As I started my day I tuned into to watch my friends on CBC News Morning and the lead story is about more massive cuts and layoffs at General Motors. While this is obviously an economic and labour story, Danielle Bochove at one point summed up the situation when she said, "It's become a story about speed."

GM had already made cuts and plans to respond to rising fuel prices, however they were clearly not enough. In fact GM found that the speed by which the economy is changing is far faster than expected, as is the speed by which consumers are buying smaller cars.

Unfortunately the Canadian Auto Workers had just concluded a new contract with GM, and these announcements effectively undermine it, showing the drastic measures GM is taking.

I work with organizations quite a bit smaller than GM, however my primary focus tends to be helping the client accelerate their corporate culture so as to be more responsive and capable of handling the pressures of our network age.

The ability for an organization to move quickly and respond to changing conditions is crucial, and yet there are many risks to speeding up, and I suspect increasingly we're going to see the wrong way far more often then not.

Take General Motors for example. While they definitely need to move faster in the direction of smaller and more fuel efficient vehicles, they also have a commitment to their workers and their families. So their ability to respond quickly and increase their overall speed as a company must also include working with their unions rather than negotiating in bad faith which they've done.

The old and obsolete school of seeing your workforce as hostile and expendable will only result in slowing down your ability to rapidly respond to changing conditions.

Successful organizations will unite the leadership structure with the combined intelligence and labour of all the diverse employees and customers/constituents that are part of the enterprise.

April seemed to fly by so quickly I was unable to post any of the reviews or thoughts I had over the last month. While I have been posting some items to my private network, I still have several posts I will be publishing on my blog in the days and weeks to come.

On Sundays I tend to spend my late afternoon and early evening going over my rss feeds and news sources in part to look at the week past but mostly to get a gauge on the week ahead.

The big news over the weekend of course is that Microsoft has backed off in their quest to buy Yahoo. The irony for me is that this past Thursday morning I did a series of interviews on CBC Radio in which I speculated that the merger was inevitable. I still believe this to be the case, however it seems the likelihood of my being right is getting lower and lower.

Check out this series of headlines from the New York Times:

• May 1st: Microsoft Outlines Its Yahoo Strategies
• May 2nd: Raising Yahoo Bid, Microsoft Steps up Talks
• May 2nd: Higher Offer by Microsoft Brings Yahoo to Table
• May 3rd: Microsoft Withdraws Bid for Yahoo
• May 4th: Will Microsoft Really Walk?

That's just the New York Times. The blogosphere as a whole is just exploding with posts, and even I am breaking a month long hiatus to post on the subject. Ironically a lot of the talk is on the death of Yahoo, and the degree to which their price will fall in the morning. This suggests to me that Microsoft may be doing all of this to drive the price lower so as to finally acquire Yahoo.

Yet who knows what will happen, and it goes to show that just when something appears to be certain it will quickly transform into something entirely different. Expect the unexpected!

One of the things I'm committed to doing in 2008 is organizing more public events. Last year, I ran a number of private interactive and intellectual discussions, which nurtured a desire to develop a larger and more public configuration for them.

To use a software development metaphor, my first public event was an alpha test, in that it was a raw and open exploration of a few concepts I've been developing or have seen in the wild and wanted to try myself.

Recently, there has been considerable innovation when it comes to event organizing, with the emergence of the BarCamp phenomenon as well as the Open Space movement. I am inspired by both, but still see room to incorporate my own sensibilities and experiences.

I've spent the last few years working in television and really studying the direction that industry is going, while also absorbing everything I can about production, both behind the scenes and on-camera. My approach to organizing events has been deeply impacted by this exploration of the television aesthetic and, conversely, my approach to television is heavily influenced by my love of live, interactive events.

The context to all this is, of course, the Internet, where I spend most of my time, and I'm always thinking how to bring the culture and properties of the Internet to live events and broadcast television. Often it has been the focus and/or subject matter. However, in the future, my intention is to run events in which the Internet is so ubiquitous as to no longer require explicit attention.

That is why I chose politics as the focus of my first event. I hoped to capture the zeitgeist of our time (with Obama inspiring a new generation) and tackle a subject that everyone should be able to relate to, one that lends itself to debate and disagreement.

For quite a while now I've been arguing that the traditional conference configuration is obsolete. Of course I'm not alone in asserting this. The incredibly popularity of the Camp phenomena represents a grassroots demonstration of why interactivity and spontaneity are becoming assumed qualities for any gathering big or small.

It's no surprise therefore to watch the fallout from the Mark Zuckerberg Q&A at the SXSW conference in Austin this past weekend. The session was hosted/moderated by journalist Sarah Lacy, and by all accounts it was a total disaster. Why? Sarah failed to either prepare for the panel itself, or be able to effectively engage the energy of the audience.

Add to this the power of twitter to give the audience a collective voice that can effectively organize and overwhelm the stage first with tweets than with heckling.

I've been organizing an event to be held at MaRS on March 18th, and one of our plans from the beginning was to have a big screen with an active twitter feed. This was meant as one of many means by which the audience can become an integral part of our event.

For a long time I've been working on ideas to expand the spontaneity and interactivity of live events, and this upcoming event at MaRS will serve as one of a series of beta tests I'll be doing to test out some of my concepts.

This past week I was overwhelmed with responses from a number of media stories. A couple of Blackberry business articles, a couple of Facebook expert articles, an article about a Hong Kong sex scandal, as well as some TV and radio appearances, first about the bust of a child porn ring, and then about the bust of a Quebec based Hacker cell.

In general my policy is to respond to anyone who takes the time to get in touch with me. Yet I've now had to revise this policy to only reply to people who show respect rather than outright hostility. Something about the audience that reads the National Post that brings all sorts of trolls out from under the bridge.

