What difference does 30 years make in the evolution of breakdancing?

These two videos should speak for themselves. Above you can see the finals of The Notorious IBE, an international breakdance exhibition held yearly in the Netherlands since 1998.

Courtesy of the homie Rob Flow is a throwback video from the movie Beatstreet, showing a choreographed breakdance battle in a 1980s New York City nightclub.

While you can see shreds of the past in the moves of the IBE dancers, it’s really amazing to see just how far the art has come in the intervening years. The power moves are infinitely more powerful, the technical skills more precise, more daring and more enthralling, and the swagger more swaggerific. Oh, those kids have some swagger, indeed. It’s also interesting to see how today’s breakers dress a lot more hipster, with tight pants, skater shoes and keffiyehs, all part of their outfits. Long gone are the days of the matching track suit.

All praise due to the pioneers of the art form, without whose invention none of today’s mastery would be possible. Still, from watching the two videos it really feels like watching two separate millennia, not just two time periods separated by 27 years.

Can you remember the T-Mobile Sidekick? The feature phone with the swiveling screen used to be all the rage. The device is now as good as any for measuring the passage of time in the tech world.

I’m practically giddy with anticipation of the iPhone 5, slated to be released in a matter of weeks. I’ve never before owned an iPhone, and the iPhone 5 will be my first. In typical Apple fashion, no hint of the existence of an iPhone 5 has officially been uttered, but the speculation is rampant, with no shortage of credible tidbits pointing to October 15 as the all-important day. If there’s one gadget I must own this year, that would be it.

I was in the shower (where I do a lot of good thinking) and I remembered how just popular the T-Mobile Sidekick was back in the day. While security vulnerabilities lead to some pretty high profile hacks of the Sidekick, it was pretty much the must-have phone and texting device among celebrities, rappers, and the glitterati at large. However, I’m sure it pales in comparison to today’s iPhone fever. If you’re a public personality, and you don’t have an iPhone, you’re pretty much a loser.

What I find amusing about this current state of affairs is how Apple’s popularity and ubiquity means that you have to own the same iPhone as everyone else in order to maintain your cool. For a company whose public image has long revolved around arming cultural rebels with their stylish, niche laptops and computers, it’s an interesting turnaround, albeit a ludicrously lucrative one.

In any case, it’s that awe-inspiring buffet of apps in the iTunes store that makes any iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch unique, there are still those few must-have apps such as Yelp!, Facebook and Shazam that I downloaded, and use regularly. In this way, the uniformity extends even to the apps. There are well more than 500,000 apps available in the app store, but fewer than a handful greatly improve my daily life, and those are the ones I use regularly.

I would never bejewel my T-Mobile Sidekick, if I ever owned one, and personally don’t indulge in much phone customization. However, the fact people would go through trouble to make their phone stand out from the crowd is something to acknowledge. There’s a stunning array of custom iPhone cases that look like everything from ears, books, and anything else you can imagine, at the end of the day, it’s still the same phone that everyone has.

While the iPhone may be the new standard in smart phone technology, an unexpected attribute of its success is homogeneity. And with that said, I still can’t wait to buy one!

These kids kill it. They’re 22-years-old, from Paris, and really about to take the world by storm. It’s also worth mentioning that they stand 6’4″ tall.

I hate to say it, but when I watch them dance with most other dancers, it makes me mad, because Les Twins are so much better than anyone else out there. Think L.A. Krumping from David LaChappelle’s classic street dance film Rize, with more than a little Oakland Turf Dancing, with a whole lot of extra swagger. There’s still much life in hip hop culture. Bear witness.

LOOSEWORLD x Waverly Films: Reggie Watts in F_CK SH_T STACK from LOOSEWORLD on Vimeo.

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In just 48 hours, former radio announcer Ted Williams has gone from homeless on the streets of Columbus, OH, to the couches of The Today Show. A stunning turn of events to be sure, and likely one of the greatest social media coups of all times.

Williams, who had battled with drug and alcohol addition, but says he had been clean for two years became an instant hit when a video with his story was published on the website of The Columbus Dispatch. This is the stuff that social media viral sensations are made of.

Since being discovered, Williams has been beset with offers of aid. The Cleveland Cavaliers organization has offered him a job as an announcer, and a caller to a radio show where Williams was being interviewed offered him a mortgage on a house. Kraft Foods has also swooped in with an offer for voiceover work, noting Williams remarkable voice, and also capitalizing on the instant Internet frenzy he has inadvertently created.

This is a heartwarming story, but also one that shows the Cleveland Cavaliers organization gets the power of social media. The fact that a cameraman from the Columbus Dispatch filmed this guy from the roadside, placed a video of it on the newspaper’s website, and catapulted Ted Williams to instant celebrity is proof of how powerful social media tools have become in instantly connecting the globe.

