In retrospect, what we just left was the decade of the rapid, revolutionizing rise of the "Me-on-Web" generation. That's why it's called YouTube and MySpace. There's a reason why Apple banked on a line of I-centered (iPod, iPhone, iTunes, soon-to-be iSlate or iTablet or i-whatchamacallit) digital lifestyle products. It was a tech-influenced decade steeped in "me-you-I" -- increasingly, inevitably, sometimes selfishly self-centered. You over-shared. You drowned on the flood information. You faced choices -- why read just one newspaper when I can rely on various blogs and online news sources instead? You took control of our media diet, not just what you read, but whom you shared it with. It was all about you.

The dawn of this new decade, however, will be shaped by the "We-on-Web" generation. It's not just about you, but about all of us: how our growing collective consciousness (or "collective awareness," as Al Gore calls it) will evolve and further cement its hold.

Is it gonna be just about you, or about all of us? Will all our tweeting, Digging, Facebooking, YouTubing and Wikipediaing lead to a greater good -- like, say, helping promote democracy in countries such as Iran? Will it lead to greater understanding of complex issues that can't fit in often too simplistic 30-second television soundbites? Will it lead to increased compassion among people of different and opposing backgrounds? In late October, to little fanfare, Facebook and the Persuasive Technology Lab launched Peace on Facebook, a groundbreaking page enabling people from various backgrounds and geographies to connect and exchange ideas -- Israelis and Palestinians, American conservatives and liberals. Some say the Internet has led to increased polarization and partisanship in politics. But it's not the Internet, it's the people using the Internet. All the Internet is doing, after all, is reflect and amplify human behavior.

In the past few days, leading up to the start of 2010, there's a "trending" theme about taming and downright killing your Web 2.0 self. The singer John Mayer, one of the most popular celebrities on Twitter, asked his 2.8 million followers to undergo a "digital cleansing": no tweeting, no texting, no Facebooking, no visiting gossip sites, even, for seven full days. Mashable, which covers the in's-and-out's of the social Web, headlined the week-long pledge with "John Mayer Wants You To Make Like a Luddite in 2010." As I learned from the industry watch-blog TechCrunch, a Web site called Suicide Machine grossly ups the ante: Why not do away with your social networking presence altogether? It's no joke. A noose is prominently displayed on the site, and a light-hearted three-and-a-half minute video explaining the process beings with, "Hi there, I used to be just like you -- always online, chatting, poking. Things were okay. But I was really missing something." The site's introduction reads:

Tired of your Social Network?

Liberate your newbie friends with a Web2.0 suicide! This machine lets you delete all your energy sucking social-networking profiles, kill your fake virtual friends, and completely do away with your Web2.0 alterego. The machine is just a metaphor for the website which moddr_ is hosting; the belly of the beast where the web2.0 suicide scripts are maintained. Our service currently runs with Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and LinkedIn! Commit NOW!

But it's not so much taming or killing our social networking presence but changing it, making it less about "I" and "me" and more about "We" and "us" -- more about forming connections outside of ourselves and our comfort zones. Here in America, the social Web is largely viewed as merely a communications tool built for over-sharing and self-aggrandizing. But as of April 2009, only about a fourth of the world's population is online. In places like Africa, the Internet is and can be a mobilizing, organizing and revolutionizing force. The irrevocable mark of the social Web, its foremost revolutionary ethos, is that no one exist alone. Online, the Web is flat and we are witnesses to each other.

And the beginning of our "We-On-Web" decade is not just about you -- your individual self -- but how you fit in a larger, growing "collective consciousness."

Here's a video explaining Suicide Machine:

web 2.0 suicide machine promotion from moddr_ on Vimeo.

Follow Jose on Twitter: www.twitter.com/joseiswriting

Follow HuffPostTech On Facebook And Twitter!

Politics is changing: perhaps not at a pace we'd all like, maybe not to the extent we'd envisioned, but it's definitely changing. Nothing speaks louder than Money in politics, and an increasing amount is being raised online. Organizing has taken on a whole new meaning because of the here-comes-everybody social Web. So has Transparency, the biggest and arguably most important word in the emerging vernacular of online-based politics. Free the data, let the information speak for itself! And Communication? More and more candidates, officials and politicians are directly communicating (and sometimes truly interacting) with their constituents -- otherwise known as "We the people," as our 222-year-old U.S. Constitution puts it. "I see the Internet as a great source of hope for re-energizing representative democracy," Al Gore, the long-time Internet evangelist, told me in an interview, "and making it possible for people to really participate."

