When was the last time your fingers did the walking?

I don’t know why they still bother to drop these off at my house. It seems they go from the front stoop to the recycling bin without ever reaching a shelf in my kitchen cabinets. Of course, I am talking about the phonebook.

We used to rely solely on location and whether they had a BBB logo on their ad. Today, we find restaurants, plumbers, electricians, etc. by searching digital sites like Angie’s List, check-ins on Foursquare, or reviews on Yelp. Or, we simply ask our massive networks of “friends” or “followers” on Facebook and Twitter. One thing that digital has brought us is more educated decision making – be it a place to grab dinner, or a business to have fix that leaky faucet.

On the flip side, you used to rely on the phonebook to find the number of a classmate, or a neighbor. Have you ever tried this online? Search your own name, and you get dozens of sites that have your name, phone number, address, kids’ names…more than you could possibly need…that is if all you were looking for were their digits. Yes, going digital has made replication and redistribution of information much, much easier. And this could be viewed as a positive, or a negative.

You used to be able to simply place a call, maybe fill out a form (on paper) requesting your phone number not be listed, and that pretty much guaranteed some privacy. If they weren’t listed, their was no way to get their number. You had to know someone, who knows someone, that went to school with that person’s second cousin first removed, before you got what you were looking for.

Today, all you need is a name and maybe a Facebook account. After all, Facebook has decreased the 7 degrees of separation to 3.74.

Yes, these are the times in which we live. Millions upon billions of hard drives scattered in computers and servers around the world feeding other computers and servers around the world, what one 1,000+ page book used to do. Why wait for such information to be delivered to your doorstep? Just type it into Google.

Do you still use the phonebook? My grandma does.

Magazines from print to floppy to cloud.

PaaS: Pizza-as-a-Service with the push of a [fridge magnet]

Google asks us to fill in the blank: “The Internet is the power to________”