Wait, what? That grosses you out? Hah, really? C’mon! It’s only shmeat: lab-grown in vitro meat, and it’s not fake meat. It’s meatsie meat. Food Safety News describes:

In vitro or cultured meat is not imitation meat — like all those vegetable-protein products that don’t taste anything like beef or chicken. In vitro or lab-grown meat is animal flesh, except it never was part of a living animal.

Seriously, how does lab-grown meat not sound amazing? This is your finest Kobe steak marinated in Future and seasoned with a little bit of starlight. If you’re still not sold on it, check out this delightful little video to whet your appetite:

The thing is, meat grown in a lab already exists. It is here. Scientists, like anybody who ever creates anything that will change civilization forever, are merely deliberating on how to make the test tube meat “commercially feasible,” i.e., profitable. Food Safety News reports that there are approximately 30 labs around the world who have been at work developing in vitro meat. As labs have begun “attracting investments and research talent from around the world,” the possibility of shmeat on our shelves soon becomes all the more likely.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) likes the shmeaty future because they hope it will spare animals pain and suffering. That’s all well and good, but this could radically improve the quality of life for vertebrates more dear to our hearts: humans. Readily grown meat in untold quantities could change the concept of hunger in the future. Animals live, people live – everybody has cake. As you may predict, humans of today had mixed reactions about this delicacy of tomorrow.

The real question here isn’t whether shmeat will be created – it will be, if it hasn’t definitively been created already – and not even if people will eat it. The question is, will people like it? What a tragic irony that would be if we the people were so fatally attached to overly salty and steroid-bleeding meat that we find 100% pure, uncompromised meat to be so unpalatable that we simply reject it.

Wouldn’t surprise me, really.

Honestly, if it tastes like meat and smells like meat and has a texture like meat and is biologically identical to meat why wouldn’t you try this stuff at least once? Would you? Pipe up in the comments and let us know if you would (or wouldn’t) and why.

Samsung announced on their flickr page that the 46-inch transparent display will be used in refrigerator doors by U.S. companies. The LCD panel features wide angles, a contrast ratio of 4500:1, a 1366×768 resolution and a color reproduction range of about 70 percent.

I for one welcome this new technology. I seriously love the idea of being able to see inside my fridge at all times with the potential for interactive fridge doors in the near future. The possibilities are endless. We are staring at the future of food and it is telling us to eat that leftover spaghetti before it goes bad.

For more information about this amazing new technology, check out our previous coverage on it.

Unless, that is, most people would prefer to huddle around their electronic devices to steal the warmth off of their over-worked processors because, given how people are spending their money on household services these days, that may be what they resort to this year.

How indispensable have your technology utilities – cell phones, Internet, etc. – become in your everyday life? How would you prioritize these expenses among traditional utilities like water, gas, and electricity? Tell us your thoughts in the comment section.

iYogi, a research initiative that examines the technology issues of today, has conducted a study that found that, among the 1100 people surveyed, 63% of people spend almost 35% more on technology bills than utility bills. For the purposes of this study, the services filed under the “technology bills” category are Internet Service Provider bills, mobile communication services, and multimedia services (cloud storage, subscriptions to Netflix-like services, etc.).

The importance of having a reliable Internet service in the home isn’t incredibly hard to grasp when you consider that “the average American home with two family members own as many as 7 IP devices.” Phones, tablets, laptops, online streaming services – these technological implements add up quickly. As you can imagine, the quantity of IP devices increases as the amount of household members grows. Households with 3 to 7 members may have upwards of 11 IP devices. That the quantity of devices doesn’t increase commensurately with the amount of household members suggests that some of these IP devices are likely shared, the Internet (since you can connect multiple devices onto one wireless network).

iYogi explains how the constantly increasing inventory of PCs, tablets, printers, scanners, cameras, and digital music players “is driving a new consumer demand for tech support services.” Add to the mix “smart phones, gaming devices, and Internet-enabled televisions and set top boxes are becoming a critical part of the home.”

