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Forrester Research analysts Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff call it The Groundswell. Nicholas Carr calls it The Big Switch. Tom Hayes calls it the Jump Point. Whatever it is, it's clearly going to involve major earthshaking.

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So Neil Young is apparently going to perform at JavaOne next week, where he's expected to belt out his Keep on Rockin' in the Free World anthem. Hey, hey. My, my. Will the encore be Needle and the Damage Done?

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When danger is at their door, people turn to social media sites, blogs, and instant messages, rather than the mainstream news media, for necessary information. Twitter and Google mashups in particular prove far more useful than traditional government channels, according to a report prepared at the University of Colorado. I learned that the hard way myself last year.

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I've been racking my brain all day to come up with an excuse to blog about the death of Albert Hofmann, the inventor of LSD. Turns out Nick Carr already beat me to it!

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Hey, FriendFeed users: Interested in getting InformationWeek headlines and TechWeb TV videos delivered to your feed? Get them now by friending InformationWeek on FriendFeed.

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Breaking up an impasse as bad as rush hour over La Guardia Airport, the U.S. Senate this week is set to pass a reauthorization bill for the Federal Aviation Administration that may finally pave the way for modernizing the nation's antiquated air traffic control system.

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Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor at NYU who studies social media, gave a stirring talk at Web 2.0 Expo last week on the Web 2.0 revolution -- how it's harnessing all the brainpower made available by the societal changes of the past 60 years. That time was, until recently, wasted watching mindless television, but now it's being put to work on Web 2.0 projects, some profound and some silly, but all significant.

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When I set out to do an article about fans of the TV show Lost and how they're using the Internet, I didn't think I'd learn anything about using Web 2.0 for business. I thought it was an article our readers might find entertaining, and that I'd enjoy doing, and nothing more than that. And yet I was pleasantly surprised to find that a couple of business lessons popped out, about self-organizing groups and how they can get results without traditional, top-down management.

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A treadmill desk is a desk that doesn't have a chair, but instead has a treadmill in front of it. The theory is that you stand up and walk while you work or play on your computer, getting exercise while going digital. When I first heard this idea, I thought the idea was completely insane. But the more I hear about it, the more it make sense to me, and I think I'll give it a try.

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Sometimes you just need to change the rules to stay on message. So when a panel of affiliate marketing experts and consultants convened Tuesday to discuss their industry and how it can evolve and mesh with Web 2.0 ideas, we had to know more.

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Most Web sites for conferences are pretty poorly designed. Simple tasks, like scrutinizing the schedule or finding the show hotel, take too long and are too painful to accomplish. That's one of the problems that Confabb, a directory, rating service, and social network for conferences, is looking to solve. I met with Confabb at Web 2.0 Expo, and got the lowdown from the company chairman.

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FriendFeed is absent in body from Web 2.0 Expo this week, but present in spirit. It's coming up quite a bit in conversation, even though the company isn't exhibiting or speaking here. FriendFeed is a social network for power users -- it aggregates feeds from your Twitter account, blog, Flickr, LinkedIn, and 31 other types of social services and presents them in a single feed for your friends to read. I decided to give FriendFeed a try and share my first impressions with you.

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We've been filling out our roster of great writers on the InformationWeek Blog and broadening the range of subjects we cover, paying particular attention to beefing up the enterprise coverage we've historically excelled at. We're proud of that -- but we also know that the sheer volume makes it hard to keep up. Heck, even I find it hard to keep up, and it's my job.

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On my way to the Web 2.0 Expo keynotes, I came across this funny Twitter message from journalist Rafe Needleman.

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Is Google getting into the burrito business? Why else would the company register bayareaburritos.com and thesecretofburritos.com?

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Keynote speakers at the Web 2.0 Expo on Wednesday delivered inspirational messages to keep innovators dreaming and working hard in the face of an economic slowdown. Tim O'Reilly, CEO of O'Reilly Media, said the Web 2.0 revolution is just getting started. He challenged attendees to work on big, world-changing problems, saying that the most successful companies in the technology industry have "big, hairy audacious goals."

