy term of the day, but this is precisely what I'm on about.