Irrevocably, politics changed in the past 10 years because of technology in general and the Internet in particular. So here, in no particular order, are the decade's top moments in tech and politics.

Follow Jose on Twitter: www.twitter.com/joseiswriting

Follow HuffPostTech On Facebook And Twitter!

Obsolete.

There are two definitions of the 16th century word, derived from the Latin obsoletus. The first reads, "No longer in use or no longer useful." Like the 8-track (say, what?) or the Floppy Disk (which I declared dead in February 2007). "No longer current," the second definition goes. "Old-fashioned."

To be clear, the HuffPostTech slideshow 12 Things That Became Obsolete This Decade, which has spread online since we posted it Saturday, functions wholly as described by the second definition.

Yes, encyclopedias are around. A small cabinet in my grandmother's living room is still populated by a stack of Britannicas. But they're decidedly old-fashioned. Yes, due to a still-lingering digital divide, some households still rely on dial-up Internet. But dial-up, for the majority of us online denizens, is so 2000, back when signing on to AOL was accompanied by that screeching, dissonant, digital squeal.

And, yes, CDs are still being sold by the millions -- just ask Susan Boyle and Taylor Swift, the best-selling artists of the year. But both have greatly benefited, it must be said, from the rise of social media. Can you imagine Boyle, the first true megastar of online video, without YouTube? Was it any surprise that when Swift finally got to accept her Moonman at this year's MTV Video Music Awards, she thanked her fans on MySpace and Twitter? (Celebs, please take note!) But just as the future of news has little to do with the future of print newspapers, the future of music is not tied to the future of CDs. For the record, Apple's iTunes was declared the number one music retailer in the U.S. for the first half of 2009, representing 25 percent of unit sales. The market research firm NPD predicts that digital download sales will equal CD sales by the end of 2010.

Technology only spins forward, continually rendering what were once digital necessities to the growing tech junk pile. But what's defined as technologically obsolete is not the same for my 16-year-old cousin Christianne Laroya, who lives by text messaging, as it is for my 30-year-old aunt Jen Batuyong, who refuses to text. And though "hand-written letters" is included in our list of the 12 Things That Became Obsolete This Decade, the Christmas gifts I gave to Christianne and Jen were accompanied by hand-written cards. Texts may be easier, e-mails simpler, but a hand-written note, obsolete and old-fashioned as it is, signals just how lasting and special our relationships are.

So what do you define as obsolete?

Follow HuffPostTech On Facebook And Twitter!

Technology has never looked so human in film.

After all the online buzz (some good, others bad), after all the focus on box office receipts (as ever, Deadline's Nikke Finke has the most comprehensive run-down), after all the attention on whether Hollywood's reigning techno-geek could create a worthy successor to his Oscar-winning, record-shattering "Titanic," "Avatar" snowballed through the pre-winter snowstorm of 2009. James Cameron didn't just make a sci-fi epic. He's created a wholly believable, realistic world, at once marking a new cinematic era and expanding the possibilities of film in our technology-dependent, digital entertainment-driven 21st century. From here on out, movies will be divided into two epochs: B.A. and A.A. Before "Avatar," After "Avatar."

Asked where "Avatar" stands in the history of technology and movies, Roger Ebert, a film historian and arguably the country's pre-eminent movie critic, wrote me in an e-mail: "It inaugurates the next generation and raises the bar. A milestone in the same sense as 'Star Wars.'"

What do Google CEO Eric Schmidt, the Supreme Court of the United States and golfing giant Tiger Woods have in common?

Privacy.

More specifically, how we define privacy in our texting, tweeting, Facebooking, YouTubing, Googling era.

Earlier this month, after Sprint, Verizon and Yahoo were blasted following revelations that they've shared customer data with the authorities, Google's Eric Schmidt declared in an interview with CNBC: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." Boom! It was as if Schmidt had planted a bomb in the blogosphere. And he wasn't done: Since Google is subject to the country's Patriot Act, "it is possible that information could be made available to the authorities," Schmidt went on. Ka-boom! Quite a statement coming from the head honcho of the Internet's biggest company. The reaction was swift and damning. Wrote John C. Dvorak of Market Watch: "For a chief executive to make what amounts to a threat to its users is absolutely astonishing."