Indeed we are in the thick of the digital age, so now that American households are beginning to fully weave Internet and mobile communication into their everyday lives in such dedicated ways, have online services become as necessary as water and electric utilities? Considering how many households have become seemingly dependent on the Internet, it looks like it could shape up that way.

Perhaps the biggest aspect to consider now that Americans are wired to the teeth these days is: how much is all of this costing us? iYogi says that “the average monthly expense [on mobile services] was found to be $94.” Add to that the average $19 per month that people fork over to download games, apps, music and the like and you’ve turned a pricey bill into a more pricey bill. As you can imagine, “the increasing popularity of mobile devices including smartphones and tablets is only likely to see increased spendings on mobile communication in the future.”

And then there’s the actual ISP bill. iYogi found that 58% of people can spend anywhere between $20 and $180 on monthly ISP service bills. (An aside: it’s probably not surprising that people would spend a lot of money on their Internet service, but that’s a really big range of expense. That’s like the difference between saying “I want to eat one hot dog for lunch” and “I want to win the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest.” But I digress.) While the cost of subscribing to an ISP will depend on the data plan, the sum of money spent inflates as you include Internet-based services like Netflix. Corroborating what we have previously reported, this change in habit “has seen TV take a backseat as an entertainment medium.”

As if the technology tab wasn’t high enough, now people are beginning to pay for yet another service: cloud-based storage. While 30% of people currently spend an average of $10 per month for cloud services, iYogi expects this figure “is only going to increase as comfort levels with these new services go up.”

So given all of this habituated use of online services, is it valid to say that the Internet is an essential utility – at least inside of what iYogi describes as “digital homes” – as opposed to an elective commodity? Granted, nobody needs the Internet to stay alive the way they need heat to cook their food or water to drink and bathe. But people, I’d argue, have re-created the Internet as a need insofar it has become the linchpin of our communication infrastructure.

And it’s not as if people have recently realized they have stacks of extra cash laying around and decided to get themselves a Home 2.0. I don’t think you can make the case that people have more expendable income because economic growth has been near-flatlining in the United States for several years now. There’s been a nudge of economic recovery in the past year or so, but hardly enough to generate enough excess income in American households where they can spend the money on “superfluous” amenities like smartphones and high-speed Internet.

It’s not that people want the Internet anymore; more and more, people need the Internet.

Whether technology finds a space in an updated version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs doesn’t matter: people are increasingly becoming dependent upon the Internet. And given how integrated the Internet is to our lives, a lack of it would drastically change the way we live these days. Sure, some bugbears will contest this notion with antiquated protests like, “We were getting along fine before the Internet so we can easily do without it now.” That’s true, we were doing fine, but we were also getting along fine before indoor plumbing, penicillin, and a national highway system but does anybody truly want to return to a way of life when those now-standard amenities don’t exist? I doubt it. It’s not about the bare minimum of resources on which humans can continue to survive – it’s about what improves the quality of life.

As for the future, iYogi doesn’t foresee the proliferation of Internet-enabled households slowing down anytime soon, so again, at what point does the Internet become a necessity and less of a luxury? Could you go without the Internet these days or is it as necessary as warm water and reliable light sources? Do you see the prevalence of Internet in our way of life as a good thing or a bad thing? Share your opinions in the comments below.

Ready to bring the shame? I hope not, because lucky for you (this time) the bringers of awesome future technology are from Team Earth (Sweden, in fact) and the awesome they’ve brought us is a slick piece of eco-friendly technology called PowerTrekk, tomorrow’s battery charger.

