Contrary to what some of my students might think, I really do make mistakes. And one of the biggest mistakes I made was in my assessment of Twitter. I blew it, and stand here with egg on my face.

My initial estimation of Twitter was that it had to be among the silliest things one could ever do online. After all, who really wants to know what you are doing all of the time? But as I pondered the possibilities, and read about how it was used in a mob-Twittering episode at the SXSW keynote speech this last March, my eyes suddenly opened.

And I started to think nice things about it.

So nice, in fact, that a colleague and I decided to use it as a required application in our online summer school courses this year. We and our students are going to be academic guinea pigs as we leverage microblogging in the aysnchronous sphere of distance learning.

You know what? Twitter is much more than just being obsessive-compulsive about reporting the minutiae of our daily lives. No, there is a story being told, and I bet there will be sociology dissertations written on the stories being told by people in their tweets. The zeitgeist has changed once again, and our lives are being told in little 140-space snippets.

The fact that there are Twitter-petitors tells me that this is for real. But add in dozens of third-party apps (TwitPic is one of my faves), and suddenly legitimacy becomes a moot point.

I have Twitter’s text number stored; I have TwitPic’s email saved. I can speed-tweet text and/or images from anywhere now. My head is spinning with ideas now about how to use this…not just in classes, but in daily life. This thing is huge, and I now concede that it is probably the top Web 2.0 app in the last two years. Hey, last night I Tweeted a picture from a concert to TwitPic, and it was all done in about a minute. Not bad for an old geezer who until a month ago had only sent a few text messages in recent time.

Now I know what it feels like to evolve from all-fours to being bipedal. It’s good to have my head up and looking forward. But now I’ve got to get the rest of that egg off my face.

Dr “The Yolk’s On Me” Gerlich

A preacher friend of mine once gave me some sage advice. “Believe in the power of the narrative,” he said. I was preparing to deliver my first message in a church setting, and I was nervously trying to write a homily that wasn’t an academic lecture, yet also wasn’t just another boring deductive (abstract principles leading to a concrete reality) or inductive (concrete reality leading to abstact principles) Powerpoint sermon.

No, I was a student of the abductive method. As Leonard Sweet, et al, said in “‘A’ Is For Adbuctive,” the abductive method allows us to “seize people by the imagination and transport them from their current world to another world, where they gain a new perspective.”

And my preacher friend was merely trying to help me shape the story I was going to wrap around my listeners. Believe in the story, the power of the narrative, he said, but always let the listener finish it for you. In their own minds.

I suppose if you have to explain the metaphor, it’s not worth telling.

That preacher friend and I have stories to tell. I recall with great fondness the cold November Sunday we left right after church and drove to Fort Worth, inhaled a monster pizza at Uno’s, and then saw 80s Christian hair band Stryper in concert on a reunion tour.

So there we were. The Preacher and the Professor. Screaming. Singing. Fists in the air. Our lack of leather, long hair and tattoos made us stand out, but we didn’t care. Heck, Becky and I even had a Stryper song played at our wedding in 1986, so I was in my glory hearing those old songs.

And like two young men on a roadtrip, we laughed ourselves silly driving back to Amarillo all night. Back in the office by 9:00am, none of my colleagues were any the wiser that they worked with a headbanger.

A few months ago when we began this journey, I regaled you with tales of my winter vacation spent bicycling around Florida. I started the semester with these words:

I suppose I could launch the semester with yet another of my tired metaphors of us all being on some mystical academic journey.

In spite of the tire tracks in that word picture, the fact is, we have been on an academic journey. Sometimes mystical, occasionally mythical, definitely not mathematical, and often mirthical (I just made that up).

It has been a long, strange roadtrip, primarily through the Great State of Web 2.0, but with occasional detours into the neighboring states of Culture, Society and Ethics. Who could forget GlimpseBack.com, the site for the dead? The hysterically funny 1967 video Year 1999 A.D.? The fact that I named two blogs “Pulse?” The CAMiLEON Heels site?

I could go on, but in a strange kind of way, I feel like we’re somewhere around Childress TX, and it is 4:30am. We’ve only got a couple more hours to go. Are those the lights of Amarillo? Or are my eyes fooling me? MUST…STAY…AWAKE. So close…but there’s still one more hill to climb, one more exam to take.

So as we near the end of our journey, I suspect this finds you happy. Screaming. Singing. Fists in the air.

