Among HuffPo’s top 11:

• iPod: little needs to be said, except, do you remember your life before having gigabytes of music in your pocket to listen to on demand?
• iTunes: made digital music downloads mainstream
• TiVo: the neutron bomb that hit TV. Do you remember when you had to watch TV in the order it was presented, or pop in a VHS tape to “time-shift”? How last millennium!
• Blackberrys/crackberrys/iPhones/PDAs in general: a computer on your belt or in your purse that is way more powerful than the computer you used to have on your desk, and it’s a phone and it’s connected to the web too!
• Kindle: still on the upswing, but do you remember where you were when Gutenberg invented the printing press? (don’t worry, it was 1439). You’ll tell your grandkids about seeing the first e-book. Yes, it’s that big.
• USB flash drives: flash memory in general is an absolutely revolutionary tool, as it allows us to record visual images (photos, video) on tiny devices that can go anywhere and record anything (which can then be uploaded on the worldwide communications platform we call The Internet). It also allows us to carry up to 300GB of data in our back pocket and hand it (say, nuclear secrets) to anyone we want.
• HDTV: 50 years after the commercialization of TV, the next step in picture quality, opening up all sorts of possibilities, but mostly, allowing men to watch football on giant screens.

Huffpo’s list is mainly “gadgets,” in other words tech hardware with some nifty software inside. What about things that were either sold or used only as software, on existing hardware? No diff really, but Huffpo skipped those, so here are a few I’d add:

• Google: came out in 98-99, but it didn’t gain popularity until 2000. Changed web search from a frustrating and incomplete exercise into an extension of our brains and thoughts.
• Facebook: changed online personas from sock puppets/imaginary selves to real people knitting their lives together.
• Twitter: it’s the first wave of the ‘real time web’ where information is shared almost as soon as it is created
• Blogging/content management systems: Took the creation of web content away from computer professionals and put it in the hands of everyone.
• Wikipedia: the open documentation and organization of all the world’s information
• YouTube: the first major step toward moving TV/video content onto the web. Trust me, by the end of the next decade, you won’t use a satellite dish or cable or rabbit ears to get TV content. It will all come over the Internet.
• Skype: buh bye, copper phone lines. Hullo, cheap voice and video phone calls over the web.
• BitTorrent: An amazingly simple way to share huge files containing entertainment (movies, concerts) over the net. I can now download a three hour, 1GB Springsteen show in about 15 minutes. At the beginning of the decade I was trading audio tapes by mail with people. How easy will it be in another decade?

This is not April Fools, and this is not a joke. The Tweeter in question, Justin Halpern, had already signed a book deal with HarperCollins. He’s got more than 700,000 followers for a Twitter feed he only started in August.

BTW, what did you do with your summer?

Here are a couple of gems from what is, absolutely, a very fun guy and his son:

• “Son, no one gives a shit about all the things your cell phone does. You didn’t invent it, you just bought it. Anybody can do that.”
• “I hate paying bills… Son, don’t say “me too.” I didn’t say that looking to relate to you. I said it instead of “go away.”
• The baby will talk when he talks, relax. It ain’t like he knows the cure for cancer and he just ain’t spitting it out.”
• “Just pay the parking ticket. Don’t be so outraged. You’re not a freedom fighter in the civil rights movement. You double parked.”

How this turns into a PG-rated CBS sitcom is a good question. “Stuff My Dad Says” isn’t likely to be half as funny, and “funny stuff that happens in my family” has been done, and done, and done, starting with “I Love Lucy” in the 1950s.

Of course, in today’s world, getting the deal, getting to make a pilot and even just getting to make a few bad episodes before being cancelled is an excellent way to a) make a living and b) leapfrog onto other projects.

Per my opening line: this IS a sign of the present and future. Life has moved online (duh) and mainstream, mass market communicators are finally taking notice. Look for more such crossovers on a TV, in a book, or on a movie screen near you.

Here’s an early warning sign that the Twitter rage may be short-lived: a 15-year old Morgan Stanley summer intern wrote an eye-opening research report for the firm about what he and his peers are looking for in information-entertainment.

“Teenagers don’t Twitter,” said the intern, Matthew Robson.