And here comes the best part: PowerTrekk is a darkness-defeating fuel cell charger that runs on – ready – WATER! It runs on approximately one tablespoon of WATER! You can charge your mobile electronics with the stuff that drips out of clouds and public fountains. This brilliant piece of future “cleanly and efficiently converts hydrogen into electricity” via PowerTrekk’s Proton Exchange Membrane. That sounds intense, but all you have to do is place one fuel pack, called PowerPukk, into the the PowerTrekk and “add water to provide instant and limitless power on the go.” Watch it in action:

UH-mazing.

myFC, the company that has created this device, promotes PowerTrekk as the ideal accessory for “business professionals in developing countries who seek freedom from wall charging either because they work in remote areas (where the grid is absent) or in cities where, from time to time, the electrical grid is unreliable.” Whether you’re charging your phone, camera, or even an iPod (because when you are completely removed from electricity the first thing to worry about is what jams you need to set the mood), simply plug the device into PowerTrekk’s USB port and – presto – you’re off like a battery-charging bandit. Take a look at all of it’s gadgety wonder:

So let’s recap: No power outlet? No problem. No car battery? No problem. No spare batteries? NO. PROBLEM.

The next time you’re venturing out into the wild, whether that’s an unfamiliar city or the actual wild that you see on Discovery Channel, take a look at your communication devices and ask yourself: Which one of these cute geometry-morphs do you hope to be:

In spite of my yearning to make Hal 9000 jokes about a thermostat that learns from people’s habits and then takes the wheel to control temperatures, that’s as close as I’m going to get; it’s too brilliant of a device to defile with my half-baked humor. The Nest Thermostat is a welcome innovation that finally brings the antiquated science of home energy use within pace of today’s technology. “It was unacceptable to me that the device that controls 10 percent of all energy consumed in the U.S. hadn’t kept up with advancements in technology and design,” said Tony Fadell, co-founder and chief executive officer of Nest Labs. “Together with the team, Co-Founder Matt Rogers and I set out to reinvent the thermostat using advanced technologies, high-quality manufacturing processes and the thoughtful design elements the iPhone generation has come to expect. The resulting Nest Learning Thermostat is like no other thermostat on the market. We hope it will not only save money and energy, but that it will teach and inspire people to think more about how they can reduce home- energy consumption.”

Once you’ve replaced the thermostat in your home with a Nest Learning Thermostat – and these guys are insistent that their goal is replacement of your outdated climate technology – Nest automatically learns from your personal schedule within the first week of use. After it’s figured out your patterns of heating and cooling at home, Nest will begin controlling the temperature based on when you’re around and when you’re away in order to conserve energy (and, more immediately, money you spend on controlling your energy costs). The people at Nest Labs provided the following video to show you how it works:

Whenever the seasons change, Nest can re-learn your habits for the seasonal adjustment in order to make sure you stay cozy all year long. What’s more, Nest can connect to your home’s WiFi network so that you can control the temperature of your home from your smartphone, tablet, or computer. Wanna make sure the house is pre-emptively warm by the time you arrive home from a frigid day at the salt mines? Just log on using the Nest Thermostat app and set the temperature via your mobile device. The apps necessary to control Nest from your mobile devices are currently available in both iTunes and Android Marketplace.

Ahead of this week’s CES extravaganza, Nest Learning Thermostat already earned CES’s Best of Innovations Award in Eco-Design and Sustainable Technology last year shortly after the device debuted. Following that celebrated award, don’t be surprised if you hear many more a splendid thing about Nest Labs and their intelligent technology to help control energy consumption and costs.

As we slouch onward toward The Future, sometimes The Future meets us halfway and gives us a sample of amazing things to come. The latest teaser from the land of tomorrow promises us that, believe it or not, we will be able to listen to sound without our eardrums.

Did you blink at that? Yes. Your eyes have not pranked you.

Consumer electronics company AfterShokz have developed the next generation of headphones that use what they call “bone conduction headphone technology.” In lay terms, you don’t actually insert these headphones into your ears but rather place them in front of your ears so that the the headphones rest on your cheekbones. AfterShokz explains the science on their site:

Most of what we hear is due to sound waves traveling through the air to the eardrum, which then converts the sound waves to vibrations and transmits them to the inner ear. Sound waves can also get to the inner ear through direct vibration of the bones in the head which carry the vibrations directly to the inner ear, bypassing the eardrums. This is how a person hears his or her own voice, and also how whales hear. This pathway of sound is known as bone conduction.