All I can say is that I have enjoyed the journey. And the package of cookies is empty, for many of you have stretched and reached to find them up there on that top shelf. Kudos to you, for in so doing you have grown a bit taller in the forest of your peers.

It’s time to reload, recover, and repack for the next adventure. Believe in the power of the narrative.

In a mystical kind of way, of course.

Dr “‘G’ Is For” Gerlich

When I was a child, perhaps the question I heard the most from well-meaning people was, “So…what do you want to be when you grow up?”

Since I haven’t grown up yet, I don’t know if I will ever find out. And for what it’s worth, my answer to the question was usually, “Gee…I really don’t want to grow up.”

There’s a certain degree of excitement in not knowing where you are going. Kind of like taking a Destination Unknown vacation, the kind I dragged my wife on back in 1988. Yeah, we were living on a grad student’s meager income, so we couldn’t do much. But I told her to just go to sleep and let me do the driving. We left Indiana…and when she awoke the next morning, we were in South Dakota.

“Honey, why the &%$# did you bring me here?

As humans, though, I suppose it is perfectly normal to want to catch a glimpse of the future, to have a road map with the route already highlighted, to have dinner on the table when you arrive. And I guess that is why pollsters and pundits are all trying to aim their telescope on the future of e-commerce and E-Society. From what I hear, there’s already road construction going on in the next frontier, and since the dotcom world is spinning much faster than earth’s 1000 mph, we could be over those looming hills in a heartbeat.

“Hold yer bonnet, Mama, thar’s change a’coming again!”

And that change is known as Web 3.0. Now wait a minute…didn’t we just start using the phrase Web 2.0? And they’re already wanting to change it? Can’t we enjoy the marvels of the read/write web for a little longer?

Apparently not, for there’s a Promised Land just over that range and around that bend. The read-only web (that’s Web 1.0) was to the internet what acne is to teens: an uncomfortable transition period. The ability to interact with the web, though, signalled a certain maturity, but it is only a taste of full-blown internet adulthood.

Or maybe just wishful thinking.

It seems like everyone’s talking about Web 3.0 now. And while Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt has said that Web 2.0 is just a marketing term, the buzz is about tomorrow, not today. There’s just a little irony in Schmidt’s voice, though, because he works for the biggest “marketing term” on the internet.

Technically, Web 3.0 takes everything that’s in Version 2, combining what we have discussed this semester, and adding more personalization and vertical search. It is basically the era of the Database Web, or as some call it, the Semantic Web. A high level of machine intelligence will be inherent in the system. Comprehensive web sites will be able to not only sell us things, offer community, provide content, etc., but also create the ultimate personalized experience, serving up products and similar users that are a match with our specific needs. And this new web will be available everywhere, as we live under data clouds and the umbrella of free (or cheap) wifi.

I have heard it said that Web 3.0 could be here as early as 2010. Which means that Web 2.0, first coined in 2005, will be just a blip on our historical radar screen.

I already see evidence of this future state, for it won’t be like someone throws a switch (unlike the FCC next February) and everyone must get on board the new train. Amazon.com is well along the path to the new web, for its site is the database. It is a multidimensional shopping experience, tagged and categorized by millions of users, yet orderly in the disorderly messiness of Weinberger’s Everything Is Miscellaneous.

But while all this talk and speculation of Web 3.0 is interesting and almost reads like a sci-fi novel, I’m not sure we should be in such a hurry. South Dakota may have some neat places, but like my wife, it’s probably not my first choice right now. I think I’ll stay in Indiana a little while longer.

Dr “Hoosier Daddy?” Gerlich

A hundred years ago, the term entrepreneur was defined by Joseph Schumpeter as “a person who destroys the existing economic order by introducing new products and services, creating new forms of organization, or by exploiting new raw materials.” Or, in other words, “someone who perceives an opportunity and creates an organization to pursue it.”

Those were glorious times, even if a pesky World War and later on the Great Depression interfered. Out of the primordial corporate soup arose such revolutionaries as Henry Ford, George Eastman (think: Kodak) as well as Will Keith Kellogg who went on to build product categories and brands that shaped our lives.

That entrepreneurial spirit has returned a century later. And even though we have experienced much bluster during this dotcom era, we can say that we have witnessed and embraced the visions of many forward-thinking people for whom the status quo is a speed bump on the path to better living. History has repeated itself.

