This, my friends, is such a time.

If you know a BlackBerry user, reach out to them. (Not with email. That's just mean.) Let them know you care, and that just because they were offline for a few days, you still love and respect them.

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Some predictions are extrapolated from data, drawn from careful observations of long-term trends, and inferred from past patterns and outcomes. Those, though, aren't the ones that get the blood pumping and the retweets flying; the predictions that really get arguments going are the ones grounded in sheer opinion.

Baby steps, then: I hereby predict that I'm going to keep working on improving my drawings of pith helmets.

We're now accustomed to digital miracles. High-speed, jaw-dropping graphics on a cheap gaming platform? Been there. The video projector that sits in the palm of your hand? Old news. Casual 10-way videoconferencing? Thanks, Google. (Now what else have you got?) A massive personal catalog of music you can access from nearly anywhere you're likely to go today? Apple is about to deliver it, and they're playing catch-up to Google and Amazon.

No, not Apollo-level engineering triumphs or half-million-mile moon missions. But things that would blow not just our ancestors' minds (flying at hundreds of miles an hour!) or our grandparents' (a powerful computer you can carry in a bag!), but our own, just a few short years ago.

These are the days of miracles and wonder (and Paul Simon hadn't seen the Web when he wrote those words 25 years ago) and every once in a while, it's worth taking the time to look at the latest new development not just with acquisitive glee, but with a little awe.

(P.S. - Clay Shirky and the cognitive surplus.)

Nuts. No luck.

Where was I? Right: when the news about Google Plus broke, I was as curious as anyone about— Wait! Someone just tweeted that they're accepting newly invited users at a special URL!

So. When the news about Google+ broke, I was as curious as anyone else about what it would mean. (Other than the inevitable flood of "Why your brand must be on Google Plus right frigging now!!!", "Why Google Plus will kill Facebook" and "Why Google Plus will doom Google to a lingering painful death" blog posts, that is.)

Well, in the 20 minutes it's taken me to write this, I've actually managed to get an invitation to work, and I am inside the walls of the kingdom.

So what's it like? Where's the value? Will it complement, supersede or succumb to Facebook?

I honestly can't tell you, because I'm completely hooked on the little add-friends-to-Circles animation, and I think it'll be weeks before I move on to any other features.

I'll keep you posted.

Until I opened the page in Safari, and had a look at the source.

Or, rather, didn't. It turns out Safari in iOS – you're going to want to sit down for this – doesn't have a "View Source" command.

Instead, I opened the page in Atomic Browser. Which (ahhhh!) does let you view the source of a web page.

"You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone," sang Joni Mitchell in 1970, which is how I know she had access to very early Firefox and iPhone betas. Because only someone who has had access to View Source, and then lost it, could understand the concept of loss well enough to write those words.

View Source is more than just a menu command; it's the Rosetta Stone to web innovation.

View Source turns "take it into the shop" into "pop open the hood and see what's broken."

View Source turns "How did they do that?" into "So that's how they do that."

View Source turns "I did this once" into "Everyone can do this again and again."

View Source turns a dozen people reinventing the same wheel into a dozen better wheels.

View Source turns a magician revealing her secrets into tens, hundreds or thousands of new magicians.

In short, View Source is a big part of what puts the "write" in the read-write web.

(Credit where it's due: while I made some progress on my own, the solution to my problem ultimately came thanks to Michael Sisk, creator of the free Webcomic WordPress plugin that powers Noise to Signal — as well as the comic I'm launching on Monday.)

But by the time the game was due to end, I thought it might be safe to start peeking again. And that's when I started to see the ensuing riot unfold in ASCII: A car overturned. Then another. Then one on fire. Then windows being broken. And then all hell breaking loose.

So not only were people live-tweeting from the scene (including some harrowing feeds from reporters in the crowd), but they were shooting photos and video. The police won't have to slap down a warrant to pick up that footage, as they did in 1994 when the people with the cameras were TV crews. Instead, clips and snapshots from ordinary people are flooding into Vancouver Police Department headquarters... heavily enough to crash their server, at one point.

But people aren't just sending their content in privately. They're also posting it to YouTube, Flickr and Facebook — and in some cases, tagging the faces of the people in the shots. In fact, dedicated pages and Tumblr sites were already up and running before the last of the flames were doused on Wednesday night. About an hour or two into the riot, I was seeing calls on Twitter for people to post, identify and, sometimes, publicly shame those involved... or fire them.

All of that has raised the question of whether we've crossed a line between an involved citizenry and what my wife Alexandra Samuel calls citizen surveillance. (She has no issue with the police soliciting photos and videos from the public; her concern is once it goes networked, social and large-scale — not to mention public.)

Alex wrote a post in the Harvard Business Review and a follow-up on her own blog that have sparked a lively conversation: What's the difference between individuals sending police raw information and networks of people publicly identifying possible miscreants? And is there a meaningful distinction between using social media to turn a spotlight on abuses by those in power, and using it to identify (and publicly shame) individuals?

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1: Find some white space on your site.
2: Fill it with an ad.
3: There is no number three. Check out these great discount air fares!

It starts innocently enough, with a few AdSense text placements. But before you know it, you have one of those Flash-based monstrosities lurking in your sidebar - the kind you don't dare roll over, because if you do it spawns some demonic window that extends outside the boundaries of your monitor and knocks over furniture in your family room, while playing The Macarena at 130% volume.