The CBC audience on the other hand is a pleasure to interact with. Even when they strongly disagree with me I find CBC viewers and listeners to be intelligent and engaging. One particularly pleasant email I received was from a "middle-aged mother" who will remain nameless, but I suspect represents a typical Canadian, from an average family. For the sake of argument, let's call her Louise.

Information overload is a growing problem that most of us face each and every day. Email, phone calls, voice mail, facebook notifications, and that doesn't include the endless flow of spam. However there's no reason all this constant communication can't be tamed and organized so that we don't feel the stress and anxiety associated with being under a waterfall of information.

While some may feel powerless in the face of technological change, resigned to the notion that all this email and information is necessary for their work or personal advancement, the reality is that the cost of our desire to always be connected is high and still growing.

For example the research firm Basex Inc examined the economic impact of information overload on the US economy, and their findings point to a steady growth from one year to the next. In 2005 the cost of information overload to the US economy was $588 billion dollars and in 2006 that figure grew to $650 billion.

Perhaps a more tangible way to articulate this cost is via a similar study conducted by Intel, which estimated that people on average lose 8 hours of every week to information overload.

There is an interesting article on the cover of today's New York Times that delves into some of the support behind former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee. Explicitly the description of Huck's Army sounds quite similar to the Ron Paul Army, although the latter is even more independent and autonomous than the former.

What they both have in common is an effective Internet strategy that allows them to make do with less, while also raising considerable funds online. Huckabee and Paul have both been outspent by opponents who blanket mainstream media with negative ads. Yet in the face of this they've both been able to use the Internet to speak directly to their growing supporters, inspiring them to work for and donate to the campaign.

I'm curious therefore to see whether Huckabee will be able to place well in Michigan and even if he can win in South Carolina this week. Is he independent and populist enough to win over some of the Ron Paul supporters? Would a ticket with Mike Huckabee as President and Ron Paul as Vice-President be popular? Though I do suspect that such a team would be vetoed by the Republican establishment which has the capability to parachute in their own nominees at the last minute.

Obviously the politics behind choosing a running mate is more than just mathematics and match-making. At this point the openly expressed symbolism has Chuck Norris as the VP in a Huckabee administration.

I think if the primary elections involved declaring a running mate it would be far more interesting. It could be balanced by having a deadline to declare a running mate relatively late in the game, thus increasing the possibility of competitors dropping out to become running mates for other candidates.

The really powerful combination would be if Barack Obama agreed to be Hillary Clinton's running mate. That would be the type of historical administration that could actually start to change the world's perception of America.

While this would all but guarantee that Obama is the next Democratic presidential nominee after Hillary, I doubt he'd agree to it, and I'm also not sure that the Clinton camp would want it either. I wouldn't rule it out however. Their combined thirst for power may be enough for them to get over their respective egos and see the opportunity such a combination offers.

The same is true for Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul.

Yesterday's results in Iowa demonstrate that the Internet is playing a central and strategic role in the 2008 US Presidential Election.

Mike Huckabee, with the help of Chuck Norris, has been able to defeat Mitt Romney who out spent him by a factor of 20! Some estimates put Romney's Iowa expenditures at $10,000 per vote.

Barack Obama, with the help of Obama Girl, has been able to defeat Billary who admittedly had low expectations for Iowa to begin with. It's also worth noting that John Edwards has been able to stay in the race, in no small part due to his sophisticated Internet operation.

Of course I'm not suggesting that literally the videos I cite above are responsible for the victories. Rather the candidates who won did so against the odds and the Internet played an important role in that victory.

Which brings me to the story many journalists are missing this morning, which is Ron Paul. His results in Iowa may seem small compared to the victors, yet 10 and 11 percent is actually quite impressive for the congressman from Texas.

Ron Paul is running the most successful Internet campaign of any candidate because he and his campaign team make no effort to control their online activity. What shocks most journalists and political consultants is the way in which the Ron Paul campaign is autonomous and spontaneous.

The $20 million dollars raised in the last quarter of 2007 will go along way to keeping Congressman Paul in the race. He may not win, but he will affect the process as a whole.

Today, after Iowa, it's clear that there is great sentiment for Change. Huckabee, Obama, Paul, all are candidates that campaign from the outside, call for change, and embody the Internet's President.

Mind you, don't count out Billary and John McCain. The former has money and a machine that can keep them competitive right till the end. McCain has also been using the Internet quite effectively to offest his fundraising problems. He may easily win New Hampshire now that Romney is on the ropes.

For the record, I like aspects of all these candidates. I'm loving this election, and am looking forward to it getting strange, weird, and totally out of control!

Near the end of 2007 I had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Ursula Franklin regarding her political and religious beliefs, as well as her lifelong activism and social criticism. I first heard her speak in 1995 at a conference around community access to the information highway (oh what weird words we used back then). At the time I was just starting to look at critical perspectives on technology, and Ursula's work influenced me quite a bit. Her definition of technology as being "how we do things around here" helped me understand the cultural impact of technology where others tend to miss this crucial influence.

In this interview we cover quite a bit of ground, starting with the analysis of the rise of techno-fascism, and the destructive impact of a society that is driven by the machines of war, which we contrast to the role of feminism and pacifism in moving towards a more socially just society. This discussion was an extension of the ideas in her latest book, The Ursula Franklin Reader: Pacifism as a Map, which was published by Between The Lines.

Technology is something that shapes our experience, the tools we use have so much influence on how we do what we do. Which is why I feel an ethics of technology is so important. We require the critical capacity to evaluate and understand the potential impact of our technology. However so many stumble forward blindly, immersing themselves in, and ingesting wholesale the technology that surrounds them.