No-one, however, expected a tweet she sent out on Monday that has sparked a storm of protest, criticism, headlines and sympathy. Here is why.

At 17:22 local time from her home in Florida, Ms Ross tweeted that:

"Fog is rolling in thick scared the birds back in the coop."

Eleven minutes later, her son called 911 to report that his two-year-old brother Bryson was floating unconscious in the pool.

The paramedics arrived at the house at 17:38.

At 18:12, Ms Ross tweeted again:

"Please pray like never before, my 2 yr old fell in the pool."

Tragically, five hours later her son Bryson was declared dead. At 23:08 Ms Ross returned to her Twitter account to update her 5,400-plus followers. "Remembering my million dollar baby." She also included a photo of Bryson in the post.

The case has now fuelled a debate about parenting and of course about how much someone should share about something so personal. There are equal amounts of shock, sympathy and anger about the affair.

And naturally enough, much of it is being conducted over the internet, especially through Twitter and a number of blogs.

Ms Ross tried defending her actions by answering her critics via Twitter but has since made her Twitter account private - no doubt given all the media attention the case has attracted.

One mommy blogger who has been vocal in her view of how Ms Ross conducted herself is Madison McGraw. She wrote on her blog:

"Maybe if she (Ms Ross) wasn't tweeting, her son might still be alive."

As well as critics, Ms Ross has had supporters speak out on her behalf.

Those who know her called her a devoted mum. One friend told Florida Today that "blogging is a community" and that asking Twitter followers to pray was not unlike asking a congregation to pray.

Rebecca Phillips of the spirituality website Beliefnet.com agreed.

"If you believe in the power of prayer and have an urgent situation like this mother did, you want as many people praying as possible. She probably felt very helpless."

Ms Ross has hit out at the opprobrium being heaped upon her by using her blog. She especially takes a swipe at the media.

"If it were not for you, I could mourn in peace. Let's try this why don't we, leave me alone, find your next victim and let my son's memory be one of good and peace and strength."

While Ms Ross and her family deal with a terrible loss, the question is being asked about how much one really should share with the rest of the online world.

Another issue is how much support one can get online when something this devastating happens.

Is this case an example of the power of social media or its misuse?

Sexting is, as Wikipedia puts it, a "portmanteau of sex and texting." Or if you like, it is the act of sending sexually explicit messages or photos electronically mainly from one cellphone to another.

The Pew Research Centre carried out a study in September involving 800 teens.

It found that 30% of 17-year-olds who have phones have received sexting photos or messages. Eight per cent say they sent such images.

In the 12-17 age bracket the numbers may not be as high, but it is startling to think of youngsters this age involved in such practices.

Four per cent with a mobile phone have sent sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude images of themselves via text and 15% say they have been on the end of receiving such material.

"It's an issue that teens grapple with and deal with in their lives, and one that deserves attention," said Amanda Lenhart, the Pew senior research specialist behind the "Teens and Sexting" report.

The problem has also caught the attention of lawmakers who are struggling with how to deal with a worrisome trend which also resulted in at least two teen suicides in the past 18 months.

The National Conference of State Legislatures has said that six states have passed laws aimed at sexting. Another five or so tried and failed and yesterday members of the Virigina State Crime Commission refused to recommend legislation involving sexting.

In California, there is a slightly different twist to the issue with the supreme court taking on a so-called landmark case involving a police officer and text messages discovered on an official police department pager.

At issue here is the same one of privacy but also what rights an employer has to read texts on a company provided device.

It certainly seems that the problem is taking on a life of its own and that while it may seem like a harmless activity among some young people, it has to be remembered that those convicted of sexting could end up becoming registered as a sex offender.

That is what happened to Phillip Alpert.

When he was 18-years-old he had an argument with his 16-year-old girlfriend and in anger forwarded a nude photo of her to their friends and family.

He was prosecuted and found guilty of sending out child pornography. Mr Alpert is now a registered sex offender.

On the issue of technology, the Pew's Ms Lenhart noted:

"The cell phone is such a vital part of these teens' lives that it isn't surprising that it's a major source of content for them - both positive content and content that's more worrisome."

