What’s the connection between Michael Moritz, Silicon Valley’s leading venture capitalist, and Hizb’allah, the Middle East’s leading terrorist organization? According to Joshua Cooper Ramo, the author of the stimulating The Age of the Unthinkable, Moritz and Hizbollah are both able to think and act like revolutionaries in a contemporary era defined by surprise and innovation. They are both “virtuosos of the moment” able to leverage the complexity and unpredictability of today’s world in order to the realize their goals.

All new media entrepreneurs should read The Age of the Unthinkable. The ability to think and act like a revolutionary is what distinguishes the grand digital innovators – virtuosos of the moment like Steve Jobs, Mark Andreessen, Larry Page and Sergei Brin -- from everyone else. And Ramos’ message is acutely pertinent today, as the moribund Web 2.0 world is being swept away by the revolutionary stream of Twitter and its ecosystem of real-time communications technologies.

This week and next represents a particularly unthinkable fortnight in the history of new media. Yesterday, Google announced the launch of Wave – an ambitious new communications platform for the Internet. On the same day, Microsoft announced the launch of Bing a search-engine designed to chip away market share away from Google’s quasi monopoly in search.  Meanwhile, next Saturday (June 6) represents the much anticipated American launch of Palm’s Pre, a smartphone device upon which Palm have, quite literally, bet the entire company.
 

The contrast between Google and Microsoft is revealing. The static Bing search-engine appears neither surprising nor innovative – just one more example of Microsoft’s persistent failure over the last decade to innovate or surprise. In contrast, Google’s Wave appears to be an attempt to reinvent both email and instant-messaging in today’s real-time Internet. As Lars Rasumussen, the Sydney based engineer driving the Google project said, “Wave is what email would look like if it were invented today.”  With Wave, Google is once again trying to revolutionize new media. In 1999, the launch of their user-generated search engine was the first barricade stormed by the Web 2.0 revolution. In 2009, Wave might represent a similar landmark in the unfolding of the real-time web revolution.
 

So is Palm like revolutionary Google or reactionary Microsoft? When Palm demonstrated early versions of its smartphone at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show in January, many pundits were sufficiently impressed to describe the Pre as a legitimate iPhone killer. But I’m not convinced that the Pre will save Palm. To borrow again from Joshua Cooper Ramos, the Pre appears to be neither shockingly innovative nor surprising. It will, of course, be a highly competent and well engineered product that doesn’t disgrace itself against the iPhone – but, in today’s turbulent new media economy, competence is Microsoft rather than Google, it’s Bing instead of Wave.
 

Joshua Cooper Ramos described a conversation with Michael Moritz in which the Welsh born partner at Sequoia Capital – who famously discovered Google, Yahoo! and YouTube -- explained his success as a technology investor. What Moritz looked for in young companies, he told Ramos, is the ability to “pivot”, to perpetually reinvent themselves in an Internet economy that is, itself, in endless flux.  It’s no coincidence that Moritz invested in Google, but not in Microsoft or Palm. In the age of the unthinkable – from the rugged mountains of southern Lebanon to the gentle flatland of Silicon Valley -- only permanent revolutionaries survive.

What is the future of wisdom on the Internet? Let me offer two quite different versions. The first is scientific wisdom distributed out over the global network by a supposedly super sophisticated computer. The second is wisdom distributed in real-time by a global network of super ordinary human beings. The first is a new Internet service called Wolfram Alpha; the second is the real-time social media network Twitter.

The just launched and hugely hyped Wolfram Alpha is the brainchild of the American based, Eton and Oxford educated Dr Stephen Wolfram, a boy-genius physicist who got his PhD by the time he was twenty and who is the founder of the computational engine Mathematica. Described by no less than the London Independent’s Andrew Johnson as “the biggest internet revolution for a generation” and “an invention that could change the Internet forever”, Wolfram Alpha claims to be a hugely powerful and sophisticated online computation data engine that retrieves information via the worldwide web.

In contrast with the Internet trawling Google, Wolfram Alpha has aggregated and curated huge amounts of data from established offline scientific sources. It’s what Harvard University law professor Jonathan Zittrain calls a “computable almanac”, designed to juxtapose data in myriad ways. Wolfram Alpha then is a taxonomist’s wet dream, a computational engine that, in principle, enables scientists to splice and dice reliable knowledge to their heart’s content.

