If CES drove anything home whatsoever for me it was the incredible arms race for the ultimate simulation - higher res, bigger screen - more, more, more! Why look at a real butterfly when you can see one in 1080p across a 100 inch screen? When is real a bit, well, too real? When it’s porn, people! In addition to desperate housewives needing new makeup artists on HD-friendly ABC, it seems the adult industry is being hit by a spate of way too realistic HD picture quality. Today’s NYT has the details - all of them.

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The Infonaut and Game Guy attended the stellar second-year installment of Video Games Live at the Hollywood Bowl tonight. The concept is brilliant in both theory and execution - bring live professional philharmonic orchestration (in this case the house orchestra at the Hollywood Bowl) of video game scores to the stage with mutliple video screens displaying game play. The performance was a perfect object lesson in convergence. Bright lights from cell phone content creators speckled the bowl, in what was a wonderful interplay of digital entertainment and analog music. An early medley took on an ironic feel, beginning appropriately with Pong, and then bouncing to more artful titles as Metal Gear Solid 2, the obscure noir Grim Fandango from Lucas Arts and crowd pleasers (standing ovation) for the Mario franchise, Tetris, and the rousing World of Warcraft. With the new absence of E3, shows like this are going to be a great new forum and revenue stream game publishers. The show’s apex was a mindblowing mashup of Steve Vai, jamming out on his LED-lit guitar with licks from a teaser from Halo 3, one of 07’s most highly anticipated titles.

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Today, the Infonaut is logging in hours at iHollywoodforum’s Mobile Entertainment Summit, where executives dream dreams of convergence and multiplatform content consumption. I’m especially curious if the launch of MySpace mobile aka helio truly means that social media is going mobile, or whether we’ll cling to our laptop screens for our social networking. Whatever you do, though - don’t call them phones.

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I’m glad this is happening — as Jeff Jarvis points out, “new” and “old’ media will live happily ever after. For PR specialists, this especially exciting for the social media-obsessed, who now have plenty of evidence that bloggers and traditional journalists need each other more and more in an a world where knowledge is increasingly networked and “distributed journalism” is slowly becoming the norm.

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We like to watch. We like to share. This is the theory behind the YouTube phenomenon; that the DNA of our YouTube fascination has its roots in the rabid fans of America’s Funniest Home Videos. In this virtually enabled schadenfreude gallery, I suppose we’re all enjoying the pain of karaoke, laughing at how naive lonelygirl15 is (or wait…maybe she’s not) or maybe just wishing we had the guts to record and broadcast ourselves.

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I hope this book has a shelf life longer than one week. Thanks to Joseph Mailander for the tip. I always wonder how books like this will fare, since the print cycle often outdates the content. Sometimes it works. My copies of The Cluetrain Manifesto and the Tipping Point are still getting dogeared today.

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