And it's not just about Google. It's about privacy in our digital world at large, where data is shared in computers and phones, where information spreads from one social network to another. The issue has finally reached the highest court in the land. As the New York Times reported Monday, the Supreme Court will decide whether the Ontario Police Department in southern California violated the constitutional privacy rights of Sgt. Jeff Quon. The department inspected Quon's text messages that were sent and received on a government pager -- many of them "sexually explicit in nature," The Times wrote.

In an interview, Marc Rotenberg of the D.C.-based Electronic Privacy Information Center told me that Quon's case is "without question the most important online privacy case, addressing all sorts of questions that we've all been grappling with." Rotenberg, one of the leading experts on digital privacy rights, defined what he calls "modern privacy" in a blog for HuffPostTech in September. First, "modern privacy begins with the understanding that personal information will be widely accessible," he wrote. In other words, we all leave digital footprints -- in our blogs, Twitter feeds and Facebook updates, etc. Second, "modern privacy is about what happens to information once it's held by others -- whether it's a government agency, a bank, a cell phone company, or a social network site." Translation: It's not about the technology, it's about how people use the technology. It's about our behavior.

More than a decade ago, Rotenberg predicted that "privacy will be to the information economy of the next century what consumer protection and environmental concerns have been to the industrial society of the 20th century." He was absolutely right. And privacy in our information economy extends far beyond our own individual, ordinary lives. It also impacts how we view others.

Which brings us to Tiger Woods, arguably the most private of our sports stars.

Last Friday, Woods posted a 165-word statement on his site, apologizing to his family and fans for his "infidelity." The statement ended with, "Again, I ask for privacy..." But the moment Woods crashed his Cadillac Escalade and hit a fire hydrant nearly three weeks ago, his privacy was gone. An unstoppable flood of information -- a hurricane, really -- continued circulating online: the list of women, the text messages from his phone, the voice mail he allegedly left to Jaimee Grubbs. And we -- yes, we , you and me -- started spreading them around. On Twitter, where #tigerwoods has been a popular hashtag since Thanksgiving weekend. On Facebook, where we posted the news and shared it with our "friends." There's even a Facebook group called "I Have Also Slept With Tiger Woods," and it has more than 139,000 members.

The relationship between athlete and fan, between celebrities and the people who follow their every move, has changed. In the past, celebrities dealt with only the media -- mainstream news organizations, from Sports Illustrated to 60 Minutes, but also the tabloids. It was the National Enquirer, after all, that published the story of Woods' alleged affair with nightclub manager Rachel Uchitel. But now, in addition to traditional media, celebrities are dealing with the rise of social media. That means us. As we pass around each nugget of Woods-related information -- may it be gossip or innuendo, serious or silly -- we chip away at the very privacy that Woods has asked for.

Privacy, as Woods probably defines it, is dead. Not even a billionaire athlete can afford to buy it. But "modern privacy," as Rotenberg explained it, is just beginning.

Rotenberg said: "This will be the defining issue of the next decade" -- whether you're Tiger Woods or just an ordinary citizen tweeting, Facebooking, YouTubing and Googling away.

The advent of global warming, the dangers of declaring war on Iraq, the power and reach of the Internet. Is there another American political figure who's been so right, so prescient, about so many things -- and, in turn, so loathed by a consistent vocal opposition?

No, there's only one "Goracle."

All eyes will be on Al Gore this week, as he attends the last days of the U.N.-sponsored climate change summit in Copenhagen. In recent years, it's been impossible to divorce Gore from the environment, what with the Oscar win for An Inconvenient Truth, the Nobel Peace Prize and the release of another book called Our Choice. "President of the planet," he's been hailed. "Alarmist" and "exaggerator," he's been mocked. But just as lasting and undeniable as his imprint in modern environmental history is Gore's early and sustained prophecy -- there's no other word for it -- for the inevitable impact of the Internet in our everyday lives. Starting with his years in the House of the Representatives and the Senate ("the Gore Bill" being just one of his achievements), and throughout his service in the Clinton administration (in developing what he called an "information superhighway"), the global warming crusader was also the government's biggest Internet advocate. Gore never said he created the Internet, though Vint Cerf, aka the "father of Internet," has said that Gore's "initiatives led directly to the commercialization of the Internet." Cerf added: "So he really does deserve credit."

