Aldo and I had a nice little back-and-forth last week regarding the synthesis of Internet and television.

I’m in the “soon it will all be a single appliance” camp.

I savor the vision of being able to watch a ball game on the big screen, with maybe 60 percent of the screenspace showing the action. The rest will feature sub-screens I’ve customized (a la Windows) that are ticking off stats, following other programs, and letting me chat with buds coast to coast who are—bless their tortured souls—Bears or White Sox fans like me.

El Jefe? He’s not as convinced. When we want to watch TV, we’ll watch TV. When we want to surf around (even if we’re enjoying videos, vlogs, etc.), then we’ll get in front of our computer. We quickly agreed that it will likely come down to the type of programming you select at a given time.

For sports, that visual multi-tasking power sounds awesome. For a movie, I’ll probably prefer to enjoy it without interactive distraction; when I want to watch Highlander, I’m watching Highlander.

It’s like reading a book. Sure, there’s incalculable content online, but sometimes we want nothing more than a roaring fire, a cup of coffee, and a few hundred pages to turn.

Still, there’s no denying that change is afoot. Motivated types are already grappling with the technological challenges of uniting the tube and the ‘net.

So what do you all think? Will broadcast television and narrowcast computer video stay on their respective sides of the aisle, or is this union inevitable?

Please watch the following video, and then let’s have a chat . . .

Cool, isn’t it?

It’s about the changing nature of text, information, communication, and, ultimately, thought in the age of Web 2.0. When colleagues and I watched it, we were impressed. We liked the story it told and how it was done. I mean, c’mon, we love online communication and the possibilities of Web 2.0 . . . this was designed to speak to us, and it does.

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Who would have thought something called the “Wii” would be out-performing Sony’s behemoth, the Playstation? While Sony kept after the hard-core gaming market, the Nintendo Wii may have successfully tapped a new market of non-gamers.

Why? The typical explanation is that a) the Wii has competed on price ($249, not $499) and that b) its innovative motion-detecting controllers allow you to intuitively use the motion of your body to play games, making the experience more active and hence more fun (see the video above). With accounts of weight loss to boot, the Wii is selling itself on multiple fronts.

But the Wii can also be viewed as a lesson in user interface design and as the latest direction for Web-based, participatory applications (dare I say Web 2.0?). The gaming industry, after all, has developed into a niche provider for tech-savvy (and often adolescent) consumers willing to spend the time to become experts at very complex games. The learning curve is steep, and the rest of us become spectators as a matter of course: I can handle only so many lethal head-shots from my little brother in one day.

The Wii’s adjustment in user interface has opened up participation to average users in much the same way that improvements in Web application interface have invited more participation from less tech-savvy folk. Consider this experiment by Washington Post columnist Mike Musgrove (who also happens to be a former classmate of mine), and its results:

My friend Andy has always seemed to dislike video games, but he was immediately taken by the Nintendo system in a way that I—and he—did not expect. “I’m surprised by how much I like it,” he said. “The controller is so intuitive.”

I’m reminded of Google’s revolutionary minimalism in user interface: the almost-blank page that exhibits, in the form of an inviting text-input, a single function designed for a single need.

Both Google and Nintendo have reduced the distance between users and the tasks they want to accomplish: Finding something on the Web should be as close as possible as whatever keyword comes to mind; playing a video game should be as easy as moving your body.

The lesson here for anyone in media development is that the medium itself ought to be made as thin or transparent as possible: It is a framework for interesting content or useful functions, and not something that should be designed merely to draw attention to itself.

The tab for 30 seconds of Super Bowl ad time is $2.6 million—almost 90 grand a second—and if you’re brewing Bud or churning out Chevys, that spot may be just the thing. SB XLI was the third-most-watched game in history, which means that for those who could pony up, more than half of all the households in America received their messages—a pretty good investment if you’re a high-stakes player.

But what if 90K per second is a tad beyond your means? What if a real-world budget demands real precision from your awareness efforts? What if you’re a small business, a smaller government agency, or a nonprofit?

The impact of a major commercial ad campaign is like a shotgun blast. You throw up a lot of lead hoping that some of the flock will fall—but those are doggone expensive shells.

Instead of a shotgun, consider a slingshot, a weapon where you have to get close and take careful aim if you want to hit your target. Slingshots cost less than shotguns, but can be quite effective when they smack the perfect target right between the eyes. A recent Forbes article cites a pair of industry experts who note that 30 seconds of Super Bowl money could purchase a marketer, plus:

“…50 different product placements on TV shows, movies, songs and video games…[and] two massive billboards in the middle of New York City’s Times Square, where a million people would see the ads each day for a full year.”

When it comes to reaching widespread audiences with messages about beer, cars, and prescription drugs, choosing to fire a shotgun might be the way to go. But others will fare better if they launch their messages from slingshots—aimed at a few thousand people who visit a particular website, attend a certain event, or participate in specialized training.

When you know your audience that well, the simple efficiency and effectiveness of a slingshot beats the expense and random results of a shotgun any day.

Now this is guerrilla marketing . . . just a little tidbit for quick consumption.

If you have ever been perplexed by what is meant by Web 2.0 (and believe me, it’s OK to admit it because there’s still a lot of debate about what it really means), you might want to look at it as a great way of enabling “word of mouth.” Most Web 2.0 toolsets and the activities they trigger have this in common: they emphasize online collaboration, participation, and sharing among users. So every time you think about consumer-generated content, blogs, wikis, online video, and social networks such as MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube, think of them as activities, tools, and sites that promote word of mouth.

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Dave Paradi has written some great articles about best practices for PowerPoint. He shares Mind & Media’s views as to how to use PowerPoint to convey messages without creating complicated presentations that put audiences to sleep:

Too many presenters use PowerPoint as a crutch for their own lack of preparation or skill. Instead of investing time in thinking through and planning their message, they simply fire up the software and start banging away.