You’ve likely heard the remarkable story of Beethoven composing music despite being nearly completely deaf. As it turns out, he wasn’t completely deaf – he could hear the music by biting a rod attached to his piano, which transmitted the music through his jawbone. The technology, AfterShokz says, works the same way.

This technology, which is patent pending, originated when AfterShokz created headphones using “bone conduction technology” for use by military special ops and SWAT teams (the military always get to play with the funnest toys first, don’t they?). By leaving the ears unobstructed by traditional headphones, AfterShokz headphones permitted the service members to listen to their surroundings while also staying in touch with the members of their unit via headphones.

So yeah. I can’t really wrap my mind around the concept but there it is: the Future hath cometh, and with it the ability to give us a virtual second set of ears. Those extra ears will come in three comfortable models: Sport Headphone, Mobile with In-Line Mic, and Game Headphone. I’m kind of gobsmacked just thinking about the medical and architectural applications of this technology; it feels like too elegant of a device to merely use for the purpose of music or podcasts. But at any rate, we inch ever closer to The Future thanks to the technological genius of companies like AfterShokz.

Bruce Sterling

Okay first question is: who is Bruce Sterling? I looked him up and if you can believe Wikipedia he’s a science fiction writer famous for defining the “cyberpunk” movement in modern Western literature. If his books are like the text of the speech he gave at Webstock 09, called “The Brief But Glorious Life of Web 2.0, and What Comes After,” then his writing might be described as sarcastic, shoot-from-the-hip, lightning-fast-and-rhythmic-witticism-laden futuristic mind-screwing bizarrely juxtaposed technobabble in the style of Monty Python meets Douglas Adams meets Robot Chicken, a style I’ve tried just now very poorly to emulate in my own description of what I know about him, which, seeing as I’m not much of a science fiction guy, is next to nothing beyond what I just told you.

Which wasn’t much. But I may be a kindred spirit. It takes a special talent to say a lot and nothing at the same time and Bruce Sterling’s speech is proof of it. Or maybe I’m just dense, which is entirely possible, I’m on cold meds after all and a little off anyway. He made quite a bit of fun of Tim O’Reilly, and I can respect that.

What I’ve got it boiled down to is that Sterling says Web 2.0 is done, over, finished, even if it was a great success propped up by “useful, sound ideas that were creatively vague,” and by the sounds of it the Transition Web won’t be any clearer of purpose. That’s okay because we’ve proven that creatively vague is a good enough conglomeration of loosely connected make-it-now-find-a-point-later-Twitter-esque conceptual netting on which to run forward and on which to cushion the fall once one has the Wylie Coyote epiphany moment he’s running on clouds and concepts and a foolhardy devotion to the idea that roadrunners taste good. He’s going to be very disappointed, and he’s going to have find something else to chase. That’s called a transitional moment.

Beyond that, Sterling’s presentation is very quotable, and one imagines sometime in the future we’ll understand what the famed futurist meant after some event with a vague ring to it sends us to Google or Twitter or whatever the preferred source of the Transition Web is to remember what it was he actually said about it. That’s how Nostradamus got famous you know. 

Tell me this part doesn’t need to be in a series of quatrains:

“The World Wide Web sits on top of a turtle, and then below that is an older turtle, and that sits on the older turtle. You don’t have to feel fretful about that situation — because it’s turtles all the way down.”

Here are some other quotes to illustrate what I mean, and by that I mean what Sterling meant, which is to say that nobody has any clue where we’re really going because the future is inconsiderately unwritten:

There’s gonna be a Transition Web. Your economic system collapses: Eastern Europe, Russia, the Transition Economy, that bracing experience is for everybody now. Except it’s not Communism transitioning toward capitalism. It’s the whole world into transition toward something we don’t even have proper words for.