The Pew Research centre also said that in 2004, 18% of 12-year-olds had a cellphone compared to 58% today. Five years ago, 64% of 17-year-olds had a mobile and today it is 83%.

Those numbers concern Parry Aftab, the executive director of WiredSafety.org who told MSNBC.com "It's not 'that kid' who's doing it, it's your kid," she said.

"If your kid hasn't taken a (suggestive) picture and shared it with somebody else, in all likelihood they've seen one, they may have possession of one or they may be sending them around."

Education among teens is seen as one possible solution. Recently James Lipton, the host of Inside the Actors Studio, has had a starring role in a series of public service adverts aimed at getting teens to stop sexting.

It is clear that in this digital age the rules are very different and young and old alike are learning the consequences of putting so much of themselves out there for others to discover.

In a chat with Dr Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, she talked a lot about the stereotypes that create and sustain the situation: girls being led to think that science is a boys' subject; preconceptions of science as dull; the idea that it's just too downright hard.

I certainly remember those messages seeping into my brain, even though I was actually - I'm happy to say - a whizz at trigonometry and consistently scored top marks in my accounts exams.

Dr Ride points out that all children are interested in science. It is innate. They are born curious. They like to know how the world works, how their bodies work, how their favourite toy works and so on. If you are a parent, you know that at a certain age the favourite question of every child is "Why?".

While these stereotypes have persisted for years, Dr Ride believes that the issue has to be tackled at this early stage in order for there to be change up the pipeline.

She also told me that the country has to get excited again about maths and science and she applauds President Obama's efforts with his newly-launched Educate to Innovate initiative:

"On and off, there has been political will to changes things - but this feels different. This feels very special with this president, and perhaps that is because he has two young daughters and is very focused on the importance of a science education."

And while she laments the present situation, Dr Ride recalls how the space race of the 1950s and '60s caught the imagination of the nation:

"When the Soviets launched Sputnik, it completely changed the focus of US education. Suddenly, maths and science became the most important things that could be taught to our kids.

"It became a national priority - and it became really cool to want to be a scientist or an engineer. A lot of kids grew up dreaming of building rockets to the stars. Over the years, we have lost that magic, that focus, that spark."

For years, Dr Ride says, she has worked to redress the balance and to get children hooked on science and maths - especially young girls, who tend to drop the ball on the subject when they are ten and 11.

She runs a company that creates programmes and products to educate and inspire children in these subjects, and with ExxonMobil, she has set up a science academy aimed at helping teachers learn how to get children excited about science.

Dr Ride told me that science was in her blood from a very young age and that she just never lost the passion for the subject. Her plans to either get a job as a research scientist or as a teacher went up in smoke when she saw an advert in the local Stanford student newspaper:

"I had just finished my PhD and was about to start applying for jobs when I saw the Nasa advert. They were looking for astronauts and it was the first time in ten years that they were taking applications and they were looking for women. It was when I saw that ad, that I knew this was something I wanted to do. Something that I had to do."

Dr Ride was one of 8,000 people who applied, and only one of six women included in a class of 35.

And the rest, as they say, is history as Dr Ride became the first American woman and the then-youngest American to enter space as a member on Space Shuttle Challenger.

In the States, Americans not only have a reputation for muffin tops and lardiness but it seems they can also add information overload to the count.

A survey just released by the Global Information Industry Centre of San Diego University reveals that households in the US consumed a mind boggling total of 3.6 zettabytes of data and 10,845 trillion words in 2008.

Zettabytes haven't exactly become common parlance yet and according to Wikipedia a ZB is a "unit of information or computer storage equal to one sextillion bytes." The university says a zettabyte is 1,000,000,000 trillion bytes.

Those explanations don't really cut it, but the brains behind this report have said it is equal to covering the continental United States and Alaska in a 7ft high stack of thick paperback novels.

The aim of this report called How Much Information is to look at all forms of American communication and consumption in a bid to create a census of the information consumed.

So where is it all coming from? Exactly where you expect as this graph shows.

What is more surprising is that while I think I never have time to read books, it seems on average I actually gorge on around 100,000 words of information a day.

What the study says that really means is that all those words are hurtling headlong via various channels like TV, radio, the internet, texts, videos, tweets and so on.

In the age of the internet though it is the goggle box that is winning out.