My problem with Wolfram Alpha is that while it all sounded very exciting in theory, it doesn't appear to work very well in practice. Currently, there's too much Alpha and not enough Wolfram. Everything of importance that I entered into the computational engine -- my date of birth, my ideology, my religion and my football team -- resulted in either useless, self-evident or confusing information. And when I entered all five of these simultaneously, it failed to retrieve me from its computational engine. Given the massive hype around its launch (mostly invented/invited by Wolfram Alpha's PR department), I assumed at first that it was me and not Wolfram Alpha at fault. My own gross scientific ignorance, I assumed, was stopping me realize the full power of the newest new thing that, we've been told, is about to change the Internet forever.
 

But belittling myself doesn’t come naturally. So I went onto Twitter for a second opinion on Wolfram Alpha. Having experienced the wisdom of Stephen Wolfram’s computational engine, I turned to the wisdom of my handpicked crowd. I tweeted my followers:


“Don't understand Wolfram Alpha…..Is it for real?”

And the replies I got confirmed all my suspicions about the general uselessness of the product. Wolfram Alpha really didn’t work according to almost everyone in my network. Purely designed for scientific geeks, it had little value to general Internet users like you and I. My favorite answer was from Hugh McLeod, the noted cartoonist and author of the hilarious new book Ignore Everybody, who tweeted:
 

“Short Answer: Nobody knows.”

When nobody knows, nobody cares. Compared with Wolfram Alpha, Twitter – a simple to use instant-messaging network -- is built on radically unsophisticated technology. Yet even today Twitter works as a retriever of wisdom. Instead of a computational engine, it contains a human engine that spits back useful knowledge in real-time from trustworthy people with who I choose to communicate. What’s lacking in Wolfram Alpha are similarly transparent human-beings. I suspect that it's just another of those "transformational products" that everybody will ignore. I wonder if the all-too-wise Dr Stephen Wolfram is on Twitter.

The medium isn’t always the message. In his 2000 best-seller, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, the American pop sociologist Malcolm Gladwell described a “tipping point” as "the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point" when change becomes unavoidable and inevitable. But Gladwell didn’t use his Tipping Point – a printed book that was mass published and sold through both traditional and online bookstores -- to either discuss or execute fundamental change within the publishing industry.

Today, almost ten years after the publication of the Tipping Point, the medium has finally caught up with the message. Till now, of course, while the Internet has savaged the newspaper and recorded industries, it has had much less impact on the book business. But in 2009, one big thing and many little things in new media have conspired to bring the traditional publishing industry to a boiling point. Writers, publishers and readers have collectively reached that moment of critical mass, at a threshold of fundamental change from which, like it or not, they can’t retreat.

That one big thing is digital book technology. Till now, the e-book has been more breathless theory than digital practice. But now with the growing popularity of the second generation Amazon Kindle (only still available in the US), the Sony Reader and persistent rumors of an imminent digital reading device from the dominant American book retailer Barnes and Noble, the idea of replacing the bulky print book with a convenient digital device is becoming increasingly attractive to more and more readers.

Digital has even begun to revolutionize the printing process itself. A couple of weeks ago, publishing industry professionals at the London Book Fair were treated to demonstration of the radical new Expresso Book Machine – a digital contraption that prints books on demand in under five minutes. This so-called “ATM for books -- the invention of ex Random House publisher Jason Epstein – changes everything about traditional retail bookstores. With the Expresso Book Machine, book retailing has suddenly gotten very flat -- the tiniest bookseller now having access to the identical inventory as the megastore.
 

But it’s the little changes in the publishing industry that are really making all the difference to the publishing business in 2009. Some of these changes are connected with the ecosystem of the e-book. Take Apple’s iPhone app store, for example, which is featuring more and more digital applications -- such as Scroll Motion, Short Covers and Classics -- for reading e-books on the telephone. Indeed, the Apple store has become so popular with readers that Amazon last week announced its acquisition of Lexcyle, the company behind the most popular iPhone app -- the Stanza e-reading interface. 
 

Then there are the increasingly innovative changes to the way in which traditional publishers are packaging and selling digital books. A couple of weeks ago, for example, Random House UK launched BookAndBeyond, an enhanced ebook initiative which provides consumers of ebooks with interactive audio and video interviews and features from popular authors like James Patterson, Lee Child and Marcus Zuzak.
 