The Web has always had an awkward relationship with business. Web 2.0 was a business model. The Transition Web is a culture model. If it’s gonna work, it’s got to replace things that we used to pay for with things that we just plain use.

In the Transition Web, if you’re monetizable, it means that you get attacked. You gotta squeeze a penny out of every pixel because the owners are broke. But if you do that to your users, they will vaporize, because they’re broke too, just like you; of course they’re gonna migrate to stuff that’s free.

And what does that mean exactly? Well that’s not a fair question during or prior to a transition now is it? You think the Antebellum South knew what was next after General Lee returned home from Appomattox Court House? Likely some slick-talking carpetbaggers had some creatively vague ideas—and I betcha one of their names was Bernanke.

What do bloggers have to say about Sterling’s speech? Well, a few of them aren’t sure they liked it. And others said nothing, just quoted a few of the more interesting sounding parts. I think he’s saying we’re gonna need something besides money and old ideas to run this new Transition Web thing, but what that’s going to be is unclear. Maybe he’s talking a hundred years in the future. The immediate future, as I rub my crystal ball, is built on more money and megaconglomerate machinery than we can currently imagine, propped up by billions of digitally empowered human digits, the owners of which spend much of their time trying to figure out how to be a wheel instead of a cog.

In short, the Web swallows everything we can’t hold in our hands and appears in things we can hold in our hands, things that used to be on paper, vinyl, and large pieces of living room furniture, and we’ll likely have some mixed feelings about it, concern for our children, and general anxiety about a future we have no real control of.
 

Instead of dreamy startups this time around, though, you can bet the companies at the forefront are names you know: Google, Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft, News Corp., AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, et cetera, et cetera. It will be the most innovative and useful entities, however, with dreams and savvy as they nimbly climb up through the pipes, that will outshine the entrenched behemoths.

So long as the behemoths allow that kind of thing. Right now, they’re putting on a bit of a dog and pony show to distract regulators and the public with issues that are important, but that have definite expiration dates. It’s a money thing. It’s about squeezing every cent out of copper wiring and old-world business models while they still can.

So far, so long as they don’t fall to the dark side eventually, so long as they stay a sort of un-corporation, Google is our best ally in the years ahead. Others have more interest in controlling the pipes and the cash flow than they do in preserving the greatness this next digital revolution will bring to us. Worst case scenario: The Internet becomes TV, complete with recycled, simplified, sanitized, zombified content, brought to you by…

The Grid

The Times Online explains the Grid in a way your mother can understand. Cern, the Switzerland-based quantum physicists that brought us the World Wide Web at the end of the last century discovered there wasn’t enough capacity in the whole Internet to compute the complicated math needed to pursue theoretically existent subatomic particles. A standard Internet-connected PC would take centuries to analyze the data.

So they developed the Grid, which is 10,000 times faster than the Internet we know, connected via fiber-optic routing systems worldwide, eleven in the U.S. They’ll turn it on this summer, accessible by the academics at first, and within two years the 55,000 servers currently in place will increase to 200,000 as the aforementioned prospectors stake their claims.

If you’ve heard the geeks at Google or Microsoft talk about the data in the cloud—where all the information you currently store on your PC is moved online—or if you’ve heard Google describe the way its servers are set up to balance one another to make search results faster, they were talking about the same concept.

The Grid’s implementation will mean cheap or cost-free, fluid video telephony, films downloaded faster than you could type the title, and holograms of your grandkids playing in your den. It could also mean computing power strong enough that interactive takes on a whole new meaning.

For governments it will mean more chaos and more misunderstandings about the Tubes. For network providers, media companies, and online powerhouses it means money.

Lots of it.

For you, it means having to describe to your grandkids that television programming and the Internet were once accessed by separate machines, and before that, choices were very limited.