People averaged around five hours watching TV and 2.2 hours listening to the radio. The computer comes in third at just under two hours, video games an hour and reading a poor and distant fifth place with just a half an hour of time.

"The report is a snapshot of what the information revolution means to the average American on an average day," says report author Roger Bohn who is also the Centre's director.

Surprisingly gaming saw a big leap with 18.5 gigabytes per day for the average consumer - that's about 67% of all bytes consumed says the report.

In a piece of good news for all those social/casual gaming companies out there, the study notes that around 80% of the population plays some kind of computer game, including casual games such as my favourite, Bookworm and the like.

Mr Bohn says:

"Games are almost universal, but most of the gaming bytes comes from graphically intensive games on high-powered computers and consoles, which have the equivalent of special-purpose supercomputers from five years ago."

Gazing to the future, the Centre say the information landscape will change by 2015 thanks to the widespread use of HDTV, mobile TV and video over the internet.

The report acknowledges that as information consumption is expected to continue to grow, there are some real problems to worry about.

"What is clear is that we consume orders of magnitude more information than can be stored on hard drives or transmitted over today's internet," says Internet pioneer Larry Smarr and the director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology.

"Even small changes in how Americans consume information would have serious implications for network planners and require large-scale investments."

Packing the biggest punch was real-time search - as shown off in the company's short promotional video.

Google told us that the feature is live, but may take a few days to roll out across the world - in the meantime, Google Trends gives a sense of the look and feel.

When the company's big guns - search VP Marissa Mayer, engineering VP Vic Gundotra (ex-Microsoft, by the way) and Google fellow Amit Singhal - came on stage, it was clear that their aim was to put the competition on notice, the competition in this case being Microsoft and its search engine Bing.

Lately, Bing has been grabbing the lion's share of headlines: finalising its search deal with Yahoo; introducing 3D maps; another deal with microblogging service Twitter and, less happily, that half-hour outage last week.

While Google remains the search giant with a 65+% share, Bing's deal with Yahoo ups the ante as the joint partnership prepares to lay claim to nearly 30%.

And so Google has fought back and claimed to be the first search engine to include real-time search in its results pages. There are of course other - smaller - services offering real-time search including Collecta, One Riot and Crowdeye.

Mr Singhal told me that he thought real-time search was as much of a breakthrough as Google's 2007 upgrade to universal search, when the company began providing results from books, maps, videos, news and books as well as from web pages.

Addressing the crowd of reporters and bloggers, Mr Singhal used the same kind of hyperbole as we heard back then:

"At Google, we are never satisfied. It takes a tenth of a second for light to go around the world. At Google we will not be satisfied until that is the only barrier between you and your information."

So there was the headline announcement for Google. There were other interesting features. For example, Mr Gundotra had fun showing off "visual search" - where search queries are made of pictures instead of words.

Snapping a picture of a wine bottle with his phone, he said that this kind of computer vision was one of the toughest challenges, as all sorts of information popped up in the search results box.

I'm not sure how much wine was drunk in the process of coming up with a name for this feature, but you certainly have to be sober to say Google Goggles a few times in a row.

Mr Gundotra - who, I should add, was clearly not intoxicated in any shape or form - literally spoke in tongues when demonstrating another feature, "voice search".

He did well getting results in Chinese for McDonalds in Beijing, but stepped aside when it came to demonstrating Japanese, the new language that is now part of the product.

There was also the launch of "what's nearby" for Google Maps on Android phones, which will give users a list of 10 of the closest places to them, including shops and restaurants.

All these developments, concluded Mr Gundotra, add up to "the beginning of the beginning":

"When you take a sensor-rich device and you connect it to the cloud - yes, it could be that we are at the cusp of an entire new computer era."

Google CEO Eric Schmidt clearly agrees. Anticipating all these announcements, he opened @ericschmidt, his Twitter account. Yes, this is the same Mr Schmidt who, earlier in the year, said "speaking as a computer scientist, I view all these as sort of a poor man's e-mail systems."

All that, of course, was way before Google formed a partnership with the popular micro-blogging service.

It's interesting to note that the photograph for Mr Schmidt's Twitter account shows him wearing a flak jacket.