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In an interview with InformationWeek, the incoming CEO of Linden Lab said he's fascinated by businesses that grow up in Second Life. He also paid tribute to the "largely unfettered" creativity of the Second Life community. And he declined to comment about whether he's preparing the company for IPO or sale.

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SAN FRANCISCO -- Web site owners who focus exclusively on building pages are just scratching the surface of Internet audience-building. Feeds, search engines, and widgets can vastly expand the potential audience for any Web site by bringing the content directly to the audience, said Web consultant Niall Kennedy, giving a workshop at Web 2.0 Expo here.

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The Second Life community today got its first good news in what seems like forever -- Linden Lab, the creator and operator of the virtual world, announced its pick for new CEO. At first glance, his resumé looks like the right combination of business acumen and creativity needed to restart the engines on the foundering ship.

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As Egyptian police were descending on UC Berkeley graduate journalism student James Karl Buck, he had time to send just one word to his friends on Twitter: "ARRESTED." Buck had been photographing a noisy demonstration, and as he was being hauled off to jail, friends around the world rallied to his support.

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What would Thomas Jefferson think about Web 2.0? Libertarians gathered earlier this week at the Jefferson Memorial to dance silently for 10 minutes (listening to music on iPods) in celebration of the founder's birthday. When police came along and ordered them to disperse, one dancer failed to obey, and she was led away in handcuffs. Since then, libertarians have used BlackBerrys and cell phone cameras to spread the word and drum up support for the woman they're calling the "Jefferson One."

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How did I get so old? And what have I done with my life? Facebook triggers an existential crisis.

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Users are drumming up petitions, blog posts, and Web sites aimed at trying to convince Microsoft to continue support for Windows XP, which Microsoft plans to discontinue on new computers beginning June 30.

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Marc Andreessen, Max Levchin, Jonathan Schwartz, Yahoo's CTO, the chief architect for Al Gore's Current TV, and The Fake Steve Jobs will be there. What about you?

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Jason Snell at Macworld has some totally awesome tips for making you into an iPhone ninja. My favorite batch of tips apply to any camera phone: Use the camera to take pictures of, well, anything you don't want to forget.

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Office pranks have come a long way since those early days of filling a vacationing co-worker's cubicle with packing peanuts or covering all the items in her office with tinfoil. This one, for example, gives new meaning to the phrase "home away from home."

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Mozilla introduced Firefox 3 Beta 5 on Wednesday, with more than 750 changes from the previous beta, including improved stability and Web compatibility, user interface enhancements, performance improvements, and better integration with Windows, the Mac, and Linux.

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With the dawn of the Internet, April Fools' Day has taken on a whole new level. Today's BBC news report about a recently discovered breed of flying penguin reaches far many more viewers (via YouTube) than its 1957 television piece about the Swiss harvesting spaghetti off of trees.

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At Startup Camp in London, I met Nick Halstead, the erstwhile founder behind fav.or.it, a new blog aggregation site that's been widely discussed in the, um, blogosphere (there's a dog chasing its tail somewhere in that statement).

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Attackers targeted a messaging board for the nonprofit Epilepsy Foundation and posted JavaScript code and flashing computer animation to trigger migraine headaches and seizures in some users.

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Surely by now you've seen the video of the "Big Dog" -- the amazing quadruped robot designed to serve as a "pack mule" for soldiers in terrains where military vehicles are unable to manage or maneuver. I'll wager, however, you've never seen the original "Beta model" in action?

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Maybe it's the end of Lent and the coming of spring, but despite the gloomy economic prospects there's definitely a spirit of reconciliation and conflict-resolution in the air of the U.S. tech industry.

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My neighbor is building an addition to his house. Lots of details. Lots of draft work. His contractor and architect use the time-honored methods. It looks painful. But it doesn't have to be.

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I had a chance to talk with the CEO of Qwaq the other day. Qwaq makes virtual worlds software optimized for corporate meetings. If you've spent time in Second Life, you know the power of avatars and 3-D spaces to enhance conversations and collaboration. It's hard to explain to people who've never tried virtual worlds, but it's real. Qwaq is an attempt to tailor virtual worlds for business collaboration, adding features that businesses need and taking away features that are harmful.

