I absolutely abhor predictive analysis for two reasons: I've rarely seen studies that followed up on the predictions to judge how viable certain companies are and I've rarely found myself believing what I'm reading.

Despite my inherent bias, it's hard not to get a bit giddy reading a report that found the global entertainment and media market -- driven by digital technologies -- would hit $5.7 trillion dollars.

That's a lot of videos games, movies, television and music (that's my prediction for the order of markets).

Of course, the Future of Media report (PDF) is also chock full of other interesting factoids that have nothing to do with wild predictions (exactly):

• Percentage wise, Russia is the fastest growing digital consumption region, followed by Brazil, the Philippines and then India; and
• The average consumption time for all media will be more than the average waking hours time frame as we consume more media from more places at the same time, reducing the effect of advertising;
• Bandwidth will grow as people demand more personalized media that will in turn spawn whole new business models built for individuals -- and not populations.

I tell the students in my classes that they know they've found something interesting whenever companies begin to argue that they are doing something because…wait for it…they want to stop child pornography.

The reason I tell them that: it's absolutely impossible to argue against stopping child porn without looking like a complete and total dirt bag.

This is relevant because two major Internet Service Providers -- AT&T and AOL -- announced they and three others companies would shut down access to child porn newsgroups.

On the surface, this is a good thing. Child porn is bad.

According to reports, the main targets of the purge are newsgroups, places where people hold discussions on message boards, where one person starts a thread and others respond. The ISPs have said they would stop hosting the groups that engage in trading -- and presumably discussing -- child pornography.

However, the details of how this is going to happen are a bit…disconcerting.

Time Warner, Sprint, Verizon and AOL already have begun monitoring content, blocking community boards and taking down child porn sites.

It's the monitoring content thing that has me a little unsure.

Up until now, companies have largely kept their hands off monitoring and censoring content online. That was left up to the community -- or in the case of illegal activity -- it was left to the person or company violated to bring forth the matter.

Now we have the very conduits to the Web watching us under the guise of stopping child pornography (and stopping child pornography, I repeat, is a good thing).

It's a slippery slope, allowing the people who control access to the Web to monitor even small portions of what we discuss and disseminate.

My father has heart problems.

He's had them for many years, which makes it a little less scary; still, we all keep it in the back of our minds. On occasion, his heart will flutter -- it's an arrhythmic beat -- and if it doesn't correct itself, it's off to the doctor.

It's not life-threatening per se, but it's surely an interruption. When it happens to often, he has to wear this big, strap-on heart monitor so the doctors can record the rhythms.

I bring this up because Intel just received the go-head to sell the Heath Guide, an in-home monitoring system for patient's with chronic illnesses (although I have no idea if "heart condition" counts as chronic).

It incorporates interactive tools for personalized care management and integrates vital sign collection, patient reminders, multimedia educational content and feedback, and communications tools such as video conferencing and e-mail.

In other words, the new system allows doctors to have a connection to their patients -- at least their vital statistics -- remotely.

In a world that is increasingly becoming flat, this type of system allows for 24-hour monitoring, a task many hospitals now employ by contracting with doctor's from overseas who -- because of the time change -- can provide real-time diagnosis.

The funny thing about technology is that nobody is using it -- and then everyone is using it.

The change seems to happen over night, at least for some things. The Web, for instance, went from this playground for geeks to a world-wide phenomenon in just a few years. It appeared as if it wasn't there…and then it was.

The mobile Web has that feeling about it; however, a new report suggests that we've crossed the threshold of "not there". Nearly 40 million Americans are now browsing the Web with their mobile phones, making our country the most mobile Web-savvy.

What comes with that, though, is an increased desire for better performing, more powerful mobile tools. In other words, we're already no longer satisfied with a slow experience that eats up battery time. We're looking for a high-end user experience.

For companies, that presents a problem and an opportunity.

The problem: how in the world do you pay for the sudden demand for high-speed, high-end services?

These things aren't easy or cheap to build. Infrastructure is expensive and more than one company has lost its shorts trying to lead the way.

Which brings us to the opportunity: new advertising and subscription models will be easier to sell because we're already used to paying for mobile service.

The Web was given away so we're reticent to pony up to pay for content. We're not quite as stingy with the mobile phones.

Neal Stephenson described a world where people could "jack in", Matrix-like, to a virtual representation of the real world: the metaverse.

It was a revolutionary -- and strangely weird -- idea back in 1992. Today, we're inching ever closer to that reality.

Google just launched Lively, a 3D virtual environment that enables people to build rooms and representations of themselves, which they can use to chat with other people. These environments have become more popular in the last few years -- whether through online gaming or Second Life. How popular? Even Darryl Macdonald, one of the original members of the group RUN DMC, just launched his own virtual environment.

But not everyone is sold on the idea that Google, which prides itself on simplistic design and functionality, should be entering into this realm. The glitchy nature of real-time simulations does seem to fly in the face of Google's main mission: be easy and work well.

And yet…

Let's get back to the metaverse, though. If this "representation" is going become more real -- which means people can move from one place to the next regardless of the company running it -- then company's have to figure out how open up their borders. So far that hasn't happened.Actually that hadn't happened until yesterday when IBM and partner Second Life owner Linden Labs demonstrated just that ability.

The great thing about social media is it opens so many doors you never thought about peeking behind.

