According to a recent study by the Census Bureau, Americans spend more time every day consuming media than they do eating. And what does 2007 hold?

In the US, adults and teens will spend nearly five months (3,518 hours) next year watching television, surfing the Internet, reading daily newspapers and listening to personal music devices.

Americans will do many of these things at the same time – we’re a nation of hopeless multitaskers. Internet use has increased dramatically – doubling since 2000. However, this hasn’t entirely been at the expensive of other media (newspapers, for example) since total media usage has increased. As James Rutherfurd of Veronis Suhler Stevenson told The New York Times, “The demand for information and entertainment seems almost insatiable.”

Interestingly, 39% of adult internet users read blogs; 9% have created blogs. Numbers like that indicate that the web truly is developing into the online conversation that Tim Berners-Lee had in mind when he created it. With greater online usage and web 2.0 tools enabling ordinary people to create content, the future is one where “intercreativity” is the norm.

Who’s the Time magazine Person of the Year? Why, it’s you. And me. And anyone else who blogs, takes digital pictures of their cat, shares their inability to spell with their MySpace friendz or uploads video of that disastrous birthday party to YouTube. According to Time, it’s about:

It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

Whew! Viva Revolution? Growing up, I always thought that revolution was in the streets. Turns out, you can be a world-changer just by sitting in front of a computer.

I read this today on my favorite blog, lifehacker, but it’s so cool I must plug it myself. Flickr has a function where you can look at all the pictures you’ve taken over the year in a simple calendar view. To do so, just add /date-taken-calendar/ to the URL of your photostream, like so:
http://flickr.com/photos/joeflood/date-taken-calendar/

It’s a really interesting way to look at a year. My conclusion? I haven’t taken enough photos! Weeks upon weeks of my life are photo-less and un-chronicled by Flickr. It’s like I didn’t exist on those days. Guess I found my New Year’s Resolution

Christopher Breen of Playlist posted the final entry of his Zune Diary. Beyond the technical problems that can be expected in a 1.0 product, what really stands out for me is the absolute contempt that Microsoft has for its consumers:

• The Universal Music Group Tax. Universal assumes that all MP3 players are used by music-stealing thieves. Therefore, they are entitled to tax MP3 player sales. Microsoft gives in to this argument and gives Universal $1 per player sold. What is the most objectionable aspect of this transaction? Is it the contempt Universal has for music-lovers or is it MS charging you extra for your brown Zune, assuming you will operate the legally-sold device in an illegal manner?
• Welcome to the (Limited) Social. What a brilliant idea this is, the ability to share content easily and wirelessly between Zunes. Too bad that there are onerous limitations on sharing – you can only play a shared song three times. And music you may have created is also limited by this restriction – the RIAA reaching into the lives of consumers to limit their creative behavior.
• The Problematic Install. MS has had years to perfect it’s iPod-killer. Couldn’t they came up with a software install process that wasn’t an unholy mess? And one that didn’t feature some, uh, questionable imagery?

The contrast with the iPod is telling.  With its focus on simplicity and ease of use, Apple has designed a product with consumers in mind.  The Zune is crippled by compromises made to appease the music industry.  Consumers will decide which product they prefer.  My money is on the iPod.

Have you been to Moleskine City?  It’s not a real place, but, rather a way of life, an analog, paper-based way of life that some people swear by.  With their old-fashioned notebooks, they swear they are better organized than you and I.  But the new travel notebooks from Moleskin look cool – and perfect for organizing and recording your trip to a major city.

What writer hasn’t had the fantasy of being a big-city reporter? We’ve seen it a hundred times in movies – you pound out the story which blows the lid off big-city corruption, a glass of bourbon at your side, fame and fortune just moments away. What’s the reality?

Darkness falls on a chilly Winn-Dixie parking lot in a dodgy part of North Fort Myers just before Thanksgiving. Chuck Myron sits in his little gray Nissan and types on an IBM ThinkPad laptop plugged into the car’s cigarette lighter.

As readers abandon print for pixels, newspapers have finally begun to see the light. They’ve decided that the future is “mojos” – mobile journalists. These reporters work out their cars and file news stories on local events continuously, for their paper’s website and print edition.

What is Intercreativity?

According to Tim Berners-Lee, it’s

Building together, being creative together.

That was from an interview in 1996, 5 years after he first created the “www program” that has grown to take over the internet. In 1996 he thought that the future wasn’t interactivity, but intercreativity. The web brought us the ability to fill out forms and press submit… interacting not with a person, but with a server. What he wanted to the ability for people to work together, all over the world to create something new, not just interact with something that was already there.

It is now late 2006, has his dream come true? A quick google search for intercreativity turns up a mere 754 entries, whereas Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness” brings back 78,400. What does that say? Though truthiness may have been the word of the year in 2005, I think intercreativity is the more important term. Where did most people see Colbert in 2006? Though his show is one of the top hits on Comedy Central, I would wager to guess he has more viewings on YouTube than his own network. And what is YouTube if not the embodiment of intercreativty on the internet. People create videos and post them to the site. Other people then mashup and remix those videos. New creations from old. One person inspiring another person to create, which inspires another.

Sites like YouTube, Flickr, Digg…all of these Web 2.0 sites are intercreativity. Let’s do our part to fulfill Berners-Lee’s vision.