These days, his two long-time interests are crossing paths. The man (Gore) and the message (our climate crisis) has finally met the medium (the Web) that can effectively help spread the word around, from one social network to another. To hear skeptics such as former vice president candidate Sarah Palin tell it, the global warming debate is far from over. To Gore, however, there is no more debate -- just an opportunity for fact-driven, practical-minded individuals to mobilize around the cause.

"You know, Web 2.0, which may gave way to Web 3.0 -- social networks, basically -- holds the great promise of empowering enough individuals who share that broad public interest in an issue like global warming to organize and express themselves with sufficient intensity and focus to overcome the special interests. We're already seeing that begin to happen, and I'm encouraged by it," Gore told me recently inside the headquarters of Current TV, his Internet-meets-television outfit in San Francisco, located just a few blocks from the offices of Twitter.

It was the beginning of a three-hour interview for Rolling Stone -- the first half in San Francisco, the second half in his solar-paneled, geothermal system-powered home in Nashville. And Gore being Gore, we covered a wide range of topics. (The transcript of the interview is here.) He was more casual than I expected, with a loose face and a relaxed voice. ("Hi, I'm Al, very nice to meet you," he said.") Wooden, he is not. This is more the Gore as seen in his recent appearances on The Daily Show and Saturday Night Live: funny, a tad sarcastic and altogether animated. Twice, he walked over to a white board and, ever the lecturer, drew a diagram, illustrating what transparency in local government might look like. "The computerization of the data, the sharing of the data, and creation of the kinds of 'clicks-and-bricks' hybrid model for absorbing and responding to the implications of the meaning contained in the data -- that's really where self-governance needs to go," he said, blue pen in hand. At one point, he took off his leather two-toned belt to illustrate the changing of a political system -- no joke -- as tied to a ground-breaking study of open systems by Ilya Prigogine, a Belgian chemist. Some people, especially politicians, talk in paragraphs, finding their way through soundbites, the digestible, quotable bits. This is not necessarily Gore. He talks in well thought-out, carefully considered chapters. Here are a few chosen bits, pared down:

Asked if government should fund journalism, as recommended by a recent study commissioned by the Columbia University Journalism School, Gore, a former newspaperman and a frequent critic of the press, said: "I don't think so, I don't think so...I think those who propose government-funding for the support of newspapers are overlooking the essential number of the relationship between the press and the government. And you think about Richard Nixon or George W. Bush. Dick Cheney. The first time some news organization that receives government support decides to be antagonistic toward the government. Whatever source of leverage the person in charge of the government has is a potential danger to the integrity of that news organization."

Asked if Internet access is a fundamental right for Americans and a basic necessity for kids -- just like water and electricity -- in order to be a part of a global, knowledge-based society, Gore said: "I think it should be, yes. But the process by which a new capacity graves into that circle labeled 'necessities,' well, it's not a simple process."

Asked if the Internet will eclipse television as the most influential source of information, following a report by Pew Internet last year which noted that more than 50 percent of Americans got their political news from the Internet, Gore said: "The Internet is on such an impressive upward trajectory that it will certainly play a much more prominent role in the 2012 election than it did in 2008. But that's not to predict that in only three years we will see Internet-based political communication eclipsed what's taking place in television."

This is the transcript of a wide-ranging, two-part, three-hour interview with Al Gore, touching on the impact of technology and the Internet in politics, both in the U.S. and abroad; the state of the mainstream media and the left and right blogosphere; the role of the Web in spreading the facts about global warming, among others topics. The interviews were held in early and late October, first in the San Francisco offices of Current TV, then in his geothermal system-powered home in Nashville, which is certified as Gold LEED, one of the highest ratings for green design. An excerpt of the Q&A appeared in the Dec. 10, 2009 issue of Rolling Stone.

Jose Antonio Vargas: A year ago, weeks before the election, I visited Blach Middle School in Silicon Valley and spoke to a group of young reporters. In the middle of the talk, Naib Mian raised his hand and asked if I had downloaded Obama's iPhone application -- which showed, in real time, where Obama was campaigning, the number of campaign offices within a few miles of where Naib lives, how much money he had raised...

Al Gore: [Laughs.]

JAV: This kid was 13, and politics was right in his pocket.

AG: Wow.

JAV: What do you say to a kid like Naib?

