Best I can gather, Bruce Sterling just spun everybody’s head around from a New Zealand pulpit with a fantastic blizzard of words about the silly vagueness of Web 2.0, and offered up as its replacement a monumentally vaguer futuristic apparition he calls the Transition Web. And nobody’s really sure if they like that or not.
The future, probably without the flying cars, the one you see in the movies with holograms, with instant and ubiquitous informational access and unbelievable computer processing capabilities, isn't too far off. It won't be built on the current Internet, though. The Internet is totally 20th Century. The red button on the Grid will be pushed this summer, and will change everything—again.
We hate to say "I told you so." Wait. No, we really don't. Analysts at Piper Jaffray & Co. took a good, hard at look at things and decided we are in the midst of a media – well, everything – revolution and it's all the Internet's fault. E-Life as you know it is about to change.