Other insights from a young man who already probably has a job for life:

• Teens don’t listen the radio
• Teens do listen to music online but are “very reluctant” to pay for it
• Newspapers and other print media are “irrelevant”
• Teens go to movies not for the content but for the companionship of friends

You name it, and we can shorten it into a tidbit of information. That’s an “infosnack.”

No longer do people want to “digest” a full newspaper article or curl up with a good book. Give me the story in 140 characters (twitter) or even less (TXTing) and let’s get it over with.

So — to get to the point — what sorts of “infosnacks” are you providing to your key audiences? Are they the usual corporate inedible mush, or is it something tasty and brief?

This is one of the main challenges in PR today — in some ways bigger than the Internet revolution itself. People don’t have time, or don’t want to take the time, to understand what you are trying to say. They want it now, fast.

That means:

• Short email subject lines
• Tweets
• Social media style press releases
• 60 second videos
• TXT messages

Give it to them the way they want it, or find yourself asking why you’re being ignored.

Still, I have to ask: how many ex-journos do we need in PR? Do they know anything about business communications, or are they all about getting “stories” and “ink?” If you were a stressed-out CEO facing a complex business communication decision, would you want a newbie PR person fresh from the newsroom giving you career-make-or-break advice? In all seriousness, I wouldn’t. I know who I would call, and no one on my list has less than 15 years of PR industry experience.

I was prompted to write this item and especially this headline by the esteemed future PR guy Stephen Baker of BusinessWeek, who took yet another cheap shot at the PR industry in his blog post last month, “Freak Out: Twitter Infested by PR.”

What a stoopid headline.

First of all, it shows how little Baker knows about Twitter. It’s the equivalent of writing, “Magazines infested by PR.” Why? Because unless you decide otherwise, people can elect to follow your tweets without your having to approve them. It’s the equivalent of posting a blog. So why would Baker and his colleagues want FEWER people following them on Twitter? Because he wants to be out of a job and in PR faster?

Secondly, Baker’s post doesn’t even address the headline. Go ahead and read it and tell me if you can figure out why he wrote the headline.

I’m sorry Stephen. You get my Neanderthal award of the day. Think a little harder before you write your next headline.

This means that you can get someone’s Twitter handle, find them on Twitter and click “follow” and if it doesn’t give you the privacy notice, you’re following them and what they have to say in 140 characters or less.

For instance, check out Anderson Cooper’s Twitter feed: http://twitter.com/andersoncooper — he’s got 6173 followers, but he’s only following 7 people. Because in order to have a relationship on Twitter, the other person has to follow you back.

This is in response to Peter Himler’s otherwise very good post on Twitter, where you can find more links to journos on Twitter that you can follow and maybe have a Twitter relationship with.

In a nutshell, Twit-pitching involves two things: relationships and concision. In other words, you have to have some sort of relationship with the journalist to twit-pitch them, and you don’t have a lot of space or time, so you’ve GOT TO BE CONCISE.

On Twitter, for example, you are limited to a mere 140 characters in each tweet. That’s about the length of this paragraph. (including spaces!)

On other social networks, such as Facebook, there’s no specific space limitation, but you know you aren’t sending a pitch letter or email, or even making a phone call. You know you’ve got at best, a moment or two of the person’s time.

These thoughts are reflections from yesterday’s excellent Bulldog Reporter audio conference with four top journalists using Twitter, Facebook and Linked In to do their jobs. My thanks to:

• Julio Ojeda-Zapata, Consumer Technology Reporter, St. Paul Pioneer Press and Author, “Twitter Means Business: How Microblogging Can Help or Hurt Your Company”
• Ina Fried, Senior Writer, CNET News
• Chris O’Brien, Business Columnist, San Jose Mercury News
• Dan Patterson, Digital Audio Manager, ABC News

We were also supposed to have Brian Stelter of the NY Times on the call, but he got pulled away on assignment. But he did drop one nugget on me when I talked to him before the conference: that he keeps his Twitter page open on his desktop, posts queries on it when he needs help and teases people with previews of what he’s working on.

Wanna find out which journos are on Twitter? You can Google ‘journalists on Twitter’ and get a few results of pages with compilations. Or you can head to m1cr0pr.com where they have posted a wiki — thanks to the great Brian Solis, who also joined us as a guest speaker on the Bulldog call yesterday.

Last point: if you want to see the tweets from yesterday’s call by speakers and attendees, search for #bulldog at search.twitter.com.