"Although the grid itself is unlikely to be directly available to domestic internet users," explains Times Online science editor, Jonathan Leake, "many telecoms providers and businesses are already introducing its pioneering technologies. One of the most potent is so-called dynamic switching, which creates a dedicated channel for internet users trying to download large volumes of data such as films."

Put another way: The telco/cable-side of the Net Neutrality argument about capacity issues, about incentive to invest, about the network grinding to a halt unless they prioritize, control, and shape traffic, is either moot, specious, deceptive, misdirecting, or intended for the short-term. In the long term, it’s about gradual upgrades, not immediate ones. In the long term, it’s about squeezing every penny they can out of consumers by upgrading to ‘unlimited" in a very gradual and controlled way.

Do you really think it costs them anything to send an SMS message from mobile to mobile? While you’re thinking of ways to break your teenager’s texting thumbs without getting blamed, consider that Docomo just wirelessly sent 250 Mbps (5 times Verizon’s best fiber offering) on an existing network, much more on the next generation.

It could be a while before we really see the true capabilities of the Grid, if ever, in the States, so long as long-term upgrade strategies remain in effect. There’s no money in giving you everything at once.

The Stakes Are Huge

Google’s stated mission, and the reason the company has been such a powerful (and to some frightening) force, is to index the world’s information. The Father of the Internet, Vint Cerf, is on that mission as well, a mission that will take, by 20th Century technology, 300 years, as CEO Eric Schmidt famously quipped. The Grid could make that indexing time noticeably shorter.

A couple of years ago, Google mysteriously bought up tons of dark fiber across the country, which they’ve never directly commented on, and have been busy setting up massive data centers everywhere. They work with NASA; they dabble in mobile; and they take noisy stances against telecommunications giants by rallying up support for open initiatives.

Google knows something, and that something is that if telecoms and cable companies are permitted to run closed networks and manipulate the Grid, then Google loses, too. Though Google’s motives are probably more self-centered and survival-based than utopian, the company represents a sort of white knight for the end-user. What’s bad for the information/advertising business is bad for us as well. They’ll have the ability and the incentive to keep the next incarnation of the Internet open, just as it has been. The same way steel and oil and medicine were manipulated last century to create an impression of scarcity is the same way some companies are looking to manipulate the next great cash cow in this century. Fortunately, a behemoth like Google has opposite (monetary) interests, and represents our best hope.

Governments will have little incentive to help out. They need cooperation from the network providers to police the unprecedented amount of information flowing across their networks. Nothing like a little legal immunity to make sure backs keep getting scratched. While the DOJ acts like they’re within their rights to snoop, the FCC does a dance around the country to give an appearance of concern about Comcast and their traffic-shaping policies.

But so far it’s just lip service.

They’re not alone. All the giants are jockeying for position on this. The RIAA and MPAA have a definite stake and powerful, multitudinous lobbyists. If they think piracy’s a problem now, just wait until movies and music are whipping across the Internet as instant as a text message. A neutral Internet, where ISPs aren’t able to snoop into and manipulate packets, is bad for their business, too.

And television? AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner, all want to provide that on their networks, alongside telephony services, and any number of others possible. For fifty years in television there was a huge cost barrier at the platform level and at the production level. That allowed messages and content to be better controlled and monetized. All that control allows for tiered networks similar to cable TV, similar to mobile phone plans that force consumers into bundles of services and extra expense for every, well, extra. 

An open, hyper-fast Net makes that business model obsolete and scatters once clumped-together audiences into infinite niches. The MPAA doesn’t just lobby on behalf of movie studios. Its membership includes TV-connected NBC Universal, Warner Brothers, Disney, and Twentieth Century Fox.

That brings News Corp. into this issue, who leads the way in media consolidation and message crafting, and who leads or is a major participant in the next great merger race to create online supermonsters. As Yahoo mulls a deal with AOL (which gives Google even more control of the online ad space, Microsoft gladly protests) and outsourcing its search ads to Google in order to thwart a Microsoft buyout, News Corp. is said to be cavorting with Microsoft to up the ante. Microsoft, it is fair to say, has never been fond of all those open standards, or cloud-computing for that matter. What’s good for Google is usually bad for Microsoft.