In fact, it can be argued that we are now experiencing a new breed of business visionary, the serial entrepreneur, that rare individual who goes on to birth multiple companies or expands the core business into many new arenas.

Take Marc Andreesen (picture right), for example. The founder of what started out as the Mosaic project, he ultimately produced the Netscape browser. Remember that? He wisely sold it to AOL (oh well) in 1999 for a tidy $4.2 billion. But since then he has teamed up with Gina Bianchini to launch Ning…but only after selling his Opsware company to HP for $1.6 billion. Cha-ching.

And then there’s Evan Williams, who sold his Blogger site to Google, and went on to found Twitter. And Sabeer Bhatia, founder of Hotmail. Bhatia sold it to Microsoft in 1998 for what now would be considered the bargain price of $500 million; late last year he launched LiveDocuments, a Google Docs-like site for online editing of Microsoft Office documents. And let’s not forget MySpace founder Brad Greenspan, whose LiveUniverse recently purchased Page Flakes.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos can also be counted among the repeat offenders. Not content to just sell books, CDs, and movies, Bezos has expanded the brand into every nook and cranny of our lives, as well as purchased countless related entities. Finally, let us not forget the creme de la creme, Google. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin may look like computer geeks, but they are merely entrepreneurs dressed in code. The corporate culture of Google is one of innovate or buy, which accounts for its ever-widening stable of online products.

It’s a great time to be an entrepreneur again. The collective sitz im lieben of the early-1900s fostered the bootstrap-pulling ethos that spawned the companies that went on the define the American corporate landscape for the rest of the century. And now a different sitz im lieben is causing a new generation of entrepreneurs to leverage the digital, rather than industrial, playground to build the companies that are and will likely remain household names for many years to come.

There is hope after all for our economy.

Dr “Netscape? Who Uses Netscape?” Gerlich

As a youngster growing up in Chicagoland, it was always a lot of fun to take the train or bus downtown and hang out in The Loop, that section of the city more or less regarded as the CBD (Central Business District). The architecture, the shopping, the dining were (and still are) first class. And a ride on “The L” was an essential part of the experience.

But no matter how you approached this excursion, no matter how many times you had been, The Loop always remained the same size, a fixed geographic quantity in a city whose legendary wind is more personal bluster than it is meteorlogic.

But while Chicago’s Loop is etched in stone, on the web it is something that can be expanded almost infinitely. And although it quickly conjures images of Amway and Multi-Level Marketing schemes, this one doesn’t require to fill your garage with inventory, or lose all of your friends in the process.

No, this loop is what made upstarts like Hotmail an overnight success, and explains current phenoms like Facebook and MySpace.

It’s all just basic math. Start with one and keep doubling it.

Technically known as a viral expansion loop (and explained quite well in the May issue of Fast Company, this explains how today’s insanely popular sites got to where they are today.

And may very well explain how newcomer Ning may well be The Next Big Thing.

So what’s Ning? Simple. It’s a social networking site for social networks, and users are free to simply stay in their chosen network, join others, and/or start their own.

Which means that Ning is actually a double viral loop because its users can reside in multiple dimensions.

Picture the possibilities for targeted advertising with specific networks, and it is easy to see how this engine could be called Amway on steroids.

So rapid has Ning’s growth come that in 14 months it has gone from 0 to 230,000 nets, and is predicting it might reach 4 million nets by the end of 2010. With everyone from rap stars to companies, organizations, and alumni groups launching networks, such stratospheric ambitions may not be out of the question.

Back down on earth, if Chicago’s Loop had grown like loops do online, we would all by now be Chicagoans.

And trying to get rich selling Amway.

Dr “Can I Interest You In Some Vitamins?” Gerlich

Sometimes I am amazed by how quickly people adapt to major changes. In spite of the kicking and screaming, the wailing and gnashing of teeth, they quiet down after a little bit, and get on with their business. Almost as if nothing happened.

And so we have been fairly quick to embrace the idea of shopping online, buying airline tickets, renting cars, and making hotel reservations without using a phone, and perhaps even submitting our Form 1040 to the IRS. Wany people now feel comfortable obtaining legal counsel at sites like LegalZoom. My students are also living proof that we have gotten over the idea of an electronic classroom with virtual degree programs, as demand for our online offerings continues to grow.

But are we comfortable with that most personal of human interactions going online as well?

I’m speaking of the doctor-patient relationship. Doctors may very well be the last hold-out in the dotcom era, as they have been rather reluctant to login and join the fray.