AG: More power to you. More information to you. You know, politics, as we understand the word, is a recreation of the Greek concept which arose in a culture where spoken word was a medium of the community within which individuals could express themselves well, could yield influence and political power with ideas. Before we talk about what's happening now, let's look back to the history of the printing press. The printing press catalyzed the emergence of an information ecosystem with very low entry barriers for individuals and created a marketplace of ideas in which individuals were literate even without wealth, family connections and force of arms -- all important prerequisites for power during the period from the fall of Rome to the emergence of the printing press. Individuals use ideas without any of those prerequisites as a source of power or influence or political authority, then the ecosystem that flowed out of the technology of the printing press was eclipsed by electronic medium -- the antecedent being the telegraph, and then the radio and then the big kahuna, you know television, which has you know the attraction for the brain because it's moving. You know the average American now watches TV five hours a day. The average American in an average American lifetime spends 17 uninterrupted years -- 24 hours a day, 7 days a week --- watching TV. Seventeen years! So the reason why all the newspapers are in a nosedive is because -- first, that started with the afternoon newspapers, when television colonized that market niche. And the coup de grace was the Internet, coming in and taking in classified advertising...But now what's happening is, as evidence by that 13-year-old in Silicon Valley, that young kid with an iPhone, is that the Internet is now getting close to the stage where it will be possible for the Internet to eclipse television.

JAV: That's the process we're seeing now?

AG: That's the process we're seeing now. As the great writer [William] Gibson said -- he wrote this phrase: "Television will sink into the digital universe." I think we're beginning to see that happen. But we're not there yet. We're still at a stage where TV is completely dominant in our political culture.

JAV: As we see with Glenn Beck...

AG: Yes, and where candidates and elected officials are concerned, they have to spend more than three-quarters of all the money they raise to purchase 30-second TV ads and the only way they can get that amount of money on a consistent basis is by relying on business lobbyists. During the Enlightenment -- which again flowed out of the printing press -- ideas displaced some of the remarkable amount of the influence that had been placed on money and also power, and led to the blossoming of representative democracy and the modern version of capitalism. As you know, the Declaration of Independence and The Wealth of Nations were both published in the same year. And they were both based on the idea that individuals, empowered with information, can make intelligent choices, and then their choices can be aggregated to give the kind of a massively parallel processing of all the data that society has to digest and process to guide the economy, to guide self-government. But when television replaced print, there was kind of a "re-feudalization" of political power -- because those with a lot of money were able to exercise enormous influence in the political system. So what you have now is that the Congress finds it almost impossible to take any action that is opposed by very powerful business lobbyists. They still do sometimes -- if popular sentiment rises above this threshold that causes them to say, "Wait a minute, you know, this is popular with the people." But by and large, the underlying algorithm of governance is, an intensely held minority view can trump a weakly held majority. If a small group that has lot of passion and means to make their views heard has one point of view, and the general public interest is in opposition of their view, but most of the public is not aware of it, then the small group, which is often a special interest group, dominates. Now television has anesthetized the body politic and has made the citizenry an audience, and the dominant political act of participation today is sitting motionless watching ads, and it's one-way meme. But the Internet empowers that 13-year-old kid to connect directly to all the information he can absorb about whatever political topics, or whatever topics, he's interested in. So if he develops passion for Obama's campaign or points of view that Obama is expressing, he can participate in the political process, once again, by using the power of ideas. So I see the Internet as a great source of hope for re-energizing representative democracy, and making it possible for people to really participate.

JAV: So we have a case in which the people are basically ahead of the politics?

AG: Yeah, yeah.

JAV: In 1969, you wrote your 103-page college thesis on the impact of television on the American presidency. Because of the social Web, however, people's expectations of politicians -- how transparent they are, how authentic they seem to be -- are changing. Expectations are different in a Web-based democracy, right?

AG: What I have learned since writing that thesis paper is a greater appreciation for the economics of media, and how the interaction of media and society and the business model for different media also have a powerful influence. The most important aspect of the shift to television -- of course that thesis was focused on governing and the constitutional balance through the lens of the presidency -- is the extraordinary expensive price tags for these television ads that have reshaped the U.S. political system. You know, when I first visited the Senate as a child -- since my father served there, I spent time there watching him -- he would take me to the floor of the Senate. In those days, debates really counted for something. Now, it's rare to have a debate on the Senate floor. And the reason they're not there, usually, the principal reason is, they're in fundraisers all the time. All the time. And the reason they're on fundraisers all the time? Mainly, is to make sure they could stockpile enough cash to overwhelm any potential opponents, by having so many 30-second TV ads that the other candidate doesn't have a chance. And again the only way they can get that money is by going to all these little cocktail parties and receptions that are populated overwhelmingly by business.