From the standpoint of the Cleveland Cavaliers organization, they’ve found a compelling character about whom they can tell a long story. Will he be able to deal with the pressures of notoriety? How good is he really? Will he be able to accomplish more than people expect? The only way to know is to stay tuned. As long as curiosity lingers, the Cavs organization wins, regardless of how the players perform.

It seems without question that Ted Williams will help sell tickets for the Cavaliers, and while not replacing a superstar like Lebron James, he will help the team change the conversation at a critical moment in franchise history. That he will be able to do so at a fraction of the cost is an obvious bonus.

Another interesting facet of the Ted Williams saga is that in an age of social media, scrubs make better stories than celebs. Normal people going through the ups and downs of life will elicit far more empathy and engagement from an audience of peers than the travails of celebrities such as Paris Hilton and frenemy Nicole Richie playing the role plebian princesses on their show The Simple Life. With no safety net, no one looking out for him, and no where to go if he fails, the stakes are much higher for Williams.

While reality shows allow us to peer into the lives of celebrities, we envy them and and hate them at the same time. They also can manipulate the experience to show only the sides of themselves they want seen. It’s unlikely that Williams will be able to demonstrate the same level of media savvy, and there’s no good reason to think he would. In any case, Ted Williams is one of us, and if he succeeds, we succeed. If he fails, well, how many second chances are there? It’s going to be a real cliffhanger.

Also, because he is a social media sensation, he will give the organization unique opportunities to engage an online audience around his story. People who don’t care about basketball will still love to hear about his resurrection story, and they should be able to see every detail play out on the Web.

Future Journalism Project – San Francisco Postcard from ScribeMedia.org on Vimeo.

Here’s a few words about The Future Journalism Project, a multimedia documentary and collaborative story about the transformation of the journalism industry.

For my part, I like to say that it’s about the convergence of technology and storytelling. Here’s a brief glimpse at what forms might encapsulate the finished product, as well as work in progress, blatanly scraped from ScribeMedia.org

Here’s what we’re now thinking. In addition to producing a traditional documentary, we want to explore the possible. This includes:

Dedicated Web Site: the Future Journalism Project Web site will hold video of all interviews conducted. Each interview will be edited down to a series of 4-6 minute segments organized by subject matter and presented in an interface similar to video-centric sites such as YouTube, Hulu and TED. The goal is to let site visitors explore the ideas of individuals and also dive deeply into specific topics as discussed from a variety of perspectives.

The Web site will also enable community submissions so that those interested in contributing to the project can upload interviews that they have independently conducted. For example, ScribeLabs plans to target students at US journalism programs to encourage them to interview their peers about the future of journalism and upload the results to the project Web site.

Podcast Series: Each Future Journalism Project interview conducted by the producers will be made available and presented in its entirety as an audio podcast. Listeners can subscribe to the entire series or download podcasts with the interviewees they are most interested in hearing from.

The Book: A book of essays written by leading thinkers is planned to accompany the project. The subjects and themes explored will echo and expand upon the video content, with authors focusing on Journalism Education, Journalism Business Models, Changing Journalism Practices and Journalism and Democracy.

The book will appear in both print and digital versions.

There is also a daily blog, FutureJournalismProject.org

Any questions, shoot me an email.

There are good reasons to support the actions of Wikileaks. Transparency in government is something we should all support, as our daily lives are affected constantly by the decisions that lawmakers enact, supposedly on our behalf. Our government should be accountable to the people it serves. Far too often this is not the case.

I also fundamentally believe that multinational corporations should be subject to intense scrutiny, especially where product safety, business ethics and environmental impact are concerned. When the rumored trove of Wikileaks documents about corporate malfeasance break, I will gleefully await the day corporate America’s feet are held to the fire. I think that large enterprise has too much power and should feel the heat from time time.

There are also, however, reasons why Wikileaks is an unmitigated disaster, and Cablegate is both irresponsible and potentially dangerous both to America’s national security interests and global stability.

It’s true that the contents of the pilfered cables were accessible to 2.5 million people, which hardly classifies them as “secret,” but no one had gone as far as the alleged perpetrator Army private, Bradley Manning, in undermining the classified nature of the State Department cables.