And so, without huge fanfare, Gladwell’s tipping point has caught up with the book business. The age-old reality of distributing centrally published print books through retail stores is being replaced by a new reality of interactive e-books and an evolving ecosystem of supply and demand. 2009 might, therefore, be remembered as one of those rare moments when the paradigm really does shift; it’s the year that the medium seems to have finally caught up with the message.

Is blogging dead? Last year, questioning the future of the iconic weblog would have had me institutionalized. But today, in the face of the dramatic explosion of real-time social media services like Twitter, the future of blogging is far from certain.

It’s not just me questioning the blog. Last week, I was in Amsterdam, with a thousand of my closest new media friends, at The Next Web, one of Europe’s biggest and best tech conferences. And the words whispered in the Next Web hallways about the future of blogging weren’t always promising for the venerable digital institution. Some pundits at Next Web – such as Hermione Way, the London based founder of Newspepper and the presenter of Techfluff – have even begun to pen their obits to the blog. “Blogging as we know it is dead,” Way told me over dinner one evening at Amsterdam’s Loup restaurant. “It’s finished.”

Are these reports about the death of blogging exaggerated? At that same Loup dinner that Way announced the death of blogging, Matt Mullenweg, the San Francisco based co-founder of the open-source blog company WordPress, announced its resurrection.

“Blogs will become aggregation points,” the shamefully youthful, soft-spoken Mullenweg explained, as he mapped out the future of blogging for me between bites of Dutch smoked salmon. “They will become our personal hub. Places where we store all our personal media content such as our flickr photos and Twitter posts.”

I suspect that Mullenweg is right. When blogging was invented in the late Nineties by my dear Berkeley friend and neighbor Dave Winer, it represented an easy self-publishing tool, a simple way to publish dirty great lumps of one’s own static text. But just as the Internet has dramatically evolved over the last ten years from a self-publishing into a real-time broadcasting platform, so blogging is transforming itself with equally dramatic vigor.

With its 10 to 15 million users and blue chip media clients like the New York Times, CNN and the Wall Street Journal, Mullenweg’s WordPress epitomizes these changes. What distinguishes WordPress from some of its competitors is its open-source foundations. This open architecture has fostered an free ecosystem of 5,000 plug-ins that enable WordPress users to do everything from incorporate their Twitter feeds, videos and photos, to even managing their own independent record label.

And last week, WordPress released two new products – Buddy Press and P2 -- that underline Mullenweg’s vision of the blog as an aggregation point for all our media information. Mullenweg described Buddy Press to me as “Facebook in a box” – technology which enables WordPress users to create their own public or private social networks around their blog. While P2 is “Twitter in a box” which, according to Mullenweg, transforms the traditional WordPress blog into a real-time media experience. 

So who is right about the future of the blog, Hermione Way or Matt Mullenweg? They both are, of course. The old static blog is indeed dying. But it’s being resurrected by Wordpress as a real-time social media personal portal.  The blog is dead; long live the blog.

Twitter might be the newest new thing for millions of Internet users but, for most of Silicon Valley’s hardcore geekerati, it is Friendfeed that remains the hottest social networking application. If Twitter is emerging as the Microsoft of the emerging real-time Web, then Friendfeed – which unveiled a major upgrade to its interface last week -- is akin to Apple in its ability to muster a noisy following of hardcore evangelists.

Friendfeed, which was founded in 2007 by a group of ex Google engineers, is a real-time aggregation service that automatically incorporates updates from Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and any other online content published with an RSS feed. Dramatically more subtle and complex than Twitter, Friendfeed is currently the most ambitious social media application on the Internet, particularly in the ways in which it empowers real-time public and private conversation between its subscribers.

What is striking about Friendfeed is the remarkably passionate responses it elicits from normally sane people. For me and other mainstream web users who crave simplicity and ease-of-use from their Internet tools, it remains an irritatingly over-engineered and elliptical application, the Internet version of Rubik’s Cube. And this may explain why Friendfeed currently has less than 7% of Twitter subscribers and has fewer users now that it had six months ago. Yet, for highly credible Silicon Valley pundits like my fellow Gillmor Gang members Robert Scoble, Leo Laporte and Steve Gillmor, Friendfeed represents the next big thing in social media.
 