JAV: What was going through your mind as you watched how the Obama campaign was using the Web?

AG: I was happy about it. I had tired to do it, when I ran in 2000, but the technology was still at an earlier stage. There weren't enough practitioners for it to really take hold. I was very happy that they were doing it. I do think that there is a way to use this technology for governing that will similarly revolutionize the effectiveness of self-governing. One early example is something called ComStat -- do you know about ComStat? It's short for Computerized Statistic. I have a new book coming out. I only have one copy, I can't give it to you, it just got off the press, I just got this today. [Gore gets up, grabs book, sits down and flips through the pages as he looks for a large graphic that begins a chapter.] Chapter 17 is the power of information. I don't know if you're ever seen that graphic? That's a visualization of the World Wide Web. It's really a beautiful work. It's accurate in its depiction. These are all the e-connections, where the real hubs are, and different colors for different languages. And the reason I'm showing this to you briefly is that, there's an example of ComStat being used in a place called Redlands, California. This shows the incidence of crimes. The police chief down there leads the charge. They map the crimes, and then deconstruct them to find out: why did this crime happen? The data shows your everything. And as a practical matter, in terms of the clicks and bricks model. [Gore gets up again, walks over to a white board in his office, grabs two pens (one blue, the other red) and starts drawing.] They have a horse-shoe table, basically, with a podium. One precinct displays data from that precinct, computerized data, okay? So, look, you've got 18 burglaries. That's a simple diagram. The point is, when the data is visible and understandable because it's visualized and it's held in the consciousness by all the relevant decision-makers in the organization -- they're sharing the consciousness of the problem to be solved, everyone is focused on it -- and the problem is solved. [William] Bratton put it in effect in New York City, and it spread like wildfire in police departments. But the same basic model can be used for immunization, illiteracy, AIDS prevention -- any problem that the society has to cope with. The computerization of the data, the sharing of the data, and creation of the kinds of clicks and bricks hybrid model for absorbing and responding to the implications of the meaning contained in the data -- that's really where self-governance needs to go.

JAV: That's re-inventing government, that's Government 2.0?

AG: Yes, yes. The government has to be more transparent. Technology demands transparency.

The future of mobile? Local, local, local -- and that's exactly what the Yelp-Android marriage unequivocally signals.

Yelp, the growing Zagat guide-meets-social networking hub, introduced its Android app today. Users can search for nearby businesses, browse and read reviews and access a move-able Google map -- you can easily zoom in and out of locations and refine your searches according to desired geographic areas. Like all of Yelp's apps, it's available in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Ireland, and reviews can be filtered by "Price," "Open Now" and "Special Offers." The Android app is the 5th member of Yelp's mobile family, which includes WAP, the iPhone, Palm Pre and BlackBerry.

"We've released a lot of apps in the past year -- the BlackBerry app, updates of our iPhone app. This is just the next logical step," Eric Singley, Yelp's Mobile Product Manager, told HuffPostTech. There's so much overlap between Web and mobile users of Yelp that it's hard to pin down the exact number of Yelp's mobile users, Singley explained, but traffic on the mobile site usually increases during the weekend. Last month, 1 million unique visitors logged on to Yelp's iPhone app, he said.

Singley added: "We'll be making an even bigger push next year on our mobile apps."

As will everyone else.

Increasingly, as mobile products become more sophisticated, everything we do revolves around our phones: where we shop, what restaurants we go to, what bars are worth checking out, etc. And popular sites such as Yelp will keep figuring out how to capitalize on the localization of all that data.

*UPDATED: Transcript of entire Twitter stream below*

On Twitter, we are each other's witnesses, one tweet at a time.

Chris MacDonald-Dennis gave new meaning to that Tuesday night when within two hours -- firing off 100 tweets in succession, totaling some 2,100 words and chronicling the narrative arc of his 40-year-old life -- he came out as HIV-positive on his Twitter stream. It was timed for World AIDS Day. MacDonald-Dennis, who is openly gay and openly HIV-positive, is dean of Intercultural Affairs at Bryn Mawr College, near Philadelphia. In the middle of his Twitter feed, shortly after finding out that he was positive, he wrote:

I went through a range of emotions: anger, sadness, fear. I remember brushing my teeth and my gums bleeding. I burst into...

tears knowing people would be afraid of me

After sharing the pain of growing up in a violent, difficult home and the taunts that went with being "a sissy in a place that did not allow sissies" -- neighborhood bullies sent him to the hospital at age 9 -- MacDonald-Dennis recounted the night he had unprotected sex with Rick, his former boyfriend who ended up infecting him. He tweeted:

I remember when he did not put on a condom. I wanted to say something. But I was afraid that he would leave

That void I described stopped me. I was more afraid he would leave than protecting myself

Of course Twitter is the most popular English word of the year.

