*On teh Internets*

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!

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

I said I wasn’t interested, but the  iPad DJ app from Mixr makes me think that I would actually buy the device, and rock it owt!