It launched last month, and the tuition fees aren't small; they're along the lines of what you'd pay for a decent continuing ed class at your local college or university. That puts them in a different price bracket from most of the approaches I've seen newspapers take to finding a new source of income, like subscriptions or pay-per-article fees.

I wish them luck. Anything to avoid another banner ad.

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Or is the occasional I-can't-believe-my-elected-representative-just-tweeted-that (or I-can't-believe-my-favorite-clothing-designer-just-tweeted-that) the price we pay for a free-wheeling, spontaneous Web?

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I'm celebrating with a caption contest and I'll think of something else fun to do on the actual day. (It may involve a cocktail with such ingredients as gin, vermouth and Koh-I-Noor drawing ink, with a Pigma Micron marker instead of a swizzle stick.)

The cartoon's changed a lot since then. I used to rough out a cartoon in pencil, draw it in ink, scan it in and retouch it. Today my workflow is most always all-digital. And my iPad is now my tool of choice for sketching ideas on the fly. (Thank you, SketchBook Pro.)

You've all helped make this one of the most worthwhile things I do. Thank you. And see you next week.

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That's true in even the most traditional fields, but if you're working in an emerging field like social media, you probably run into it constantly. And you may have learned such strategies as...

Or you could do something completely insane: getting to know what makes your nemesis tick, identifying the fears or doubts that keep them up at night, and addressing them. In short, you could engage with the enemy honestly and try to bring them around to a more positive outlook. (And if that doesn't sate your lust to avenge a beloved cancelled initiative, you can always reflect on what Abraham Lincoln supposedly said about destroying your enemies by making them your friends).

Best-case scenario: you gain a supporter. Worst-case scenario: they win you over to their bleak, despairing view of the world. In which case, at least you can while away the hours... by finding reasons to say no to other people's projects.

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But for someone who never saw used the word "friend" as a verb in her life, Mom taught me an awful lot about social networking.

Things like being of service, and giving instead of taking. Mom volunteered on everything from the local community association to the church. (It got to the point where someone witnessed a break-in at our home - the burglar walked in through the unlocked front door - and thought nothing of it except "Poor JoAnne; people aren't even bothering to knock any more when they walk in with more work for her to do.")

Or like finding a niche and filling it. When they moved to a small rural community, one where news coverage was next to non-existent, Mom and Dad started a local newspaper. It was a labour of love, not profit; a month where their revenue exceeded their printing and distribution costs was a pretty good month. But they kept it going for years.

And when I'm having my greatest impact online, it's almost always when I'm doing one of those things I saw Mom do so often in the offline world.

And while she didn't have analytics to track their progress, or an ROI measurement strategy so she could tell if what she was doing was worthwhile, she did have a clear reward for her efforts: a large, broad circle of friends. As Mom and Dad's kids, we were often beneficiaries of the goodwill they earned, with warmth and friendliness automatically extended to us by virtue of our parents' contributions. And toward the end of their lives, when they had to draw on that community more than they were able to give to it, those people were there for them.

What did your mother teach you about social networking?

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True, we don't have to write notes to school like "Dear teacher, Monique won't be attending classes today because our entire village was wiped out by the Black Plague," or arrange birthday parties at the mastadon petting zoo without the benefit of Evite or Facebook Events.

In short, sure: maybe they walked to school uphill both ways through three feet of snow nine days a week. But they didn't have a peer group expecting them to check in on Foursquare when they got there.

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Tumblr is a fast-growing publishing platform (last month we reported it has now raised more money and sees more hosted pageviews each month than WordPress) but it has struggled with occasional down-time, as such platforms often do. Its urban hipster image sometimes leads to mockery of its upset users when they complain of downtime, but we argued in support of those emotions in a December post titled Why a Day of Tumblr Downtime Matters to the Entire Web & World.

You'll note that the monsters got a name change when they were let inside the house. Personally, I like Inman's TumblBeasts a little better.

Inman has propelled his web comic to fame less than two years since launching it. He was the subject of an interview on tech blog Mashable this morning, for example. Inman has grown famous on the web for web-centric humor satirizing things like email, but has built his business from sales of more utilitarian works of humor like How to Use a Semicolon. Next time Tumblr goes down, which Inman tongue-in-cheek Tweets he hopes happens soon, now you'll know where that image came from.

In the Summer of 2008, ReadWriteWeb's Sarah Perez wrote about how a much less well-known designer named Yiying Lu posted a whale graphic to iStockPhoto and then saw a community of Twitter fans propel the image into official use as the page telling users when Twitter is down.

But today? In a few minutes, they could post it to Tumblr, Posterous, WordPress, 4chan and - just for the hell of it - Plenty of Fish, with plenty of time left over for Michael and Fiona to agonize over their relationship, for Sam and Fiona to explore their rivalry for Michael's attention (I suspect they each had emotionally distant parents), and for Michael and Jesse to finally acknowledge the sexual tension between them.

It's possible I'm overreaching. That may have to be a two-parter.

So to the action movie clichés of which wire to cut and cars slamming into fruit carts, you can soon add batteries running low, cell phone jammers, and "Why did I choose AT&T?"

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But the news that PayPal will now allow you to transfer money to someone just by bumping your iPhone or Android device with theirs - that's pretty cool.

Makes you wonder what else you could swap. Maybe DNA?

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