Since 1995 the Information Age has become exponentially faster and more important. We have more access to data, it is easier to get information immediately, and we have the ability to tailor information based on our own needs. For all its messy greatness, there is a lot of white noise, however. Can the information flow get any faster? And will the white noise become clearer?

I think it will. In just thirteen years, we have changed how we process information and there seems to be a growing need for better filters, thus sites like Bing. There is also a frustration level: there are mechanisms to get certain information but institutional lethargy in providing it. The next movement in the Information Age will be the drive toward better filters and commercial real-time systems. There will be more flow and more transparency. For example, someday in the near future, voters could have the ability to see a Senator’s expense account on-line and know who he is having dinner with leading up to a big vote. And with more networked medical technology, physicians won’t simply have a patient sit in a room and recount their ailments, people will wear health monitoring devices and swallow digestible pills with microscopic monitoring chips that will tell the narrative of their health. (Transparency Alert: my wife runs an annual conference, called the Body Computing Conference, on networked medical technology, which will be held tomorrow at the University of Southern California, and it delves into the merging of the Information Age with medicine.)

The movement toward real-time has already happened with Twitter, but I believe “tweeting” is a rough approximation of what lies ahead. A new consulting company, The Realtime Project, based in London, is advising companies about real time strategy. Steve Overman, one of the firm’s founders, worked at Wired in its early days, and believes there is a shift in social values and a need for authenticity, a shift he compares to the early days of the Web. He points to President Obama’s presidential campaign as an example of using the Internet to react quickly and talk directly to people. But real time is more than email blasts and tweeting. For example, with the collapse of media platforms, industries are being forced to create their own media platforms that talk with their customers. As companies create their own real time systems, whether it is in marketing or in the guts of an operation, expect to see an even faster world that is (seemingly) more transparent.

Facebook just crossed the 300-million user mark, and they are cash flow positive. Is it now time to worry?

Business lifespans seem to be getting shorter and shorter. When I first started covering technology almost two decades ago, the major players were old-line technology companies, like IBM, that had made smart transitions into the modern computer age. There were upstart hardware companies—Apple was still considered one—and a slew of software makers who did not have the heavy manufacturing costs and were able to bring out products in relatively fast cycles. There was perceived chaos as technology went through upheaval in the hardware business (AT&T taking over NCR, for example) and more and more manufacturing jobs moved overseas. But troubles used to bring a slowish spiral in the hardware and software businesses. When a company struggled there was a mourning period because people had a sense of brand loyalty. I don’t think brand loyalty exists very much anymore and that goes across industries, but technology companies have tended to seek marketshare more than money (Twitter is a good example) and so our expectations have changed. Brand loyalty has diminished and companies tend to go bust much more quickly.

During the Internet Boom, I watched companies with no real value become overvalued. I remember going to a launch party for a company that had enormous buzz. I asked the CEO about his company’s strategy and he said he hadn’t figured it out yet. Of course, many of these Web businesses were over-hyped and they went bust. Technology, including the non-Apple hardware business, lost its perceived value over this time period and the bit hardware companies have fallen away. I think the nature of today’s tech companies and our very culture has made most companies expendable in our minds. Just ask the folks at MySpace.

Facebook is doing well, and yet I wonder if Facebook will even be around in five years. I remember when AOL was all the rage. (After many tough years, AOL has finally been able to re-invent itself.) And I can list many dot-com busts (boo.com, for example) that generated excitement for a limited time. The tech children of the so-called “New Economy” are typically faddish outfits with short business lives. The real value in many of these Web-based tech companies come from users. That should worry companies like Facebook. A decade ago people were passionate about chatting on AOL because it was seen as cool, but then they moved to another party. I remember in years past having loyalty to a brand whether it is a car, a computer, or even a cell phone. I like Facebook. I like Twitter. But do I have loyalty to them? No, I have loyalty to the user-generated content, and that is not something they control. And that would make me very nervous.

Mark Whicker, a sports columnist with the Orange County Register, wrote a column (some are calling it the “worst sports column in history” and it has my vote) relating sports to the Jaycee Dugard kidnapping. It showed poor taste. Sometimes a journalist will come up with an idea that seems clever but it does not work; these misguided attempts at over-the-top gravity or immature humor usually only see the light of day in college newspapers or on blogs. At major daily newspapers there is usually a system in place to check stories, or at least there is the ability to run an article by a colleague. Whicker’s article should have been spiked. An editor looks after the integrity of the paper and tries his or her best to bring readers the most lucid coverage. With the implosion of the newspaper industry, there are fewer editors. Without good editing, newspaper writers do not always elevate the discussion, which is their mission, and there is a creeping sloppiness in our papers. Humor can be difficult to pull off, especially in a daily newspaper. So the Orange County Register ran the column, which really missed the mark in many ways, and readers were mad about it. They wrote outraged letters. Whicker apologized, kind of. In an interview with the Poynter Institute, he did not blame himself, bad editing, or weak judgment. It’s the Web’s fault! According to Poynter, “…in a phone interview, he defended the premise of his column and suggested that the fast-moving, quick-to-judge culture of the Web was behind the wave of criticism.”