It seems the wayward youth of today has given that honour to a golden oldie - Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

A survey by Junior Achievement, an organisation that educates students on matters related to future employment, found that the Apple boss is the most admired entrepreneur among teenagers.

Of the 1,000 teens questioned, 35% gave Mr Jobs the thumbs up followed by 25% for Oprah, 16% for skateboarder Tony Hawk and a dismal 10% for twenty-something Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

The Olsen twins came further down the pecking order, as did fashion model Kimora Lee Simmons with 4%.

Of the people who choose Mr Jobs, 61% cited him because "he made a difference in/improved people's lives or made the world a better place."

Testament to the power of shiny gadgets like the iPod and the iPhone for you.

"We live in a celebrity-obsessed culture, so it's no surprise that teens admire famous entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs and Oprah Winfrey who have built brands around their personas as well as around their products," said Jack Kosakowski, president of Junior Achievement USA.

Still, it is interesting to see a tech titan like Mr Jobs leap ahead of Oprah - which might mean that a lot of youngsters are truly interested in science and technology as a career and not TV fame.

Disney turned to the man whose firm is known for its design aesthetic because it wanted to overhaul its shops and turn them into the ultimate shopping experience, the way Mr Jobs has done with Apple's outlets.

Jim Fielding, the president of Disney Stores worldwide told the NYT:

"The world does not need another place to sell Disney merchandise - this only works if it's an experience".

The top-to-toe refurbishment will cover 340 shops throughout Europe and America - and some new stores, including a flagship outlet at New York's Times Square.

The idea is to give the Disney retail arm a high-tech makeover to "make children clamour to visit the stores and stay longer, perhaps bolstering sales as a result." There is no "perhaps" about it.

So where, you may ask, does Mr Jobs come in?

Well, as a member of the Disney board and a shareholder, he encouraged the Disney management to let their imagination fly.

As a result, Disney is to adopt Apple touches like mobile checkouts and allowing customers to choose film clips to watch or to take part in karaoke contests or live chat with Disney Channel stars via satellite. (Yes, I know there are no karaoke events in Apple stores... but you never know.)

High-tech tricks include walking by a "magic mirror" where Cinderella might appear and speak or the whole store might be made to smell like a Christmas tree if a clip from Disney's A Christmas Carol is playing.

Disney told the paper that it has been working on a full-scale, fully-stocked shop inside a secret location in Glendale, California to shape an overall philosophy and work out any kinks. That was on the advice of Mr Jobs.

While some may consider its shops tired and old-fashioned, Disney is still a retail titan. Its licensed consumer products pulled in $30bn (£19bn) in global sales last year.

And that Tinker Bell connection? Well, a section of the store will be called WWTD: What Would Tinker Bell Do?

As Macworld notes, "it's sort of a Genius Bar except, um, with fairies."

And while the BBC and other organisations have been highlighting the dangers of these attacks for a long time, it is understandable why so many people fall for them.

Cyber-criminals are increasingly sophisticated in their approaches these days and because so many of these fake websites look so authentic, it is easy to understand why users get hoodwinked.

Don't feel bad if this means you because even the most security-conscious and hyper-aware can be taken in. Robert Mueller the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation told the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.

"Cyber crime is a nebulous concept. It is difficult to grasp intangible threats, and easy to dismiss them as unlikely to happen to you.
 
"Intruders are reaching into our networks every day, looking for valuable information. And unfortunately, they are finding it, because many of us are unaware of the threat these persons pose to our privacy, our economic stability, and even our national security."

America's top G-man then revealed that he himself was nearly suckered by a phishing attack after he got an e-mail that "looked perfectly legitimate" on his home computer that seemed to come from his bank.

He told the audience that he answered the first few questions, but pulled the plug on the whole thing when he was asked for his password.

In a mea culpa moment. Mr Mueller admitted that even though he is "someone who spends a good deal of [his] professional life warning others about the perils of cyber crime, [he] barely caught [himself] in time."

The FBI director told the audience that he quickly changed all his passwords and tried to brush the incident off to his wife as a "teachable moment". She replied: "It is not my teachable moment. However, it is our money. No more internet banking for you."