Yesterday, the Global Language Monitor declared the San Francisco-based micro-blogging site as the top English word of 2009. In a decade marked by the growth of most everything Internet-related, this marked the first time a Web company has earned that distinction. MySpace (founded in 2003), Facebook (in 2004) and YouTube (2005) never made that spot in their early years.

But Twitter's achievement also underlines a sobering reality -- one that President Obama, a BlackBerry addict, hinted at in a town hall meeting in Shanghai two weeks ago. Asked via the Internet if the Chinese should be able to use Twitter freely, Obama responded: "Well, first of all, let me say that I have never used Twitter. My thumbs are too clumsy to type in things on the phone."

For all the buzz (our "first Twitter Christmas," the New York Times wrote Friday, noting how retailers like Best Buy use the site); all the magazine covers ("How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live," read a headline in June's Time magazine); all its undeniable impact in all aspects of life, from politics to entertainment (remember country-pop princess Taylor Swift thanking her Twitter followers during her speech at this year's MTV Video Music Awards?), Twitter is not mainstream.

Not mainstream in terms of size; since this summer, there's been report after report that Twitter's membership has peaked, not anywhere near the 300-million strong membership of Facebook.

Not mainstream in terms of usage; though many live, swear and exist through Twitter's 140 character limit, Twitter's retention rate, as been widely reported, is somewhere around 40 percent. (A caveat: that doesn't take into account people who use Twitter through third-party applications and mobile phones.)

Not mainstream in terms of omnipresence and ubiquity; Twitter ain't Google.

In other words, Twitter is not for everyone -- not yet, at least. Many people are confused by it. (If I had a dime for every time a friend or a relative who's not glued in front of his/her computer all day said to me, "I still don't get this Twitter thing!"). Others don't see how it relates to their everyday lives. ("So why do I need this again?") Broadly speaking, and with many exceptions, Twitter is still largely the province of the world's digital elites and early adopters, who from the streets of Tehran to the fragmented Republican Party are getting their message out, whatever that message may be, unfiltered, unedited, be it photos, videos, opinion or just plain news. And the message will get out. And the message will inevitably spread. It's no coincidence, by the way, that the top English words of the past few years, as surveyed by Global Language Monitor, are news-related. Last year, the top word was "change," in reference to Obama's improbable and winning campaign. Three years before that, in 2005, it was "refugee," in reference to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. In 2000, it was "chad" -- as in the hanging chads of Florida, which played a central role in the tight race between Al Gore and George W. Bush.

Twitter, after all, is about having a voice. Here in the U.S., it may mean tweeting about this or that party. Abroad, in authoritarian regimes such as Iran, it means tweeting about the fight for democracy.

"Twitter has gone in the way of YouTube. At first, people thought YouTube was silly and weird; they didn't know how to YouTube and what a YouTube channel was. Now YouTube is synonymous, the industry standard, for online video -- for everyday people to watch, upload and share videos," Scott Goodstein, the text messaging expert who ran Obama's social networking presence during the campaign, told me. "Twitter is going through the same process. Twitter has become synonymous with quick, short opinion and perspective -- coming from anyone, going everywhere."

The Web is flat. And in a world made smaller by the Internet and new technologies, Twitter forces us to become each other's witnesses, one tweet at a time.

That's why Twitter, only three years old, is the most popular English word of 2009.

"Hey, you hear the news about the housewives of DC crashing the president's party?" read a quick note from one of my best friends, Manny Varela, a 29-year-old engineer from Miami. Like most people, Manny is not one to care about some party in D.C., never mind that it's the Obamas' first state dinner. But he is a fan of "housewives" -- short for the Bravo's hit and addicting "The Real Housewives" reality TV series, now filming its Washington, D.C. edition.

"How funny," Manny wrote. "What great marketing for the show."

A very, very good point.