In spite of my own admittedly rather irrational antipathy to Friendfeed, I certainly urge everyone to sign up with this free service and try it. Whatever one thinks of Friendfeed, this real-time application is, without question, a major technological achievement which, in some shape or form, represents the future of the real-time Internet. The most interesting way for non-geeks to try Friendfeed is to test-drive it alongside Twitter. The chances are that you’ll either love or hate it. Like a good Rorschach Test, your reaction to Friendfeed is probably an accurate indicator of your general attitude to the conversational value of real-time social media.
 

Given Twitter’s phenomenal popularity with mainstream Internet users, it’s hard now to imagine that Friendfeed can now effectively compete as a straightforward consumer application. As Techcrunch founder Mike Arrington wrote last week, “Friendfeed is in danger of becoming the coolest app no one uses”. But perhaps Friendfeed will emerge as a platform for third party social media developers who can add useful new features – such as real-time video or audio.
 

That said, I do think that it is unwise to ignore the significance of Friendfeed’s hardcore evangelists. A year or two ago, many people (including myself) were sneering at the value of Twitter. But early adopters like Robert Scoble, Leo Laporte and Steve Gillmor persevered with the service and now Twitter is growing by more than 30% a month and, according to the web metrics firm Comscore, had around 10 million unique visitors in February. Maybe it is Scoble, Laporte and Gillmor, and not me, who are right about Friendfeed. I hope so. Little would please me more than to be proved wrong about the value of Friendfeed.

“Are libraries old or new media?” I tweeted earlier this week, assuming that my opinionated Twitter buddies would tell me that libraries – with their crusty old gatekeepers, shelves of dusty books and strict “no talking” policies -- are quintessential old media.
 

As usual, I was wrong. Most of my Twitter friends responded that libraries are both old and new media. They are, of course, right. Libraries and librarians, like newspapers and journalists, don’t naturally fall into one or other media camp. It all depends on the kind of libraries in which you happen to find yourself.
 

Last week, I was lucky enough to find myself in the fair city of Amsterdam in the company of several hundred Dutch librarians.  I was addressing Bibliotheekplaza 2009, an annual convention of Dutch librarians focused on using the tools of the Web revolution to modernize libraries. Borrowing the wisdom of my Twitter buddies, I argued in my speech that while most libraries today do represent the most crusty and dusty of the ancien media regime, they also have a great opportunity to become the next-generation curators of digital information. 
 

My audience of Dutch librarians agreed with my argument that, in the midst of today’s chaotic digital revolution, we need reliably curatorial libraries and libraries more than ever now. Like in Britain, librarians in Holland are under tremendous pressure to reform. Unlike in Britain or America, however, the Dutch, with their trademark foresight, are actively investing in libraries of the future. The two most innovatively interactive libraries in Holland are the central public libraries in Amsterdam and Delft both of which have both radically reinvented themselves for the new digital age.
 

At Bibliotheekplaza, I chatted with Rob Visser, the guy who has been driving the remarkable digital revolution at the Amsterdam public library. Instead of the dustiness and crustiness of the typical 20th century library, visitors to Amsterdam’s central public library will find not only books, but a restaurant as well as a children’s theatre and a public radio and television studio. The library, which is open every day from 10.00 am to 10.00 pm, also holds a series of cultural festivals – such as the upcoming week of poetry – which it then broadcasts on the Internet.
 

Amsterdam library’s website epitomizes its innovative approach to the 21st curation of knowledge. The website features its own customized search engine, the “aquabrowser”, which has integrated the library’s books, CDs and DVDs as well as a rich archive of Amsterdam’s history and culture. Equally innovatively, the website provides those who use it within the walls of the library itself open access to all its digital content.
 

Amsterdam library’s return on investment is impressive. The upgraded library, built at a cost of 400,000 euros, was opened in July 2007 and within 7 months it already had welcomed over a million visitors. This truly 21st century library with its cutting-edge website proves that old media can be successfully upgraded. I urge all non Dutch librarians to make the trip over to Amsterdam to see the latest cultural miracle in this most miraculous of cities.

 "If you thought Facebook was banal, try Twitter" says arch techno-skeptic Margaret Wente. So why do we use the short-messaging network and how can we explain its meteoric growth? The Toronto Globe and Mail columnist/cultural anthropologist gives four possible critical explanations:
 

1) "Is it really hunger for community? Is it, as one Twittering friend suggested, a safe substitute for talking to yourself, something that other people tend to find disturbing?"

2) "One more symptom of mass attention-deficit disorder – yet another excuse to distract ourselves from the dull or difficult tasks at hand?"