Mr Mueller went on to point out that while these scams are becoming a fact of life, it's a technique that terrorist groups are also relying on to fund their activities.

"We know the game of our adversaries. They will keep twisting the doorknobs and picking the locks until they find a way in. But we must not let them in. We must change the locks. We must bar the doors and we must sound the alarms when we notice anything out of the ordinary."

As an example of co-operation across borders, Mr Mueller also announced "a major takedown in an international cyber- investigation", involving a wide-ranging phishing attack that targeted American financial institutions and around 5,000 US citizens.

He said that the FBI, the Secret Service and state and local law enforcement worked closely with their counterparts in Egypt to close down the "largest international 'phishing' case ever conducted."

While Mr Mueller tried to underline the need for everyone to "take ownership of cyber-security," one audience member was not so convinced that cyber-criminals are the real threat to American security.

A written question to the FBI head read, "I'm not worried about a teenage hacker reading my e-mail. I'm worried about you reading it."

These aren't trick questions, but it turns out that on a random day back in June in New York's Times Square, less than 8% of people polled had any idea what a browser was.

The company doing the questioning was of course really interested in what kind of answers it would get, and was no doubt disturbed at the same time.

That company was Google, which is of course spending a small fortune and a fair amount of time developing its own web browser called Chrome.

Since then, Google has tried to fill the information gap with an explanatory video.

Call it part of a back-to-basics approach, but the video certainly ensures that the viewer isn't overwhelmed with technical information. The same approach has been used in a specially site to educate users.

Google associate product marketing manager Jason Toff explained in a blog post that his reason for creating the site was that his own "unscientific study" among friends showed that they were just as confused about web browsers as the folks of New York.

"Lots of our time each day is spent online, and every page on the web is experienced through the browser. Unfortunately, most people don't realise that there are many browsers out there, which differ on features like speed, security and extensibility."

It is worth noting that Google does not steer users to any particular browser and offers up Opera, Google Chrome, Apple's Safari, Mozilla's Firefox and Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

Heaven help Google if they hit the streets to solicit answers to the question "What is Google Wave?"

With more than a nod to George Orwell's novel 1984, the advert warned of a future where soulless drones unquestionably soak up the words of their dictator who speaks to them from a large screen. Moments later a gorgeous nameless heroine in red shorts and a white tank top comes running down the aisle with a hammer in her hands while apparently being chased by the thought police.

She hurls the hammer at the screen just as "Big Brother" is telling the faithful "we shall prevail." The screen is destroyed in a shock of bright light and the commercial ends with text which reads "On January 26th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like '1984'."

Well now get set for the sequel on YouTube.com and you will see why 1984 is so not like 2009. And I think it is fairly safe to say that this follow-up does not have the approval of Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs.

For 1984 take two, a Silicon Valley start-up called doubleTwist is sending Apple a very pointed message. Monique Farantzos, one of its co-founders and a former physicist told me why:

"For many back then, Apple symbolised the rebel and that whole 'think different' attitude but honestly I don't think they can say that anymore."

"I see Apple as the new Microsoft and so it felt natural to do this advert this way."

Let me give you a bit of background on doubleTwist.

As you will see from stories here on the BBC, the company is big into reverse engineering which is something the likes of Apple are not terribly keen on. The aim is to let users take their digital media like songs, movies and other files and transfer them easily between say cell phones, cameras, laptops and iPods.

DoubleTwist might have a thing about Apple because this is its second go at the company. Back in June, they took out a massive billboard advert next to the Apple store in San Francisco offering "the cure for iPhone envy." It was of course a free doubleTwist download.

In the latest version of the advert, the drones in the video are wearing white ear buds and round white spectacles. Their master tells them "no other choices shall detract from our glory and our domination will be complete." As he utters his prevailing words at the end, the heroine does her damage and the video closes by saying "On October 6th, doubleTwist brings you... choice."

"Our billboard was brought down after pressure from Apple so it kind of felt that Apple is not just about shiny new gadgets," Mr Farantzos told me.

"There is a darker side as they become more powerful. That includes where iPhone applications are getting rejected, where Google voice is turned down, the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) investigaton or the Palm Pre being blocked. There are many of these examples and we wanted to point out that the emperor has no clothes."

