The Birth of Trinity: Web 3.0

In the wildly popular 1960's television series Star Trek, Captain James T. Kirk would often turn towards his engineer, Officer 'Scotty' Montgomery and direct him to take the spaceship into a fascinating new realm called 'warp speed'. Time and again, with all commanding confidence he would turn to Scotty and say, "Warp speed ahead". "Aye Aye Captain" the Scottish officer would reply, at which point millions of 'Trekie' fans from all around the globe would simply gasp with unparalleled glee. Suddenly, the colorful multi-national crew would be thrown back hard against the cushion of their seats, as the Enterprise headed at an almost unimaginable speed towards a new and uncharted world. Born in the sixties, but not quite a part of that age, Star Trek would ultimately help to define an entire generation. The world would be denied a futuristic look at such an earnest multi-cultural effort at Globalism until the year 1999 and the movie The Matrix. It is here, as the first mate on the hovercraft The Nebuchadnezzar that we initially encounter a rather computer savvy woman named Trinity; whose job it was to save souls stolen into an artificial digitized world. As a forecast of future developments, these are examples of fiction from just a few years ago. However, much of this 'Science Fiction' actually exists as a fitting metaphor for the space-age events of 2008. Last year, while many Americans and indeed many people from all around the world became totally captivated by the spectacular election season, a trio of technological advances hit warp speed on the internet. This was the year that Social Media (2.0), Internet News, and Long Tail Marketing came of age, and the birth-pangs of a brave new world quietly came to life out of the crucible of Web 3.0.

Although the New Year has only just begun, it has already become quite certain that commentators will be driven to conclude that the previous 12 months have indeed marked a true tectonic shift in the packaging of News, and the marketing of consumer products and services online. The power of the old Fourth Estate was radically usurped in 2008, with internet websites like Politico.com, The Huffington Post, and Real Clear Politics to name but a few, instantly trumping 'mainstream media' in the 24-hour-news cycle. The major news outlets were suddenly 'sat-down' during the election season. For the very first time the awesome power to decide just what is considered 'newsworthy' was no longer exclusively in the hands of the corporate media elite. A whole new industry for freelance journalism all of a sudden came to life, featuring a host of websites, blogs, and I-Reporters on the ground, recording facts and taking pictures often with nothing more than a cell phone. All throughout this process of evolution we have seen independent internet news sites frequently gathering first hand information well before the networks were ever even aware of its existence. Then, after all the dust would settle, there would quietly emerge the lithe and agile form of yet another new group of elite independent reporters; information savvy consultants if you will, using their wit to pimp the new reality while saving whatever souls that they could from the media of yesterday:

"[The] [T]echie-types ... began to discover the power of the Internet to amplify a single voice ... suddenly [they] gave this voice substance ... authority ... reach ... and influence like never before. In fact ... we have witnessed the rise of a whole new class of video journalists ... armed only with mobile phones ... who are changing the way we see the world ... from the violence in Tibet ... to gaffs on the