In the column, Whicker noted all the sporting events and activities Dugard missed as she was confined to a shed behind her kidnapper’s house. “She was not allowed to spike a volleyball. Or pitch a softball. Or smack a forehand down the line. Or run in a 5-footer for double bogey,” wrote Whicker, who’s been in the business for 35 years. “Now, that’s deprivation.” And here is Whicker’s baseball-inspired kicker: “Congratulations, Jaycee. You left the yard.”

While the summer months are typically a slow time for significant technology announcements, the last several months brought some interesting, and key developments, in the tech arena. Some of the larger tech players jockeyed for position with new operating systems, search engines, smart phones, and ultracheap video cameras, all of which will get attention through the end of the year and beyond.

01: New operating system war. The July announcement of Google’s operating system, Chrome OS, sent some nervous chatter through Redmond. Chrome OS is targeted to run on low-cost portable computers known as netbooks, but Google says it will also run on PCs. The operating system is set to be released in 2010. In the Apple sphere, it released its Snow Leopard, a faster version of its operating system.

02: Ultracheap camcorders. Networking giant Cisco acquired Pure Digital Technologies, the maker of Flip Video, in March. Researchers at Cisco predict that video will account for 80% of Internet data traffic within four years–44 exabytes per month, the equivalent of 11 billion DVDs; thus, Cisco is anxious to control what it sees as an enormous market. But they are not without significant competition. Smartphones, including the Apple 3GS, includes video capabilities, and companies like Creative and Kodak have a line of pocket video cameras. Expect increasing noise in this area.

03: Decision engines. As search engine makers look for the next evolutionary step in the market, Microsoft unveiled Bing, its “decision engine,” to good reviews and public interest. Also, some smaller outfits released decision engines, most notably Hunch.com and Wolfram’s Alpha.

04: Smartphones. A lot of the technology news during the summer centered on smartphones: Apple released an updated one, Palm came out with the Pre, and new phones using the Android operating system have received attention. By the end of the year there will be 18 phones based on Google’s Android operating system on the market.

05: The return of original content? Much was made of the graying of FaceBook and how it has lost its cool factor, apparently. The newspaper and magazine industry continued to struggle as they try and best figure how to package and sell (or give away) content. Meanwhile, as local papers perish, bigger outlets are seeing an opportunity and muscling into regional markets. ESPN has a site dedicated to local sports in Chicago, and more cities will be on-line in the future. And The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal announced that it would publish local editions in San Francisco. AOL and Yahoo have made inroads by creating original content instead of simply aggregating news. Perhaps media companies are realizing that original content is important because it creates value and brand loyalty.

Before a recent trip to Chicago, my home computer network died and I was without DSL for a couple days. Since I now get my primary news and information from the Web, I went through a day of near panic, but it also made me reassess the time I spend on the computer. Many of us live a digital lifestyle. The Web has brought a lot more information and ways to connect for people, but in the dog days of summer I have been thinking about the way we spend our days. Information technology is about efficiency, not meaning; technology is a tool to deliver information. I spend eight hours a day on a computer: I write, exchange emails, go on social networking sites like FaceBook, and search for information on news sites, Twitter, and other voices. In some senses, the efficiency of the delivery should make us less prone to being on the computer, but the need for immediacy has had the opposite impact. Getting information and virtually connecting with people are not unpleasant experiences, per se, but am I (and millions of other people) gaining as much pleasure and knowledge from these experiences as we would hope? If I am spending eight hours, or more, a day on the computer, is that leaving enough time for other pursuits? I am a huge fan of technology, but is there enough value-add, as they say in Silicon Valley, to justify the amount of time we all spend on the Web?

On my plane ride to Chicago I decided to write down the top ten experiences during the week. I decided to exclude anything that I had done with my children and wife because they would obviously dominate the list. It was a relatively slow week as summer winds down, but here were my top ten events:

Drinking a well-made Sidecar; going through some old photographs; browsing for books at my local bookstore; talking football with my father; preparing a complicated meal; finding a difficult-to-find book on the Los Angeles Public Library Website; chatting, and laughing with, the airport shoeshine guy about the evolution of the shoeshine business; reading the first 100 pages of John Le Carre’s A Most Wanted Man; playing pick-up soccer with a multicultural crowd and thinking about how soccer defines the world; interviewing some sources for an article.

Throughout the week I spent time on the computer and was satisfied with the information I found, and it was nice to connect with friends virtually. But none of the computer experiences made the top ten, except when I found a book on the LAPL Website; I had been searching for the book for more than year.

Being on the computer is a big part of my workday, but based on my own personal meaning assessment, it would be reasonable to cut down my computer time by half. (Write down your own top ten important events and see if I am wrong.) Web 2.0’s cultural hierarchy can be defined by speed and one-upsmanship, in which people who know something a couple minutes before everyone else, or visit the coolest sites, or provide the most clever lines on a social networking site become the tribe leaders. Not being on the computer will leave you out of many conversations. Perhaps we have gone overboard, and the pursuit of speed has created a loss of meaning on and off-line. I don’t think the satisfaction level matches the time spent staring at a computer.