Ms Farantzos said the video was two and a half months in the making and came about during a visit to Tokyo. It was her idea to use the white ear buds in the advert because it suggested conformity.

She admitted that she isn't sure if Mr Jobs will take too kindly to their re-working of the advert and their message, but she hopes on one level he gets it.

"I hope he will see the parallels of this small company going after the status quo. He used to be there 25 years ago and now it is a very different story," said Ms Farantzos.

Government 2.0 as a concept is not new, but the present administration has put its weight behind it like no other - and that has been getting entrepreneurs and the technology industry excited.

In an earlier post on the subject (The new tech start-up: US government), Anil Dash of Six Apart told me that the government's innovations represent the "most promising start-up of 2009 (and) one of the least likely" because it is allowing third parties to take all that information and to mash it up into useful applications and tools for the public and for agencies to use.

The effort is being largely led by the US tech gang of chief technology officer Aneesh Chopra, chief information officer Vivek Kundra, Federal Communications Commission chair Julius Genachowski and director of new media Macon Phillips.

But at ground level, it is the likes of Greg Whisenant - the founder and chief executive officer of Crime Reports - who are trying to do useful things with the data.

CrimeReports.com actually started three years ago; Mr Whisenant says that the company got off the ground thanks to progressive views at a local level among law enforcement agencies.

Washington DC and San Jose police forces were the first to sign up to let Mr Whisenant and his cohorts develop software tools to help these agencies understand crime trends and share information with the public in "an immediate or near-immediate timeframe and at a street level."

The lightbulb moment for Mr Whisenant came a few years previously when he was working on Capitol Hill as a lobbyist and accidentally let a burglar into his apartment building. He told me that the surveillance tape clearly showed him going through the door first and holding the door open for the burglar.

"This just showed me the chasm that existed between the public and law enforcement.
 
"It's certainly beneficial to get the public thinking about this in the context of where you live. If I don't know what is happening around me, I can't make better decisions or change my behaviour to accommodate what's going on around me."

In other words: had Mr Whisenant known there was a spate of local burglaries, he might have questioned the guy before practically ushering him through the door.

Soon after, Crime Reports was born. In simple terms, it overlays police reports onto maps so that users can type in an address and find out where arrests have been made and what kinds of cases police have been called out on. Users can also configure e-mail alerts to notify them of crimes in places they are interested in.

Mr Whisenant says his service really took off when Google Maps came along and allowed companies like his to plot crime.

This Utah-based company boasts of being "the world leader in online crime mapping". It has over 500 law enforcement partners across North America and is in the middle of signing up its first UK police force.

San Jose now claims to be the first police department in the nation to let residents find out where, when and why police were called to a particular area. Police chief Rob Davis says it helps police officers see trends in crime in particular areas instantaneously:

"It's Monday and I come in and I go, 'what's being going on in the last three days?' I can click on this link and put in the last three days' dates and see what has been going on in my beat. Before we used to get these updates on a six-month basis."

And what he hopes will happen next is local people reacting by helping officers do their job more effectively:

"If, all of a sudden, there's a bunch of icons showing drug activity, the residents are going to see that as well. What are they going to start looking for? Suspected drug activity. And where are they going to go as a result? Call us when they see a suspicious person."

Mr Whisenant says the number of agencies taking up his service is growing by about 50 a month, and in large part he credits that to President Obama and his desire to open up as much data as possible.

"We have this radical shift that is going on and that will reverberate not just at the federal level, but at state and local level as well. Government 2.0 as we see it now emerging would not be happening under another president."

Plans for Crime Reports include releasing an application programming interface (API) for developers to build on, an iPhone application and a way for local people to set up neighbourhood watch schemes.

Mr Whisenant also warns that there will be many stumbling blocks for Gov 2.0 - not least the problem of how to make much of the data relevant and useful.

"I feel the driving parameters for success are time- and location-aware based apps. Local is the piece of this puzzle that will make the big difference, giving people something that is personally relevant to their life.
 
"It's a case of letting a thousand flowers bloom. It will take some time and some experimentation - but in the immediate future, there will be a lot of innovation."

"You developers are the dreamers in our culture. I encourage you not to be afraid to dream that big dream. What if? What if? What if?"

