"Those not busy being born are busy dying" Bobby Dylan

On the weekend of June 26th, Toronto underwent a transformation. A new generation of activists were politicized, and in many cases radicalized. Also, a new generation of journalists were born, products of a long-awaited fusion of traditional and new media. For me, it was a return to days of old, going back a decade to when I was young and radical.

So I was there, on the streets, providing coverage and witnessing history. I'm still processing the insights and emotions triggered by the events, and I finally have time to put down some thoughts. Rather than focus purely on what happened, I'd rather share my story in the form of advice for how to move forward.

When I was younger I genuinely loved the game of baseball, especially Toronto Blue Jays baseball. All winter I would pine for the start of spring training and opening day was often one of the best days of my year. The Jesse Barfield, Lloyd Moseby, George Bell outfield will always have a special place in my heart. Almost every Saturday for $2 as a Junior Jay I'd be in the outfield grandstand at Exhibition Stadium cheering on my team.

However as I aged, my interest in baseball began to fade. It's not that the team let me down, in fact they won two World Series as I was drifting away. Rather I was the one changing, seduced by the internet into an accelerated lifestyle that had little patience for a pastime like baseball that felt more dragged out and boring every time I tried to re-engage.

Since those two championships the Jays in general have lost the love and passion that this city once gave them, which is not to say they don't have a loyal fan base, but rather it cannot offer the size and momentum that inter-division rivals in New York and Boston can produce. While it's easy to focus on money and payroll as the secret to a team's success, the true source are the fans.

Recently a newspaper columnist from Chicago wrote that baseball in Toronto is dead, a remark made partly out of spite, but also after covering the White Sox play a series against the Jays, a series played to a handful of fans in a largely empty Rogers Centre. While some rushed to Toronto's defense, there's clearly something wrong when the stadium is as empty as it has been for the past few years.

Blue Jays (and Rogers) management counter with the argument that the team has to play well to earn the support of fans, however the players also require the support of fans in order to be motivated to play well. It strikes me that perhaps the solution is not just spending money but also spending social capital? For example let's look to the internet for a business model the team could learn from.

What if the Blue Jays were to adopt a freemium model? For the rest of the season, make all seats on the 500 level free, for all games. First come, first serve. Then allow all other seats to be sold on an auction basis, allowing seat holders to resell their seats if they become more valuable than when they were first bought.

If you can't fill the stadium for each game using that system, then yes, Baseball is dead in Toronto.

However I think that by making the games fun again, by making them a place people want to go, that they can go, it would give the players motivation to perform and excel.

The problem with baseball, is a similar problem that businesses face across industries. Whether they want to admit it or not they are competing with the internet, someway, somehow.

For me it was an issue of attention, that in this case can only be solved culturally, with economics coming second. By adding a freemium model to baseball, you could culturally change the vibe in the stadium, and therefore increase the appeal and value of the overall experience. You adopt and appropriate a little bit of the internet to upgrade an old pastime to something that preseves the game while expanding the potential audience/market.

This week, Samsung is making 3D televisions available for purchase in Canada. They will quickly be followed by other major manufacturers with their own 3D displays. Does this mark a new shift in how we experience entertainment, or just a neat concept that lacks the content to make it tangible?

Our culture seems obsessed with what's new, and what's innovative. There's always a need to push forward, and the TV/Entertainment industry still remains a powerful force when it comes to pushing new technology into the marketplace and convincing us that we need it.

When done right, 3D TV is phenomenal, as anyone who saw Avatar can tell you. Yet it's not always done right, and Alice in Wonderland is a great example of this.

Is the imperative of first pushing HD and now pushing 3D partly a response to the internet and the larger phenomena of sharing content? If you keep innovating, if you keep evolving, it makes it harder for the barbarian hordes on the internet to undermine your business model. Which is not to say they won't catch up, rather this might be the new way of doing business. Make money by getting people to keep buying into new technologies and platforms.

For example while the initial Samsung models start at $2,500 for the TV, the glasses start at $250 each, and those are just entry level. When I first heard of 3D TV I imagined them being a hit at sports bars, but not if you have to give drunk patrons goggles that cost a few hundred bucks each.

As a metaphor the internet affords all sorts of sensational and melodramatic language. I regular receive emails from public relations professionals representing clients who claim they are starting a revolution or changing the world forever.

Last week I got such a message regarding an announcement from Cisco, who are "the leading supplier of networking equipment and network management for the Internet." In this email, I was told that Cisco would make an announcement that would "forever change the Internet and its impact on consumers, business, and government" and that was all they could say.

Yesterday Cisco made their announcement, the introduction of their next generation router, the CRS-3, and the media seemed to walk right into the hype.

In their recent speech from the throne, the Canadian Government indicated their intention to raise foreign ownership limits with regard to the telecom industry. This is a decision long overdue, although one that requires balance and diplomacy when it comes to achieving the desired goal, something that the ruling Conservative Party has not been able to accomplish.

On the one hand they want to increase competition so as to lower consumer's monthly bills, yet on the other hand they also want to spur innovation by allowing existing companies access to foreign capital investment.

The demand for Internet and mobile networks is growing far faster than companies had anticipated and they will need to continually invest and expand their infrastructure which requires a lot of capital. The fear is that without foreign investment there would be further consolidation so as to pay for ongoing upgrades.

