My world has become increasingly more surreal with each passing day in Silicon Valley.

Firstly, the success of my viral online marketing campaign is a little overwhelming. Being that we haven't even launched (except to a small group of alpha testers established eons ago), the current response floors me. My strategic plan was to seed deeper in the blogosphere et al post-launch to hope to facilitate the level of response we are receiving already. Not that I'm complaining, I really love success stories like this, especially when they are my own. Nearly 10,000 alpha requests (and growing), a launch party packed to the brim, 350 blogs pointing to Riya.com, several interviews under my belt and more to come, national magazines calling, and a very healthy rumormill later, our team here is feeling a little overwhelmed.

What is it? Is it my brilliant marketing prowress? Is it the really cool technology? Hmmm... the technology is definitely revolutionary and I think my marketing strategy on this one was pretty solid, but there is another layer at play here: we're on the upswing of a revolution.

Take, for instance, some examples of how technology is effecting our human interaction here in the Valley:

1. The other day I receive a text message (names changed): "Sam has been arrested! Check Flickr for details..."
   
   Wow...check FLICKR for details?! And, sure enough, the details were there. Photos of the action, the handcuffing, the holding cell, everything...complete with another meme folded in.
   
   
2. Couples are taking their quarrels online. In a former life, I recall calling a girlfriend when becoming frustrated with loved ones. Now, couples are posting their arguments to their blogs to seek out support.
   
   
3. Why call your friends to arrange meeting up for drinks when you have Dodgeball, Upcoming.org, Plazes, Skype and personal blogs? I could maybe tell you the telephone numbers of two friends here in the Bay Area, and that is only after looking them up on my phone...but I can tell you EXACTLY what each and every one of them is doing at any given moment.
   
   
4. Somehow, our Flickr favourites have become a barometer for our mental headspace. I was pinged the other day by someone asking me about my current situation due to a few too many photos of a certain someone in my favourites stream. Another friend recevied many emails of concern after posting too many photos of various 'artistic but naked' babes in his favourites stream. I suppose that 'favouriting' particularly dark photos out of character (maybe you are usually fond of bunnies and flowers?) could be a cry of distress. Erm, are we not picking up body language any longer?
   
   
5. A group of us went for coffee the other day. We spent more time Skyping one another than actually talking. Every single one of us sat at a different computer. It was a nice bonding experience. Laptops are also quite common at parties and other social outings here.
   

Believe me, I'm not saying that any of this is bad. There is no value judgement here. I actually find my new life fascinating and exciting. Nothing gives me more pleasure than being surrounded by geek speak and in front of an online connected laptop. What I'm saying is that things are going to get interesting as more and more people migrate online. I don't know if it will bring us closer together or further apart.

I do know that we can connect easier with people all over the world - enabling all sorts of opportunities. On the flipside, we are choosing to interact online more often than offline, so what does that do to intimacy?

The blogosphere has exploded with Technorati tracking 21.5 Million blogs. I'm not certain what the number of communication mediums is, but it seems to grow daily. Personally, I have 4 different IM clients currently on my desktop, 6 different email addresses where I recieve (currently) an average of 500 messages per day, several blogs to keep up, 150 blogs in my aggregator (often with several hundred posts per day to read), groups to follow (and that I run) on Upcoming and Flickr, and several different 'vanity searches' to do several times a day to determine where the buzz is at. Somewhere in between here, I have a life offline, but more and more I'm finding myself feeling naked without an internet connection wherever I go. I rely on these new communications mediums so heavily that picking up the phone and dialing is my last resort to finding information.

I know, I sound like I'm complaining. I'm not...that is the strangest part. I am thriving on this.

We in the Bay Area live in interesting times right now. I can feel the fever spreading outwards, too. Thus, we have been discussing how we are going to document this time in our lives and have started it off by:

1. Starting a new group on Flickr called 'Brat Pack 2.0', inspired by the energy of the new generation of geeks - the social software/open source driven generation. On there, we will post our photographic momentos of the fervor of the moment.
   
   
2. My partner in crime on this, Chris, has also started an Upcoming.org event stream for the Brat Pack.
   
   
3. Anything specifically Brat Pack 2.0 related should also be tagged specifically bratpack2.0. I've started a new del.icio.us account to keep track of this. I'll be posting the details on the Flickr group.

Any video, audio and otherwise useful online content will also be collected through various channels to create an archive of this cultural shift. I would love to bring this all together in a documentary afterwards. Perhaps the documentation will reflect the 'birth' of a movement in years to come, perhaps it will reflect a blip in time and space.

Either way, my experiences here have changed my life forever. If the project is only good so that I remember the shift, so be it.

technorati tags: longpost, geek, geekculture, riya, bratpack2.0