These were the words of LeVar Burton who played Geordie la Forge on the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation.

As the chief engineer constantly seen fixing machines or discovering new scientific phenomena, perhaps it was fitting that the actor came to IDF to inspire. And even more fitting that he made his comments during the company's big play for the future of television.

Mr Burton told the audience that he firmly believed early episodes of the programme helped encourage young viewers to take up science and to go out and invent and come up with new ideas.

He said that he was a geek thanks to literature and that, in his mother's house, "you read a book or got hit in the head."

As a youngster, Mr Burton told the audience that he was drawn to science fiction writing but that "it was rare for me to see heroes in the pages of those novels that looked like me, a person of colour". Gene Rodenberry, the creator of Star Trek, changed all that for him.

"When the future comes, there will be a place for you."

Mr Burton said that for him the two most influential and powerful words in the English language are "what if" and he encouraged the developers at IDF to go out and make the "link between what we imagine and what we manifest".

And he noted that "human beings manifest machines. It is what we are hard-wired to do."

Mr Burton wound up by posing the question:

"What are the contributions you are going to make in our present that will lead us to our future?"

He ended using the words of his friend and fellow actor Patrick Stewart in the role of Jean-Luc Picard: "make it so."

Update 1134: Apologies to all enraged Trekkers and appalled Trekkies. After carefully avoiding either of those divisive terms throughout this post, the last line contained a clanger, conflating Captains Picard and Clark. This has now been rectified.

Sure, there was a video camera for the iPod Nano and a voice recorder, pedometer and FM radio. There were some price reductions and a bigger iPod Touch at 32 and 64 gigabytes.

For iTunes, there was some nifty software and a feature that lets you buy liner notes, lyrics, photographs and memorabilia - the equivalent of those old LPs Mr Jobs made fond reference to.

Oh, and let's not forget 30,000 ringtones.

But most of the press, analysts and guests were really there to see Apple's own rock star make his first big appearance following a medical leave of absence: Mr Jobs was treated for pancreatic cancer in 2004.

The hype and second-guessing beforehand was feverish, but there was little doubt that he had to turn up given how the market has reacted in the past to the merest hint of him having the sniffles.

And he didn't keep us in suspense for long, taking charge from the start. Mr Jobs sounded emotional when he talked about his liver transplant and said that he was able to stand in front of us thanks to the generosity of a 20-year-old who died in a car crash.

While he soon got down to business, there was a lot of flash bang but not much whizz. Given that the iPod is now nine years old, perhaps it's understandable. After all, what more can Apple make it do? Have it make you a cup of tea?

Accompanying these iterative upgrades was a plethora of stats: 100 million registered iTunes users; 220 million iPods sold; 8.5 billion songs sold; 1.8 billion app downloads.

But nothing really detracted from the main news: Steve Jobs was back centre-stage and running the show.

Remember, this is a man who could well afford to put his feet up and move on from the stress of running a multi-billion dollar company, but who told us: "I'm back at Apple and loving every day of it."

While this might be reason enough, the pressure is on. Analysts I spoke to were disappointed by the product announcements and hoped that the famed "Apple tablet" will appear in the new year and set the heather on fire.

Meanwhile, Apple will jealously guard its boss from the prying eyes of us in the media. Every time I, or another journalist, pointed a camera in the direction of Mr Jobs to get a more "intimate" post-show snap of the boss chatting to his execs and guests, a burly chap in a black shirt would "happen" to block the shot.

On a side note, Google CEO Eric Schmidt watched the presentation from the front row, evidence perhaps of no hard feelings after his departure from the Apple board.

I don't know how some big-name tech companies felt, though, because I know of two big firms and one smaller one that moved their own press events because they knew that all eyes were on Mr Jobs. And they sure didn't want to play second fiddle there.

And for the traditional "one last thing", we got the delightful Norah Jones to serenade us - and she got a kiss from Mr Jobs.

One of the most obvious ways is to get a clutch of amazing references about what a wonderful employee/colleague/boss/leader you are and how you have helped take the company from strength to strength.

If you are looking for a job, you are hardly likely to offer a reference that does nothing but paint you in a glowing light.

Likewise there are bosses who will pen the most poetic prose in order to help what they regard as a useless employee out the door.

