The iPad has arrived. Praise the Lord and pass the applications!

OK, that may be a little over the top (ya think?), but it’s hard not to get a little carried away by the combination of Apple hype, first adopter frenzy and the slavering attention the media pays to both. The thing is, it looks as if the iPad might be everything it’s supposed to be—and that’s quite a bit—and it surely will be better when, as past experience tells us will happen, Apple works out the bugs, beefs up the apps and comes out with the next generation product in six months or so.

Peel back that Apple a bit and you can actually see the seeds of innovation growing at the core of a company that’s also toying with the notion of Apple TV. Can the whole TV be that far behind the little TV that is iPad? It’s innovation built on interactivity, but in the end it seems like Apple knows exactly what it has: a supplement to the TV—like the computer or the smartphone—but not a replacement.

You have to feel a little badly for the good folks at Microsoft. And not just because it wasn’t that long ago that they’d get the same kind of iPad frenzy going just by releasing a new version of Windows. Microsoft has always struggled a bit with the boundaries between computing and television. Yet try as they might, they’ve never been able to complete the great leap from functionality to entertainment.

Apple, it would seem, knows what the iPad is. But more importantly, they know what it’s not. It absolutely is yet another step toward giving viewers rapid and bigger screen access to mobile video. But in the end, nobody at Apple is saying that this is a substitute for the 10-foot experience that is television.

So amidst all of the iPad hype, one of the most important lessons we can learn from from the device’s launch is the continued interest in big-screen interactivity. Apple is doing the cable and CE industry a favor by expanding the horizons of users interested in tapping into the wealth of the Internet and more traditional media. Eventually, as almost everything does, it will come back to the big screen in the family room, bringing with it a wealth of interactive television applications that were probably there already but just needed to be nudged to the fore.

This is, according to a new book, the new age of worldwide paranoia. The last age was before my time, in the ‘70s, when events like Watergate, the Vietnam War, the Cold War and what was then Red China flexing its muscles combined with a bunch of style setters wearing shoes with clear plastic heels big enough to be filled with water and a goldfish to set everybody’s teeth on edge. This was also the era of diamonds in your teeth, although that has nothing to do with paranoia.

Maybe there was some reason to be paranoid in those crazy days; maybe it was just general craziness.

Today’s paranoia is, as the old joke says, justified. After all you’re not paranoid if somebody’s actually after you. And trust me, somebody’s after you… from your cell phone company tracking your phone calls to your ISP tracking your Web viewing to your cable company tracking what ads you watch, somebody’s watching you.

But, like goldfish in plastic heels, things can get a little out of hand. A Baltimore start-up called SpotCrime has launched an interactive TV app with DirecTV that gives DirecTV viewers “near” real-time—guess that means they don’t shout, “Look out! There’s a burglar in your den!”—crime data, including listings of local crime activity and a map of where it’s all happening.

First-time homebuyers will, no doubt, be enthused to learn that those bucolic woods behind their houses are teeming with moonshiners and that the nearby field of flowing grass is actually grass of another sort.

This is the kind of interactive application that will draw a big, mixed, audience. There will be the voyeurs, those folks who just have to know everything about what’s going on in their neighborhoods. There will be the paranoid, increasingly stepping towards the boundaries of agoraphobia. And of course there will be the criminals, sitting home at night looking at the local crime reports and learning it’s not worth going after Billy Smith’s place because the James Gang already cleaned it out.

About the only people who probably won’t be happy about this are the local authorities, who, in the end, will make the whole thing go or not go. That’s why I’m a bit paranoid.

SpotCrime, in a prepared statement, said its business is to “pull crime incident data from multiple sources, including state and local police departments and validated news sources, to produce a comprehensive record of local crime information.”

Not to shoot holes in that model, but if the police and other local authorities were willing to talk about local crime, wouldn’t the stories be in the newspapers and on TV? They’re not because, among other thing, local crime is not good for local business or local property values so it’s better not to talk up what’s going on.

There’s a limit to how much paranoia you can drive for a profit. The local TV news steps up to the line—and sometimes crosses it—every evening. SpotCrime, were it to ever really take off, would probably step so far over it would be reporting crime in another county. It’s one thing to know you’re being watched; another to participate in the watching as a voyeur; and quite another to have that information affect your home value. How long do you think it will take until that lesson is learned?