My fear is that the endless search for wow further coarsens our culture at the same time it encourages marketers to get ever more shallow. That’s where the first trend comes in… the artists, idea merchants and marketers that are having the most success are ignoring those that would rubberneck and drive on, focusing instead on cadres of fans that matter. Fans that will give permission, fans that will return tomorrow, fans that will spread the word to others that can also take action.

Liked this statement. It was very interesting writing about our families year traveling at www.sixintheworld.com. We were not looking for page views, unique users or revenue, we just wrote about what we wanted. We took some ribbing from our friends and family for our long winded posts. We could have written shorter posts but we didn’t have time. Even if they were 50% shorter they still were reads which required some time and effort. I have wondered about how different it would be had we just tweeted about the whole trip. It would have been much more real time but it wouldn’t have been as rich and it wouldn’t have had the impact it did on the people who read it. We are continuously amazed at how many traveling families and travel-lusting families tell us what an inspiration we were. Oprah even called us roll models. (we would humbly disagree) However, I don’t think our communications would have had the same effect if they came in shorter and more frequent bursts. I am currently very guilty of seeking out and consuming the wow but I hope people will continue to put in the effort to share their deeper thoughts and experiences and hopefully get us to continue to think.

Sometimes it is hard to understand the hypocrisy that comes from making the world better and more peaceful by being the worlds biggest arms supplier but when our own policies work to kill off more Americans with subsidized cheap fatty foods; that is just crazy. Not that we don’t need protein and we definitely need guns. I am just pointing out the absurdity of investing in keeping the masses fat and happy…. well at least fat.

I like to imagine a world where we focused on a wellness bill instead of a healthcare bill. A world where we invested a trillion dollars into education and job creation in the 3rd world and only half the money we are currently spending on keeping the bad guys in submission. One can always dream.

It is clear that Mobile is the future. What is becoming more and more clear is that the future is now. I have been looking at usage across mobile and it continues to grow much faster than people expect. We had many comments at Myspace that people would use the mobile version of the site rather than the web. You could say that it is a Myspace issue but the same holds true for other websites. The reality is websites are becoming services and those services will be purchased, consumed and managed on mobile devices. I am excited to see the wireless speeds increase, the ubiquitous nature of real connections(3g+) expand. As they do it will be great to see what services we can come up with to take advantage of the social, local and realtime nature of mobile. It’s not all perfect though, I am concerned that the screen size, input limitations and limited time to spend consuming the vast amounts of info, will make us even more unfocused and scattered. I remember my first crackberry. It is only going to get worse.