And more importantly, in this litigious age we live in, managers will write references that will not come back and haunt them.

Step forward a new idea by Marty Manley - an entrepreneur, union man and former assistant Secretary of Labour under President Clinton who created the Office of the American Workplace to regulate labour unions and promote workplace innovation.

Mr Manley is also the founder of Alibris.com the premier global exchange for used, rare and out-of-print books.

Through his start up company called Reputation Networks, Mr Manley has dreamed up an alternative to the old style reference called WorkScore.

In essence it operates like a cross between someone's medical record and their credit score only it is applied to work. Mr Manley explained:

"Employers in every organisation live or die over their ability to hire and develop people with specialist professional skills.
 
"Most of it is still being done on resumes and references which are self interested documents and therefore employers are having a harder and harder time getting accurate information about people."

Added to that, Mr Manley said reputations are moving online but the problem there is that in a lot of cases "inaccurate information spreads quickly and can do real damage."

He describes WorkScore as "the first social resume" that provides a profile of what you can do with ratings from fellow workers you have invited to comment on your skills.

Those comments are then given a score and aggregated, much like a bank would score your credit worthiness when it finds out if you pay your bills on time or not.

You also rate the person who is rating you and what your relationship is. So if you say the reviewer is a close contact and fair minded, then that assessment will count for more.

If you say they are loony tunes with an axe to grind, then the rating will count to a lesser degree.

Of course this mirrors the original issue with references in that you will presumably only pick people to review your work if you know they are going to do so in fairly fabulous terms. And with WorkScore you can delete the stuff you don't like.

Mr Manley added:

"It actually solves the Lake Wobegon problem where all children are above average and shows real strengths because it represents the accumulated knowledge of people who know your work really well."

Added to that, your WorkScore moves around with you and is not static and will have a summary that is searchable by employers.

It is also a two-way street, because users get to rate their workplace. Something that Mr Manley said is useful for prospective employees considering applying to certain companies for a job.

Anthony Ha at Venturebeat said he thought it sounded pretty useful compared to the likes of LinkedIn while Rafe Needleman at CNet.com said:

"I am not sure that WorkScore can scale quickly into a trusted brand that stands for accurate work assessment.
 
"I do hope it works, because it really could make information about skills and accomplishments transparent and portable, and it gives workers more control of their personal brands".

WorkScore is in beta testing, so for the moment is free.

At GDC, the company announced its aim to revolutionise the way games are distributed and played by streaming on-demand games over the internet from servers as much as 1,500 miles away.

The hope is to provide high quality gaming on low-end machines. The end result will only be affected by the user's internet bandwidth.

The company's secret sauce involves a video compression algorithm designed specifically for video games that can encode and compress video into data in about one millisecond.

When I spoke to inventor Steve Perlman at GDC earlier this year, he told me "video games are the last media sold as packaged goods and, yes, OnLive disrupts that retail model."

Lots of demos at GDC went according to the script in a controlled environment but now there is the chance for gamers to test things more in the wild and get involved in what Mr Perlman views as 'the brave new world.'

After months of "evolving the technology and installing lots of servers in our data centres," the company has just announced it is opening up its internal Beta to outside gamers.

OnLive says it's planning to set up a series of different test groups to put the system through its paces and use the data to improve the product.

"If OnLive is able to scale and meet the demand, it could pose a significant challenge to a game console industry that's weathered the storm of multiple hardware cycles, but might face an uphill battle against a truly great on demand service," said Barb Dybwad of Mashable.com.

While there are a thousand differing viewpoints about the future success or otherwise of OnLive, one notable voice out there is Trip Hawkins. As the founder of Electronic Arts, he is often dubbed the Godfather of the gaming industry.

In a piece in PCmag.com, he told the interviewer that he felt that cloud-based games will gain a great acceptance and that games delivered by, and played through, the cloud will eventually drive a lot of the innovation in both desktop and mobile games.

Mr Hawkins also said that the cloud might become the most disruptive, as well as the most efficient, way to play and deliver games.

One of the most important factors in the success of OnLive, and other types of services like this, will be what and how it charges customers whose wallets are no doubt feeling weary in these straightened times.