The information, suspicion and banter contained within them may have been common knowledge in diplomatic circles, but it is one thing to suspect people are talking about you behind your back, it’s another when you know it, and it’s there in official correspondence. Furthermore, now that news of the leak has circled the globe many times, what is or is not in the cables is starting to cause a bit of a fuss. In Pakistan, which enjoys a special, but tense diplomatic and military relationship with the U.S., fake cables have been circulating in the local press which paint India in a a very bad light, as an intentional instigator in Balochistan and Waziristan, conflicts which are beyond the control of the the Pakistani army and very relevant to the Pakistani people. One cannot help but wonder what other fake cables may arise, and what their impact may be. The toothpaste is out of the tube, so to speak, and it won’t be going back in.

Ultimately, I think that Cablegate is an irresponsible headline grabber because as the video above makes clear, Americans know little about the world in which we live, and they clearly could care less. Most average Americans couldn’t find Libya on a map, so why would they care about Gen. Muamar Qadafi, except that he gets botox. The tabloid nature of the revelations is the only reason why anyone cares. Juicy gossip about Saudi princess hosting lavish parties with alcohol and prostitutes makes for interesting water cooler talk, but it will quickly be replaced by the next Kanye mishap, Monday Night Football, or the suicide of Bernie Madoff’s son Mark over the weekend.

Image: Stefan Rousseau/PA

Yesterday’s arrest of Julian Assange and the escalating harassment of his organization, Wikileaks, has proven many things, among them, the power of information, and how nasty things can get for those whose business it is to pry the lid off closely-guarded secrets.

While pundits, commentators, bloggers and the Internet as a whole debate the efficacy of the latest Wikileaks bombshell, Cablegate, one thing can be certain, Legacy Media benefits tremendously from the document dumps, while the journalists of the future have already sprinted ahead.

Wikileaks will not change journalism. Instead the fracases over Cablegate demonstrates how the economics of journalism have already changed the business of reporting, and the resultant product. If the 251,000 documents being released were originally pilfered as early as May of 2010 by Army private, Bradley Manning, as is suspected it is somewhat laughable that a group of distributed volunteers could keep such a juicy secret bottled up and away from the professional press for so long.

Organizations like Wikileaks, or groups with a similar agenda will have a role to play in the future of journalism, regardless of what happens to Wikileaks founder Assange, who is now in British custody, awaiting extradition to Sweden. However the future of journalism belongs to those who can use social media, devices like the iPad, location technologies and a suite of tools that make storytelling more rich, more communal and more locally relevant, while simultaneously empowering millions to join the conversation. That is the future of journalism, and the aim of the documentary and website of The Future Journalism Project is to capture the transformation that is underway. The future of journalism is being shaped by the convergence of tools and tales, both the medium of expression, what is now possible to express thanks to technologies that are becoming ubiquitous.

Aside from a few clever infographics and word clouds, little has been done with the information from the cables which demonstrate the power of new media story telling tools. (The term ‘new media’ is somewhat of a misnomer, as many of the tools and techniques are not new, but there are many mashups of existing technologies, as well as new tools that are being created every day that bring with them tremendous potential to change how stories are told and consumed)

Cablegate wordcloud from Fast Company

One way in which sensitive topics are today dealt with is through the use of Xtra Normal, a video engine that allows cartoony avatars to conduct a dialog selected by the user. The robotic voices of the avatars and their jerky movements lend a sense of parody to otherwise verboten topics. Examples abound, such as ‘Black Marriage Negotiations,’ which turned a critical eye to the double standards successful African American men must face when the topic of marriage arises with similarly ambitious African American women. Just prior to the midterm elections, ‘Hi, I’m a Tea-Partier’ surfaced, which was another Xtra Normal video that depicted a level-headed conversation between a Tea Bagger and a skeptic, who questions the ethos and aims of the Tea Party. At each turn, the Tea Bagger answers with de rigeur talking points from Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin and others that are both nonsensical and contradictory. Cornered on the substance of his/her arguments, the Tea Bagger responds with an ad hominem attack on President Barack Obama and the Democrats, calling them both socialists and fascists.

Our political discourse is conducted in shrill tones, and with the most sensational, provocative and dishonest purveyor of misinformation ruling the day. It is exactly because Xtra Normal is so matter of fact that viewers can listen to arguments side-by-side, and evaluate them on their substance,somewhat devoid of context and free from emotion.

Below is a short Xtra Normal clip I compiled this morning dealing with one of the first Wikileaks cables, wherein the U.S. State Department, ordered detailed surveillance of UN diplomats in a document signed off by ‘Clinton,’ who one must imagine is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The Future Journalism Project is about more than the tabloidization of diplomacy, however. It was created with the mission to be a “Web-based video series [that] will explore the present state, current disruption and future possibilities of American journalism from a variety of perspectives.” In short the result will be a documentary film following, among other things, the transformation of the journalistic profession and the media through the advent and adoption of new technologies.