In spite of the fact that we have scads of online medical sites (like WebMD) that allow us to research medicines and diseases, I have no doubt in my mind that the medical profession actually despises these advances. The result is a waiting room full of self-diagnosed hypochondriacs who simply need a doc to write a prescription for their terminal illness. The abundance of online information from well-meaning sites makes it possible for me to conclude that my tummy ache is really Stage 3 colon cancer, when in fact it may just be last night’s Tex-Mex dinner duking it out in my Alamo.

So is the medical profession the neo-Luddites of the 21C? Good question. But maybe the docs are right in holding out. There are fears of liability stemming from any form of online communication, even email. What if the doc isn’t able to answer your email in a timely fashion, and you are in need of a new script for your asthma meds? Or you are a Rush Limbaugh protege and have spammed a dozen docs seeking the same prescription from all of them for your own pleasure? Or worse yet, what if the doc misdiagnoses your ailment and sends you on your merry way with the wrong treatment?

Can you say malpractice?

Not all docs, though, are leery of the 21C. The Fetal Treatment Center allows individuals and their physician to connect with a team of specialists at UC-San Francisco. But while this is a step in the online direction, it should be noted that there is still a middleman involved, that being your local physician. It’s not just you and your cable modem.

While I am unable to visualize a home lab kit for do-it-yourself X-rays and blod samples, I would like to be able to reach my doc when my request is as simple as needing a new script to refill something that he knows I need for long-term treatment. I don’t want to have to visit or even call; I’d like to just drop a simple email and have him forward his approval to my pharmacist.

And I’ll let my insurance carrier figure out how they want to pay him for his time.

Dr “Give Me The News” Gerlich

Back in the day, an icon could expect to be…well, iconic, for a long time. It kind of went with the territory, and there was almost an assurance of lifelong employment basking in the glow of elite cultural supremacy.

But not anymore.

Take, for example, the larger than life persona of AOL, whose “You’ve Got Mail” went from being culture touchstone to albatross. When one considers how fast AOL’s rise and fall has occurred, it onloy reinforces the notion that you’d better not get too comfortable in E Society.

Because someone else wants your gig.

AOL peaked at 27 million subscribers, but has seen it dwindle to a mere 10 million. In internet terms, that’s nothing. Facebook has 67 million users, while MySpace has over 110 million. And our fascination with getting email has long since passed. In fact, for most of us, what was once novelty has now become drudgery. Even a storybook Hollywood romance between Tom Hanks and the beautiful Meg Ryan couldn’lt keep AOL on top for long.

OK, I showed my bias there. Did you expect me to say that Tom Hanks is beautiful or something?

But I digress. My point is: How does one go from industry powerhouse to doormat in just a few years?

Simple. Technology changed, and dial-up went the way of the fax machine, typewriter, and VCR. Wi-Fi trumps No-Fi 7 days a week.

The bizarre thing is that AOL was actually prescient in other avenues. AOL Instant Messenger was actually light years ahead of its time, and its Member Directory and Buddy Lists were social networking before anyone even knew what the phrase meant.

Time-Warner’s acquisition of AOL couldn’t patch this sinking ship either. Being a bastion of old media does not necessarily translate well into new media.

But that’s not all. AOL has simply allowed its innovations to be eroded by others. Their MapQuest service has been tromped by Google Maps. Their AOL Internet Phone has been unplugged by Vonage and Skype. A revived Member Directory (called AIM) tried to compete with MySpace, but it was too late.

This is not to say that all is dead or dying at AOL. Their Truveo video search engine is hot, and TMZ delivers the celebrity gossip buzz. AOL Music and AOL TV are doing quite well.

But the fact remains that Time-Warner is stuck with a spent firework display. The sparks are mostly gone, and Time-Warner was smart to remove AOL from its corporate name back in 2003. They saw the writing on the board room wall back then. The only problem is, who would ever want to buy AOL today?

Ooh…hang on…I think I just got through my modem into AOL.

Welcome! You’ve Got Mail!

Yeah, sure. Would you like me to throw you a life preserver? Wireless, of course.

Dr “Cut The Cord” Gerlich

I couldn’t sleep early this morning, so I went to the living room, flipped on the TV, and landed on the couch. After a little channel surfing, I zeroed in on Current TV, the station that shows Viewer Contributed Content (VCC).

