"Tell me a story."

It's one of the oldest requests. We asked it as children, and our children ask it of us, and we ask it of one another. "Tell me a story."

We marvel at "King Kong." We're enthralled at seeing the "Lord of the Rings." We're mesmerized at the sweep of "Star Wars." "Sky Captain," "Final Fantasy," and "Sin City" head into new realms. And who will forget, "Who Shot Roger Rabbit?"

Yet, at some point, all these projects were screenplays, or at least treatments. There was a story.

I was reminded of this as I listened to the commentaries of Jodie Foster and Robert Zemeckis each give their running account in the background as I watched "Contact" on DVD.

For Foster - the star - it was mainly about the story. For Zemeckis, it was more complicated, or as the top-level guy, Zemeckis had a wider range of responsibilities, but I could not help but notice how devoted he was to the technical aspects of the film. Perhaps he let Foster take care of the story and rather than be redundant, he gave his spin on what magic was done during the production.

Hollywood on the run.

Hollywood is worried, although they have not yet had a full-blown panic attack. Their bedrock market - the one they have always taken for granted - is eroding beneath their feet. Generation X, is growing up and their tastes have changed. The once captive audience that grew up on the "Star Wars" movies that their parents took them to is finding that their own children are not nearly as impressed as the Gen-X parents once were with special effects.

But that is not the only place we are seeing changes.

Video games are capturing a bigger piece of the pie.

"If I had some time in the afternoon, and it was a choice between watching a movie or playing a game, I'd rather play a game," said Marlon Castro, 35, of Foster City.

The digital divide is vast. Businesses, organizations, and political leaders are rushing to become part of the digital future. In a January 2005 article the BBC tells us

The last statistic puts things in perspective, only 38% of online Americans have heard about blogs. So how many is that?

According to Internet World Stats there are almost 203 million Internet users as of June, 2005, a 68.5% penetration according to Nielsen//NR.

I took Sanskrit at the Far Eastern and Slavic Institute while an undergraduate at the University of Washington. Six linguists and me - the hard sciences major. They didn't know what to make of me.

It immediately struck me that if there ever was language "invented" by/for a computer, it was Sanskrit. I was only 19, so with a few gray hairs, I understand some of the challenges a bit better.

With only seven students in a University of 33,000 taking this class, you can guess that Sanskrit is not a big draw. For those who only know a little about it, let me state a few things. Sanskrit is the ancient language of India. Some claim it is older than Hebrew, but I'll leave that for the other six students in the class to debate. But it is old.

English comes from the roots where Sanskrit does, but what does it have to do with speech recognition and computers?

Sanskrit is written in an alphabet called the Devanagari and it looks exotic - the writing we see in India, It has an interesting feature. While in today's India, words are separated by spaces, in ancient Sanskrit all words run together.

Shigeru Miyagawa, Professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, discusses "Personal Media" on 17 minute streaming video in part one of a series entitled "Media, Education, and the Marketplace." Professor Miyagawa's insights are fascinating and dovetail with the role that the founders of pingV have envisioned.

Professor Miyagawa speaks of "story telling," which is a pingV pillar. He speaks to how learning is changing and how the role of mass media is central.

He makes an interesting point. There is "mass media" and "personal media." Like most of us, he is part of a generation raised on a diet of mass media. His insight is into a new paradigm, not limited to children, but people adapting to personal media.