Anyone counting on the iPad to be a messiah device, or the savior of the media will surely be disappointed, but the tablet computer in its current form points to an exciting road ahead, in spite of it’s limitations. The initial draft of this post was written using iA Writer, and while the native WordPress app leaves a lot to be desired, in theory it enables mobile blogging, ditto Tumblr. For free apps–which still require engineering resources to code, they’ll do for now, and demonstrate how much potential there is out there.

One of the key areas of change is he increasing use of video. Video is engaging, utilizes both sight and sound, and it is easy to share. Furthermore, as a growing percentage of the workforce spends its days at a desk, in front of a computer screen, Web video is one more way in which we interact with other humans, even if they are two-dimensional strangers.

Location-based services are another evolving technology with the power to change journalism and storytelling. Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Facebook Places and Yelp! checkins are examples of location technologies that allow users to broadcast their whereabouts to social contacts, but also bring with them the possibility that one day advertisers will be able to serve relevant discounts based on proximity, and news organizations can do the same with news, or possibly involve citizen journalists in breaking events. While the vast majority of today’s smart phones are GPS-enabled, the possibilities have barely been explored.

Social media, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, YouTube and others, are both evolving the conversation, and changing the form it takes. PBS demonstrated how social media can be used to harness the power of crowds when Thanksgiving flyers were asked to tweet how long it took to get through airport security, using the hash tag #TSAtime. Compiling and displaying the results with the aid of Storify, reports poured in from America’s 52 busiest airports that expected opt-out protests of full body scanners did not materialize, and that on the whole, security screenings were quick and painless.

While the discomfort of commercial and humiliation of commercial aviation has little to do with the mendacity of the world’s government leaders, it is a far more immediate and actionable concern to the avergage citizen than the contents of the State Department cables. Furthermore, had opt-out protests materialized, it would have demonstrated in unequivocal fashion how social media tools, and the power of suggestion can have a real and profound impact offline. There is little that can be done with the information released at Cablegate.Wikileaks.Org through social media, except to share disappointment, shock or indignation–less so now that access is being limited.

Therefore, The Future Journalism Project is an attempt to look at the changing nature of our media, and the technologies that are disrupting old business models and opening up exciting new possibilities for storytellers.

In the Bay Are are many of the technologists whose tools will usher in transformation that is already underway, while on the East Coast, specially in New York City, are the media owners and content rat ors who will harness and recombine these tools to tell stories in increasingly-sophisticated, comprehensive formats that engage and activate communities both online and offline.

Indeed, the future of journalism does not belong to Julian Assange, nor does Wikileaks hold the pen, with or without its leader. The future of journalism, the media and storytelling as we know it is being constructed by star technologists in Silicon Valley and San Francisco as well as brilliant content creators in New York City. Furthermore, the future of the media is held in hand that cradles a telephone, because increasingly, each person is becoming a content creator and contributing to the larger story that is our collective future.

Today’s Guardian headline says it all; “US cable leaks spark global diplomatic crisis,” and demonstrates why Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is not long for this world.

Like a fly buzzing the ear of the world’s most powerful nations, Assange is bound to get swatted, and it will look like an accident when it happens. Surely the day is not far off.

Posted at Cablegate.Wikileaks.Org, a trove of 250,000 leaked dispatches were today circulated, uncovering among other things a wide scale spying operation ordered by the State Department to keep tabs on UN diplomats– quite often America’s allies–which even included the covert retrieval of DNA samples. Also revealed was that Saudi Arabia’s king had urged the U.S. to launch a preemptive strike against Iran’s suspected weapons-capable nuclear facilities, which, if true, would be nearly impossible to walk back.

Shown in the light of day, this represents nothing less than a pie in the face of the U.S. Department of State specifically, and the government as a whole. Anticipating the fallout, the U.S. State Department on Friday issued a warning to its allies to be prepared for an embarrassing leak of highly classified information, though this would do little to quiet the storm that is brewing.

The Wikileaks organization also demonstrated its media savvy, selecting the name “gate” in anticipation of an impending scandal, even before the news broke. By choosing a Sunday to make the revelation, Wikileaks will almost certainly dominate the news cycle on Monday, and possibly beyond, as millions of Americans return to their offices from a long holiday weekend.

Stemming the flow of such harmful information by a single source must today have risen to a top priority by intelligence agencies in the U.S. and elsewhere, as the potential damage of today’s leak is certainly massive. The means by which future Wikileaks blockbusters will be staunched will almost certainly be extrajudicial, and plans to that effect may have been set in motion by Cablegate.

Since the launch of Wikileaks as an online outpost for whistleblowers, Australian founder Julian Assange’s days have been numbered. Today he may have sped up the clock considerably.

