I talk a lot more than I write these days. Blah blah blah people. Blah blah blah usability. Blah blah blah semantic web. There's probably good parts to my well-worn rap I could write down, but for me writing's always been about discovering something new, at least when it works.

So what's new on this quiet night? What new clarity might be found given all that's going on? I could comment on the many great movies I've seen lately. I could write yet again about the project, or other business blather. I could dredge up some tender detail from my life and tie it together with something real.

. . or . . .

I could write about the really interesting part, the part I see only in broken glimpses, as though I were driving past a winter forest, trying to make out some lake or canyon through leaves and branches.

Here's what I know so far: there will be a new art form, a new way to tell our stories, a new way to entertain and enlighten each other. Its defining characteristic will be interconnectedness. It won't be sequential, but it won't be haphazard. It won't be some kind of "you choose the ending" lame-o branching crap either. It'll be engaging, involving . . . geniunely creative.

In the early days of movies, they parked a camera in the audience and filmed the play. People would say, "Big deal. Where's the art?" It took time to develop the language of film, to imagine splices and overdubs and angles and closeups.

We're stuck the same way with digital media. We're still thinking photo albums, when there's so much more we can do. Our children's children will know a different world.

We get to invent it.