This is, after all, all about marketing, whether Bravo likes it or not. Though folks at Bravo have told various news organizations that they have yet to finalize the cast for its D.C. series, it's this drive for self-marketing that seems to have landed socialites-turned-"gate-crashers" Tareq and Michaele Salahi inside the White House in the first place. Hey, who could resist a "real housewife" who gets face-time from a smiling President Obama? In our reality TV culture exacerbated by the rise of social networking sites -- in which 15 minutes of fame can be elongated by the number of photos and videos swirling around the Web -- who can blame the Salahis for their sheer, shameless self-promotion? Their shared Facebook profile have 743 photos and 14 videos, and you don't need to be Facebook friends with Tareq and Michaele to see them. Just click away.

Inevitably, people have created and joined groups mostly chastising and mocking the wedding crashers heard 'round Facebook.

Yes, technology is revolutionizing politics, from raising money through online donors to organizing and mobilizing supporters using Facebook and text messaging. Yes, technology is impacting businesses big and small, particularly how they pitch and sell their products in such a fragmented, almost ADD digital marketplace.

But most importantly of all, the onslaught of new technologies -- cell phones, video games, social networking sites, the Wikipediazation of information, the reach of YouTube and Skype, you name it -- have ushered a seismic shift in education: how our kids learn, how our teachers teach, how curriculum is shaped and presented, how individual students, powered by technology, process and experience what they're learning.

It's this shift, an education earthquake of sorts, that prompted Karl Fisch, formerly a math teacher and now the technology coordinator at Arapahoe High School, just outside Denver, to create the slideshow "Did You Know?" That was in August 2006. What happened next, within three years, illustrates the very nature of what I've called our evolving "Clickocracy": one nation under Google, with video and e-mail for all.

First, Fisch posted original slideshow on his own blog. It quickly fired up the education blogosphere of which Fisch, a long-time teacher, is one of the earliest pioneers. A few months later, he got an e-mail from Scott McLeod, then an instructor at the University of Minnesota and now an associate professor of educational administration at Iowa State University -- if you want to be a principal or superintendent, contact McLeod. McLeod loved the slideshow but also wanted to tweak it a bit, shave off about half a minute, jazz it up with photos and do a video, which he then posted on his own blog.

Then the mash-ups, the remixes, the parodies, the re-uploads on video sharing sites like Glumbert.org and Break.com came pouring in. The design company XPLANE contacted Fisch and McLeod and wanted to create a 2.0 version of the video, complete with animation, for free.

We can't turn it off -- we just can't. Our relationship with our phones (BlackBerrys, iPhones, Sidekicks) have gotten so eerily co-dependent that, as the New York Times noted in a must-read story, we're solving "a problem caused by technology with more technology." Instead of simply turning the phone off, some of us go to a free site like ZoomSafer to disable our beloved cell phones. And, as if texting or talking on our phones aren't enough, some of us want to type in our cars, too -- hence the Laptop Steering Wheel Desk. Thankfully, the product's seller warns: "For safety reasons, never use this product while driving." No kidding.

Because here's the biggest challenge of our hyper-kinetic, always-connected, tech-powered daily lives: Unplugging. A few weeks ago, we asked some of the biggest names in the tech and online world how they slow down. Recently, for a video for CNN.com, I spent an hour or so at Times Square in New York City -- the capital of TWW (texting while walking) -- asking people when they turn off their cell phones. "A text message is more important than my health," a 16-year-old told me. "Radiation, like, it's not gonna do that much."

Well, we've got a long way to go.

Is there anyone quite like Sarah Palin online?

At the moment, no -- not Michael Jackson, not Manny Pacquiao, not even President Obama. According to Google Insights for Search, which tracks what the online masses are searching for within specific times and regions, the former Alaska governor-turned vice presidential nominee-turned media celebrity far surpasses Obama when it comes to Google searches. Online, interest in all things Palin has surged in the past few days. Of course, the more TV appearances she makes promoting her book "Going Rogue" -- first with Oprah Winfrey, then with FOX's Sean Hannity and a multi-part series with ABC News -- the bigger draw she becomes online, in blogs (right and left), on YouTube (1,320 Palin-oriented videos have been uploaded since last Thursday) and other social networking sites. Online popularity can be defined in various ways. Sheer ubiquity is one.

"Searches for Sarah Palin have surged to their highest level since the election -- even further than when she resigned as Governor of Alaska," Google spokesman Galen Panger told HuffPostTech. "While search interest now still pales in comparison with when she was announced as John McCain's pick for VP, at the moment she's all the rage--and right now people are searching for her more than President Obama."