Wikileaks was founded in 2006 and its “primary interest is in exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance to people of all regions who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their governments and corporations,” according to their home page. As an online repository of highly-sensitive, classified documents, videos and other sundry information, Wikileaks has brought to light killing for sport in Iraq by American helicopter pilots, corporate malfeasance, the contents of Sarah Palin’s personal email account and a diary of the Afghan War, among numerous other caches of data. Unlike the explosive release of the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971, in the age of social media, Wikileaks revelations go viral instantly.

There is something truly noble and commendable about the way in which Wikileaks uncovers the “truth,” which is far too often obscured, distorted or hidden from the public. What the average person knows about the world comes from a media establishment who increasingly sees its cozy relationship with government as a way to ensure access and a steady flow of puffy personality-driven stories.

Political journalism today has far too much to do with good looks, regurgitating official releases, and little to do with hard-hitting exposés, or actual news. Wikileaks will certainly never enjoy such privileges or access, and does not risk jeopardizing its standing with deep background sources or knowledgeable insiders by publishing inconvenient facts. While exposing our folly in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is one thing, Cablegate is a completely different beast.

While the press and the American public were provided with another burst of tragedy porn with secret documents pertaining to the Iraq war exposed, Wikileaks could do little to change the course of the war, which has depleted America’s treasury and given us a black eye. At best, what Wikileaks could do was to remind the American people that the war in Iraq is far from over–regardless of any troop drawdowns–and that our zeal for revenge will have far-reaching consequences in the Middle East and throughout the Arab world. In the end, it was a cheap thrill at the expense of the Iraqi people, paid for by American citizens. The revelation by Wikileaks that the groundtruth was far worse than we had feared was, at best, an anticlimax, grizzly though it was.

The difference between Iraq War leaks and Cablegate is that while the public at large has a visceral reaction to war and armed conflict, there is far more nuance to diplomacy, and secrecy is of the utmost importance. Therefore, this latest move is unprincipled and reckless.

Cablegate constitutes the release of sensitive information for which the public at large has little or no context for evaluation, and no means of corrective action. It’s a coup for Wikileaks, to be sure, but it will accomplish little for which the organization should boast, and they may have forced the hand of the U.S. government or other nations caught up in today’s controversy.

Discussions of Assange’s personal life and management style deserve scrutiny as well because they have bearing on his motives and state of mind. Facing questions about rape allegations stemming from two incidents in Sweden, and his public spat with a former staffer, Assange walked out of an October 2010 interview with CNN reporter Atika Shubert, refusing to address the issues. “This interview is about something else,” Assange told Shubert, according to Huffington Post. “I’m going to walk if you’re going to contaminate us revealing the deaths of 104,000 people with attacks against my person.”

From the video above, Assange appears erratic, irritable and paranoid. Believing himself to be under threat, Assange says he has had two encrypted laptops stolen from his luggage, and he is constantly on the move to avoid detection–though he does make the occasional press appearance. Furthermore, Assange has alienated key supporters who might otherwise provide him with safe haven and a sympathetic ear.

“Outside of the Iraq and Afghan dossiers, Wikileaks has been incapacitated by internal turmoil and politics,” Smari McCarthy, a former Wikileaks volunteer and freedom of information campaigners from Iceland, told The Independent.

“Key people have become very concerned about the direction of Wikileaks with regard to its strong focus on US military files at the expense of ignoring everything else. There were also serious disagreements over the decision not to redact the names of Afghan civilians; something which I’m pleased to see was not repeated with the Iraq dossiers.”

When New York Times reporter David Rhode was held hostage by the Taliban for seven months, competing journalism organizations agreed to an embargo on the story because it could have endangered his life and threatened his release if the information were made public. Despite the newsworthiness of his capture, the higher duty was preserve life through silence. Had Assange gotten hold of the story, it stands to reason that Wikileaks would have made it public in the interest of full disclosure, which could have lethal consequences.

Few people know what potentially damaging information Assange and the Wikileaks organization now possess, or what plans they have to release it. Assange seems to be on a crusade to undermine the American war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he is not operating according to any known playbook.

While the release of classified information can constitute a public service, and serves a key journalistic function, irresponsibly publishing the names of Afghan civilians who collaborated with American forces, spilling sordid details of American statecraft, or the next bombshell revelation have real-life implications and can undo the hard work of thousands of diplomats, soldiers, spies and real people who are working towards a goal. While me may not agree on what that goal is, it’s clear that there is a process involved. What are the real goals of Wikileaks, and what, if any method is Assange following?

When the next bombshell hits, this time it might just land in Assange’s lap.