Surveillance technology may be the most corrupting and also the most intoxicating media proliferating in these rapidly changing times. Its use is a slippery slope sliding further into the surveillance society.

For example, a school district in Philadelphia has recently been caught spying on its students via cameras installed on laptops. The school board was able to do this through several thousand Apple Mac Books with spyware installed that they distributed to students. School administrators could access and activate the laptop camera whenever they wished.

The justification for including this spyware was that it would be used only if the laptops were stolen. The users of the device would not be monitored, but if they were to report it stolen, authorities would have access to this capability to find out where the device was and who had possession of it.

However, all of this came to the public's attention because, in a totally separate incident, school authorities provided as evidence a photograph they took of a student via a laptop, demonstrating that they had used this capability to spy on the boy. As they started to defend themselves, they also revealed that they had done this on other occasions, to investigate particular students.

This is a great example of the seductive power of surveillance, and the way technology can corrupt authorities. They are approved to use it in one way, but end up using it in others that weren't approved.

Once again Canadian democracy is in crisis, as our government has prorogued parliament to avoid a scandal concerning the torture of detainees in Afghanistan. Public opposition has found a home on social media like Facebook and Twitter, which pose a challenge and opportunity for creative leaders to emerge and possibly even rescue our democracy from death's door.

The nature of a minority government like ours is that no single party controls the lower house of Parliament, and as a result gory details about the use of torture in Afghanistan were about to be revealed due to the diligent work of the opposition parties. In proroguing Parliament, Prime Minister Stephen Harper is able to prevent (or more likely just delay) the public from learning more and thus ensure the survival of his government for at least another two months.

A crisis like this presents an opportunity to expand the democratic process and include more people in politics as a whole. However, it's hard not to snicker at the fact that joining a Facebook group to show opposition to something has become the ultimate cliche. While such a group does raise awareness and cross over into mainstream media with front page headlines, I am not alone in wondering whether it actually accomplishes anything.

Even worse, why is the alternative to this kind of virtual action doing absolutely nothing? It's as if it has already become such strong orthodoxy that if you don't join, or even worse complain, you're regarded as a nay-sayer and are also responsible for providing alternatives.

The justification for this staid strategy is that it helps to raise awareness and provides an outlet for new initiates to the political process. However I don't believe that awareness alone makes a difference, but rather it is the larger process of mobilizing to action, and evading marginalization.

As another year comes to a close I thought I'd share some brief thoughts on what I anticipate for the world of technology in 2010:

The Might of Mobile

Mobile technology will continue to be a dominant trend as smart phones go from being tools for professionals, to devices that just about everyone has or wants.

A lot of the growth in the mobile sector is driven by applications. A related platform that I think will thrive in 2010 is Augmented Reality (o/k/a AR).

Augmented Reality is an effort to bring the qualities of the web to the physical world by literally adding a layer of hypertext on top of our material reality. Often described and associated with the concept of the "Internet of Things", the idea is to unlock web-based information associated with each object or location.

As a concept AR has been receiving a considerable amount of attention and investment. The recent announcement of advertising in AR will have a powerful and also normative effect.

In this regard, "hyper-local" advertising will be a big trend in 2010, and it will be driven by mobile and AR applications. This will be a way that Twitter starts to cash in, for example, bu having localized ads that target people in particular cities or neighbourhoods. If you don't want to be exposed to these ads, you'll be able to pay a premium and get Twitter with spam filters.

Tablet Computing

I'm kind of excited about the (re)arrival of tablet computers. Apple has one coming out in the spring, Google is rumoured to have one out in early summer, and I've been playing with Nokia's N900, which calls itself a tablet.

What excites me is the combination of mobility with traditional computational power and abilities. On the one hand, it will further drive the development of mobile applications, with the tablets marketed and treated like mobile devices. On the other, they enable a truly rich multimedia experience with their expanded touch screens and user interfaces.

One of their impacts will be to continue to accelerate the rate of technological change as evolution happens faster and companies push out new products and upgrades to keep up.

After many weeks of anticipation I was finally able to obtain a Nokia N900, the new Maemo Linux-powered tablet computer. This is the device I wanted fifteen years ago, when the web was just taking off. While it resembles the smart phones that currently dominate the mobile marketplace, the N900 is more like a mobile computer because it runs on an open source operating system that potentially enables it to evolve faster than others.

When buying any new technology an important evaluation metric to is the health of the supporting community, including user groups, developers and the companies around it. This logic is even more important when it comes to open source projects, as community health and dynamics are explicitly tied to their usability and the direction of future development.

Tiger Woods has always made a concerted effort to protect his privacy. He even owns a massive yacht named "Privacy". While Tiger makes his living based more on his public profile than his ability to swing a golf club, there will now be many who might argue that his desire for privacy was directly associated with his guilt. That he had something to hide all along.

I agree there's a certain responsibility that people like Tiger should have when it comes to their relationship with the public. While Tiger's fame may be based on his golfing prowess, his income is a direct result of his popularity, and the support of millions of fans and consumers.

However I also recognize that Tiger has a right to privacy, the same as any person, even if his wealth and power allow him to exert that right better than others.