In the Ether: News from Southern - The Next Big Things

I was reading the Southern Review of Books today and wanted to pass on some news I found very interesting.

The Next Big Thing

I've been having discussions with people who write Speculative Fiction and we were all wondering about the 'next big thing.' Vampires and Werewolves have been done to death and if I never see another fanged, semi-human creature who sucks blood or sprouts a snout, I will be very happy.

People are looking for something else now, hopefully. But no one seemed to know what that was. At least none of those I talked to.

Then I read something in the July issue of Southern Review and found this:

Pottermore

I was going to do another Science:  Fact or Fiction feature, but something else caught my attention, and in a way, it could be a portent for things to come.

It's been on the wind for months. Rumors here. Whispers there. A conspiracy-theorists wet dream.

Another political assassination? No. It's….

Pottermore!

Social Media Explosion

On Monday, May 2^nd, at 1 AM Pakistani local time, a Twitter user with the handle, 'ReallyVirtual', tweeted this to a San Francisco-based microblogging service:

Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event)

Shortly afterwards:

A huge window shaking bang here in Abbottabad Cantt. I hope its not the start of something nasty :-S

This was soon followed by a succession of rapid-fire tweets telling of a helicopter crashing, a family dying and then soldiers cordoning off part of the neighborhood and searching door-to-door.

Welcome to live coverage of the death of Osama Bin Laden by an unwitting computer programmer

…and a new era in social networking.

The Future of Reading - Or How I Learned to Love My Kindle

What is the future of the publishing industry? The consensus appears to be…no one really knows and anyone who claims they do must have precognition and as scientists will tell you, that is a class 3 impossibility.

Change is happening. That's a given. But what is that change?