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Budding Wolf Blitzers can bring their news reporting talents to the Web and Second Life using a citizen journalism program run by CNN. Reporters post video, photos, audio, and text reports to the beta iReport site, and have the news appear on the site unfiltered. The best contributions appear on CNN itself.

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Writer A.J. Jacobs takes the debonair actor on a hilarious cybertour of what people are saying about him on the Internet. He bravely reads his Wikipedia entry, looks up reviews of his best and worst movies, and joins the Facebook group "George Clooney is NOT the sexiest man alive."

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Welcome to our new end-of-the-week feature. The clever and astute might recall seeing a similar incarnation on the Network Computing Blogs a while back. I convinced (read: fast-talked and begged) the powers-that-be that this would be a fun way to bid the last five days buh-bye and head into the weekend.

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We caught up with Peter Semmelhack, president and CEO of Bug Labs, to talk about how his company is building tools to allow users to build any mobile device "as easy as snapping Legos together." The company's mobile devices are based on open source hardware and software to foster innovation. Watch now to get a look at the devices, and find out how Bug Labs hopes to make money by giving technology away for free.

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Arthur C. Clarke, who died Wednesday, spent more than 60 years writing about how communications and computing technology could help drive the the next stage of human evolution. So it's appropriate that he's now being remembered on the international communications network, the Internet.

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Yesterday I read two articles that suggested Web 2.0 growth is stunted, if not actually in danger of stopping altogether.

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Back in January, I pondered if I would be able to survive a week away from e-mail, cell phones (other than for emergencies), and overall connectivity during my family's trip to Disneyworld. Several readers expressed surprise and disbelief at such a quandary, saying how easy it was for them to leave their gear behind for vacations and extended periods of time. According to a new study, however, disconnect anxiety is not all that uncommon.

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Philip Rosedale, the co-founder of Second Life, is stepping aside as CEO of corporate parent Linden Lab, and the company will begin a search for a CEO with more operational and management experience. This could be great news for Second Life and its community -- the service is, in many ways, brilliant, but it often trips over its feet when trying to execute some of the functions that are basic to any business, like communicating with big customers and processing payments.

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Fox Business had me on this morning to introduce its viewers to social networking. I explained a little about what it is, who the big players are, and why it's popular. I talked about the differences between the three big companies, MySpace, Facebook, and Bebo, and why people like them. We're a social species (I said), and socnets replace the kind of face-to-face casual conversation we'd have if we all lived in the same small town and ran into each other on the streets every day. Watch the video below.

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For a telecom and Web conference, the Emerging Communications Conference at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley this week had a lot of talk of death and extinction. Most of it was related to the big telecom carriers.

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Fox Business Network is going to interview me tomorrow about AOL buying Bebo. They're going to put pancake makeup on me. I told them if they wanted to make me look good, they're going to have to apply it with a trowel.

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We caught up with the former Grateful Dead lyricist and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation at the ETech conference in San Diego last week. He says technology is beating Hollywood efforts to control knowledge. We talked about how people will make money if they can't sell copies of their work, and more.

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I've been beta testing Hulu.com, the NBC Universal - News Corp. collaboration that puts TV shows and some movies online. At first blush ... it's very entertaining and there are some enterprise possibilities, but why does it have to be so much like TV?

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Now here's a great idea: Register with the Takes All Types facebook application, tell them your location and blood type, and they'll contact you when your blood is needed.

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Wikipedia gets 300 million page views per day and could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars if it sold ads. But it doesn't -- it survives on donations. The company hired an executive director nine months ago, and is looking for ways to raise revenue, which is tough because it's a not-for-profit that depends to a huge degree on volunteer labor.

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Just as the Internet has evolved over the past decade and a half, the language used to describe it has evolved as well. We used to say "World Wide Web," now we just say "Web." English tends to get more compact and faster over time.

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