Just to help you keep tabs on who is connected to whom in these incredible power-plays to have a nice, controlling interest in the eventual Grid, here is the flow chart: Microsoft, News Corp., the MPAA, the RIAA, all the telcos and cable companies, shareholders and board members who cross over onto other boards, world governments, one hand in somebody else’s pocket, the other hand on somebody else’s back, yes, it’s a beautiful trillion-dollar symphony, something very, very hard to compete with.

On the other side, it’s Google (hopefully to stay), a few others, and a growing landscape of concerned citizens who want, need, and deserve to keep an open Internet so there can be more Googles and YouTubes and Facebooks in the future. The other route brings sanitized, test-marketed and focus-grouped, tailored messages, approved content, and the high barriers to entry that keep true competition out of the marketplace. 

Boy, wish we’d have noticed that before Piper Jaffray put out this 425-page report (PDF). Oh yeah, we kind of did, notice it a lot, but we’ll get to back-patting later. The report, entitled The User Revolution: The New Advertising Ecosystem and The Rise of the Internet as a Mass Medium, coins the latest buzzword "communitainment" after exploring the upheaval currently in progress.

Greg Jarboe, president and co-founder of SEO-PR, took one for the team and weeded through the report before penning a succinct summary over at Search Engine Watch. "After several years of moving at a healthy pace along well-traveled pathways, the search engine industry seems to be sailing off in surprising new directions," he writes.

The comprehensive report is the result of a year’s worth of research led by Piper Jaffray’s Safa Rashtchy, managing director and senior Internet analyst, and Aaron Kessler, VP and senior Internet analyst, and is the firm’s outline of how they believe advertising and media models will change over the next couple of decades.

Jarboe quotes an email from them:

"Consider this report as a warning of a storm that has already formed, a storm that will destroy many models and create new ones. Luckily, the full cycle of the storm will still take a few more years to complete, and there is still time to react."

The short and skinny: The user revolution has gone mainstream and is causing increased media fragmentation, putting search, as a portal, at the forefront of branding, and video ads will be funding it all.

It’s good to see this spark of recognition from outside the online marketing world. For the longest time, SEM was considered, from both sides of the fence, quite separate from traditional media and traditional marketing/advertising/branding. Search marketers, at times still, scoffed at branding concepts that didn’t produce direct, measurable results, even if this is the way the advertising world has worked for decades. Ask Coca-Cola.

But traditional Madison Avenue types have also been slow to accept the power of search marketing, and, more recently, the power of user-generated media. Both sides, though, are starting to get it: it’s all going to be one big media orgy one day anyway, might as well start smooching.

We could go into specifics about how this orgiastic revolution will take place, but we’d just be repeating ourselves. Instead, consider this an abridged index of sheer, conceited prescience:

Sweet-Talking The Searcher

YouTube Users and Video Ads

YouTube Optimization

Pure Unresolved Speculation

Google and TV Ads

YouTube Vs. TV

Online Video Reach

What Google Could Do Nielsen

Don’t Expect the FCC to Stay Out of It

Madison Ave. Doesn’t Get Web Video

Online Gaming

Google and In-game Advertising

Quantum Physics and Viral Marketing

Search Engines and Time Reality (just for fun)

Google Media, Inc., 20 years later…

Advertisers Late To the Big Dance

Portals, Google’s One Of Them

Google Should Come Out of Portal Closet

Mainstream Media Afraid Of Blogs

What Bloggers Like

The Associated Blogosphere

Branding In The Age of Wikipedia

Branding Through Social Media

Branding In the Red Light District

Branding In France

Podcasting, Blogging, Monetization

The Googleconomy

That’s all of the horn-tooting for today.