3) "Is it really fear of dying? Maybe Twittering is just another way (like getting and sending e-mail) to reassure ourselves that we exist: Ego tweeto, ergo sum."

4) "Maybe the drive to tweet is just the logical extension of our narcissistic age, in which nothing in the world could possibly be more fascinating (to us) than what we're having for lunch."

What is particularly interesting about the Wenteian critique is the way in which she throws the philosophical bucket against Twitter. By introducing four of the most profound critiques of industrial society -- the communitarian, the narcissistic, the existential and the Luddite-- as a way of critiquing Twitter, Wente is acknowledging its significance. Thus, in reality, she is arguing that Twitter-- love it or hate it -- is actually quite profound. I agree with the Wenteian position in many ways. But I respectfully suggest the substitution of a single word in her overall argument:
 

"If you thought Facebook was profound, try Twitter."

Last night, I was in London doing a public debate at the RSA with Don Tapscott, the author of the new Grown Up Digital, a book which explain how, exactly, today’s “Net Generation” of digitally native kids (the 11 to 31 years-olds) is changing our world. Tapscott dedicates much of his new book to politics, explaining that these digital natives are transforming society and arguing that Barack Obama – with his successful utilization of social networks and citizen engagement in the electoral campaign – is the first Net Gen President.
 

So, more than fifty days into his new job, how is Obama doing? Is the BlackBerry addicted Chicago politician who, Tapscott claimed, has been created by the transformational Net Generation, now using the Internet to transform America?
 

To get a balanced summary on Obama’s Internet achievements so far, I spoke earlier this week to Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry, respectively founder and editor of the Personal Democracy Forum, an online magazine and annual conference on how technology is changing politics. And while both men said that it remained a bit premature to judge Obama, they nonetheless acknowledged some fundamental shifts in the way the new President was using the Internet to change America.
 

Sifry listed three main areas of change. Firstly, using the example of the new Recovery.Gov website, the data intensive hub to track all stimulus money spent by the new administration, he explained that there was now an Internet centric commitment to transparency of information in politics. Secondly, citing the example of the Justice Department’s reversal of the Bush administration’s policy on classified documents, he explained that there had been a “huge shift” in the government’s approach toward the openness of information. Thirdly, Sifry used the examples of Obama’s use of YouTube, blogging and Twitter technology to directly distribute his message as evidence that the Internet has now become an almost convention way for the new President to communicate with the American public.
 

Rasiej and Sifry agreed the Internet represented a quite different series of problems and opportunities to President Obama as it had for Candidate Obama. The challenge, today, they told me, was leveraging Obama’s 13 million person base of Internet donor and supporter to the day-to-day running of the country. Sifry noted the “waning of intensity” of Obama’s online supporters and urged the new President to keep the online momentum going by using the Internet once again to "rev up" his core online constituency. . While Rasiej urged the new President to focus less on the television sound bite and more on the bytes of the Internet to fully engage with the electorate. 
 

Rasiej, however, reminded me that it is much easier to be elected with the support 13 million online activists than it is to get those 13 million supporters to agree on any one specific political issue. Rasiej also explained that for all the good intentions of the Obama administration toward making the Internet central in governance, White House digital infrastructure remains underdeveloped and thus things will only change substantially when that infrastructure is made more robust.
 

Rasiej and Sifry’s always excellent annual Personal Democracy Forum conference takes place this year on June 29-30 in New York City. By then the Barack Obama will have had more than 100 days in office. By then, I suspect, we will have a better idea of whether he really is the first genuinely Net Gen President in American history.

I'm in London this week. Tonight I recorded a programme for the BBC tv show "It's Only A Theory" hosted by the comedians Andy Hamilton and Reginald D. Hunter. Then tomorrow night, I'm at London's RSA to respond to Don Tapscott's thoughts in the RSA/Encyclopaedia Britannica (sold-out) debate about "the Economic Crisis and the Age of Uncertainty". The debate will also feature Dan Hind of Bodley Head and The Threat To Reason fame, as well as the Cambridge economist Lord Eatwell. It promises to be a very lively discussion in which Tapscott will use his Wikinomics/Grown Up Digital argument as a way of making sense of the current economic situation. Here's the RSA's description of the event:

On the plane from O'Hare, I read most of his latest book, Grown Up Digital which, like all Tapscott's work, is lucid and honorable. Tapscott is generous toward his ideological foes -- particularly Nick Carr and Susan Greenfield -- and I admire his willingness to criticise young people's failure to protect their online privacy. That said, of course, I don't agree with a number of the book's major premises about the positive pedagogical qualities of the Internet and I suspect that my responses to his presentation will be skeptical.
 

