As a professional journalist who nonetheless champions a 'people's' Internet, I am happy to compete against the thousands of amateur bloggers out there reporting and commenting on the same stories I do.

New technologies are wreaking havoc on employment figures - from EZpasses ousting toll collectors to Google-controlled self-driving automobiles rendering taxicab drivers obsolete.

The new Zune may not be an iPod killer, but it does offer a clean interface, great industrial design, HD radio, and a subscription model for music, making it significantly less expensive for big users.

It's also hard for people to contend with the difficult possibility that we are simply overadvanced fungi and bacteria hurtling through a galaxy in cold, meaningless space. But just because our existence may have arisen unintentionally and without purpose doesn't preclude meaning or purpose from emerging as a result of our interaction and collaboration. Meaning may not be a precondition for humanity as much as a by-product of it.

Beyond the hype, style, and speculation, the truth is that the iPad is really just another tablet device. A really big PDA, where a touchscreen does what a laptop's keyboard used to do.

Our society has reoriented itself to the present moment. Everything is live, real time, and always-on. It’s not a mere speeding up, however much our lifestyles and technologies have accelerated the rate at which we attempt to do things. It’s more of a diminishment of anything that isn’t happening right now—and the onslaught of everything that supposedly is.

While we may blame the Internet for the ease with which conspiracy theories proliferate, the net is really much more culpable for the way it connects everything to almost everything else. The hypertext link, as we used to call it, allows any fact or idea to become intimately connected with any other.