And with a second nod to featuring only that which is truly generated by the people and for the people, they regularly show what’s hot on Google. After all, Google is a social barometer that measures what’s on our mind. The very pulse of our culture is felt by the big thumb of Google, forever tracked and recorded at Google Trends as a snapshot of our collective cerebral activity.

And it is a very revealing peak at our psyche.

About that time I heard a noise in the kitchen. I went to check it out, only to find our 10-year-old coming from the playroom with a stack of VHS tapes. Now mind you, we haven’t bought one of those this century, but just last night said daughter asked me to hook up an old VCR to her TV. I guess she was in a tech-nostalgic mood or something. She invited me back to her room to watch with her.

I went. What else is there to do at 4:45am?

But we couldn’t just jump into the show. “I have to rewind it, Dad,” she said.

Oh yeah…I forgot. The analog days were linear, weren’t they? Sure, you could speed up the process or reverse it, but it was always in a straight line. Music CDs, and then DVDs, changed all that, and like the shuffle option on your iPod, suddenly everything became miscellaneous.

Just like our queries at Google.

And so the global zeitgeist is an ever-changing reflection of the newsworthy, the trivial, and the just plain mysterious. After all, who could ever begin to explain the quirks of our information searches? Maybe it’s to find out more about something we saw on the news. Or to track down a long-lost friend, a forgotten lyric, or info on a vacation destination.

Similarly, Twitterverse is but a gigantic tag cloud of what people are posting in their tweets in the last hour. Trivial pursuit? Or sociology dissertation in the making?

Back in the analog era, one could never begin to fathom breaking out of linear predictability. The Dewey Decimal System kept us in the proper aisle, and we either found what we wanted, or left empty-handed. But no more. The non-linear multidimensional arrays of information allow us to create an infinite number of paths and connections. Like a tailor stitching a tree’s leaves from one branch to another, we can find connections we never dreamed possible.

I may not know what you are thinking, but I know what we are thinking. It may not always be profound, but at least there’s some evidence of activity between our ears.

Even when we’re lying on the couch.

Dr “Can You Feel It?” Gerlich

There are over 67 million active Facebook users. There are over 110 million MySpace users. And the overwhelming majority of them are young. As in under 35.

So is social networking a way of life only for the unwrinkled? The not-yet-balded? The pre-Grecian Formula crowd?

Think again, puppy dog breath.

Perhaps the biggest demographic now being pursued by online marketers is seniors…a term that sends shivers of reality up and down the stiffening spines of 78 million Baby Boomers. But it’s true. There are three times more Boomers than there are teens and 20-somethings, and this group has many desirable traits: discretionary income, leisure time, and computer skills. Sure, they may have vastly different concerns than their offspring and their friends, but they want to be a part of this wave, too, and not just get swept away by it.

So it is no surprise then that sites like Eons are targeting the Boomers specifically with the ability to build MySpace-like profiles and connect with like-minded users.

Yeah, I know…the possibilities for cracking jokes are almost limitless. Friends are now cronies. And the topic du jour is gall bladders and those pesky stones. Shuffleboard anyone?

A quick glance at the Eons home page illustrates the decidedly different concerns of folks in the 50-up group, and rightfully so. A man in his 50s probably doesn’t want to discuss his prostate problems with a young buck trying to find a doe.

And the young buck probably doesn’t want to hear about it either.

But I still had to laugh at some of the “hot topics” making the rounds of Eons…like video uploads (in three parts) of the Happy Days pilot episode. Photos of a hummingbird bathing. And a discussion group focused on the Top 6 Causes of Clutter.

Honey, hold the Metamucil! I think I found a new place to hang out!

While I tip my marketing hat to Eons for seizing the opportunity to zero in on a lucrative demographic, I sure as heck hope there’s more to my golden years than watching lame reruns of the Fonz, sharing pics from the retirement center garden, or organizing my desk drawer. It’s stuff like this that gives old folks a bad name.

On the other hand, it does keep people out of trouble. And the plethora of age-oriented sites popping up is noteworthy. Sites like Escapees bring full-time RVers together. Although the site is not a true Web 2.0 hub of activity, it comes close.

Wisecracking aside, the assimilation of all age groups into E Society is affirming and refreshing. And while I am not yet ready to ponder the cultural significance of when Fonzie jumped the shark, my furrowed brow is raised with delight to see a demographic not being left behind.

Dr “Anyone Out There Remember Disco?” Gerlich