Where Tapscott and I do agree, however, is about the historical significance of the digital revolution. Like me, Tapscott sees the social media transformation as equivalent to the industrial revolution in its transformational significance. But what we don't share is a common theory of history. For Tapscott, the digital revolution represents the progressive transformation from the mass age to the age of the autonomous, liberated individual. Here, for example, is his analysis of the shift in educational terms (pp 139):
 

Mass education was a product of the industrial economy. It came along with mass production, mass marketing and the mass media..... This mass-education idea, however, is being challenged. Students are individuals who have individual ways of learning and absorbing information... "If the factory was the model of the typical 20th Century American school, the craftsman's shop or artist's studio is the model for the 21st century educational delivery system."

What is interesting is that Tapscott is idealizing the pre-industrial romantic vision of the "craftsman shop" or "artist's studio" as the organizing principle of the digital age. I don't agree. Yes, he's right that the mass production of the industrial age is being replaced by the digital revolution. But I fear that our new epoch will be characterized by a new kind of hyper-individualism more akin to digital feudalism than to an idyllic new age of craftsmen and artists.

America’s digerati has been abuzz all this week with the gloomy words of a couple of the country’s most lucid Internet prophets. First came a speech last Friday by the author Steven Johnson at the South By Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin TX, then came an essay on Saturday by New York University digital media scholar Clay Shirky. Their words addressed the future of digital news; and both men delivered the bleakest of news to print journalists already under siege from the economic crisis afflicting almost all American newspapers.
 

Their media may have been different, but their shocking messages were the same: newspapers are history, the two visionaries agreed. The traditional business is no longer viable, Shirky and Johnson both announced; newspapers are being replaced by futuristic digital news networks that will barely resemble their archaic print ancestors.
 

Johnson, the author of the sparklingly provocative Everything Bad is Good for You, a polemic in defense of the educational value of video gaming, entitled his speech “Old Growth Media and the Future of News”. But most of Johnson’s media growth lay ten years hence – a couple of centuries in Internet time. In the short term, his prognosis was dire. Things are “ugly” right now, he acknowledged, and “they are going to get uglier”. Johnson, who is also a member of the founding team at the neighborhood news site Outside.in, not only predicted that “great journalists and editors” will lose their jobs”, but also that entire American cities will lose their papers.
 

But compared to Clay Shirky, Johnson was positively sunny is in his outlook. Shirky’s self-published online essay, entitled  “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable”, tore into the convenient lies to which many “fabulist” newspaper executives continue to cling. “Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism,” he wrote, with delicious venom.  The old newspaper business model of paid content can’t be neatly and painlessly exported into new media, he explained. “Nothing, nothing will work”, Shirky argued, in a sickly newspaper culture that has become “faith-based”; there is “no general model” that will allow newspapers to transform themselves from print businesses into digital enterprises.
 

Like Steven Johnson, Clay Shirky is hopeful that eventually new digital models will come to replace the broken print newspaper business. But his future is even more science fictional than Johnson’s. “For the next few decades”, Shirky wrote, various new publishing businesses – represented by innovative models ranging from the non-profit ProPublica and WikiLeaks to Consumer Reports -- will seek to reinvent a viable journalism. “Many of these models will fail,” he predicted. And even in the distant long term, Shirky explained, nothing is guaranteed, there is no certainty of success.
 

Meanwhile, the real world continues to validate the accuracy of their depressing analysis.  Last week, for example, Hearst Corporation announced the closure of Seattle’s oldest newspaper, the Post-Intelligencer. And there were more staff cuts at a number of other newspapers including the San Diego Union-Tribune. Meanwhile Time Magazine identified the ten most doomed regional papers, a chilling list which included such historically august publications as the Boston Globe and the San Francisco Chronicle.

As Shirky wrote, “this what real revolutions are like.” They are invariably bloody and chaotic events in which “the old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place.” Non American journalists, publishers and editors should take note; like the unsentimental Clay Shirky and Steven Johnson, they must dare to think the unthinkable and imagine the unimaginable.