A few years ago, my writing partner and I wrote a book about virtual worlds. As part of that, we'd set up some in-game book tours, which our publisher thought was a bad idea and a waste of resources. (What resources? I have no idea. It didn't cost anything.)

These days, though, publishers have started looking around for new ways to promote their work -- and one of the cool ideas coming out of this is the book trailer. There's a great post at the Pandemic Blog, about social media marketing, that gives a great overview of the best trailers on the Web.

One of the world’s biggest publishing houses, HarperCollins, went even further and built a book trailer studio in their offices that will have the capacity to create 500 book trailers a year. This is a sign that established players in such an old-fashioned and non-technical industry like book publishing are recognizing and unleashing the potential of viral videos.

There's even several sites -- including Book Trailers -- that are dedicated the best book trailers, an At The Movies for the literary geek in you.

I've written oftentimes about the exponential importance of social media and the exasperating experience of trying to maintain it all.

How are normal people supposed to deal with MySpace, Facebook, SocialThing, FriendFeed, Twitter, Britekite, their blog, their RSS reader, their personal data, Flickr, YouTube and the countless other software tools that make it "easy" for you to exist online?

The answer: they don't.

There's been a slow rumble about this online, particularly in the past year.

There is an increasing call for a new type of interface design, one that brings all of your media into one place, sitting on your desktop allowing you to seamlessly drag-and-drop media from one network to the next.

Of course, there's not an inherent business model in creating a single interface. At least not for the creator. After all, you're simply creating a conduit for people to access other accounts.

(Although the cable company is just an interface to television programming, they company also owns the cable that runs into your house.)

The OpenID movement t is one that is predicated on finding ways for social networks to interact with each other; however, getting Google, Facebook and the like to agree on a standard "sign in protocol" isn't necessarily an easy issue to fix.

We're rapidly reaching a point, though, when it's going to be necessary to control all of this information in one place…and the company that solves that issue the best is going to create a giant user base in very little time.

I cajole people to read two books -- Groundswell and The World is Flat -- because they each present case studies about companies using technology the right way.

Southwest Airlines is one of the examples oftentimes cited. They are the lone bright spot in the U.S. air industry. While other carriers are reducing aircrafts and cutting back on flights, Southwest continues to grow -- and remain profitable.

Wired has a great 7-point article about why the company has continued to grow, but the one thing they left out was the company's aggressive use of technology. Long before other companies were using online boarding mechanisms, Southwest was -- in the words of Thomas Friedman -- turning its customers into ticket agents by allowing them to print out their boarding passes from home.

Southwest CEO Gary Kelly talks about the fuel hedging the company does as well -- a neat trick the company plays to keep its fuel prices as low as possible, which is another part of the flattening world. That is: you fix your supply chain so that your company is spending as little overhead as possible.

This is no easy task. However in the modern world it's important that companies find ways to use emerging technologies to ease the cost burdens.

In other words, Southwest isn't profitable because it's a better air carrier; it's profitable because it deploys technologies in a way that allows the business to run leaner.

For those of us in the technology industry, the decade-long back-and-forth between Microsoft and Yahoo has been fodder for bar room conversations.

The two giants were two heavyweight fighters vying for supremacy over each other as the Web expanded from its humble origins to a full-fledged part of daily life. Yahoo was always the plucky upstart, creating search tools and other Web-applications that increasingly pried market share away from the Redmond, WA behemoth, a fact that made everyone feel a bit better about Microsoft.

Then came Google. Suddenly both companies seemed so much…smaller.

Now their back-and-forth was less a heavyweight fight and more a battle for survival. Few think the two can wage a long-term, victorious fight on its own against Google. But neither wants to cede their respective positions in the tech sector.

Earlier this year, it looked like Microsoft might finally succeed in buying Yahoo, creating a combined search and Web-application business that would dwarf Google. Instead, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang quashed the deal.

That prompted raider Carl Icahn to launch a bid to oust the current Yahoo board, claiming that was the only way to restart acquisition talks (which, for the record, would make Icahn a pretty penny). Yahoo denied this, saying Microsoft was welcome to resubmit a bid whenever it wanted.

This sounded good.

Until Microsoft said today that Icahn's analysis that the company would only come back to the table with a new board was correct.

That makes those of us who follow the tech sector very happy because it sets up a throwback confrontation between old stalwarts: Yahoo and Microsoft.

We've reached a tipping point with IP-based media systems, which is just a fancy way of saying that more people are using their computers to get information they used to get from other sources.

Television is now delivered to computers and cell phones, untethering people from their living rooms. Unfortunately for big media networks, there aren't many good tracking mechanisms that can handle this change in viewing. That makes it hard to get advertisers to pitch in the cash necessary to go whole hog into the market.

NBC hopes its Web-based Olympics' coverage will change that.

NBC hopes its research provides a comprehensive picture of how people are supplementing TV viewership with tools such as video streaming, video on demand and mobile phones, said Alan Wurtzel, the company's research chief.

There is some data on how people handle online viewing, particularly when it comes to sports. CBS streamed every NCAA basketball tournament game this year and it's been such a successful venture, the network has plans to expand its online coverage.

Understanding how people use digital media these days is more than just a critical issue because there's no set business model right now even as companies move more of their content online. That conundrum -- how to make and distribute money for work streamed online -- was one of the core issues of last year's writer's strike in Hollywood.

If networks can track use -- and put a dollar figure to it for advertisers, there will be a rapid and transformative move to deliver all types of content online.