Don’t get me wrong. Hell will freeze over before I would ever vote for Newt Gingrich. First, off the man was named for a lizard. Secondly–and more seriously–you can directly track the origins of the current polarization between the two major US political parties on Gingrich’s tenure as Speaker of the House.

And like every candidate in this the most mud-slinging president primary campaign in history, he has been made to look bad in a great many ways. It is hard for me and others to recognize what sometimes happens and that is good ideas come from bad people.

A few weeks back, Gingrich proposed that we build a space colony on the moon and that has been the subject of a great deal of ridicule. Comedians are still having their fun with that one and Tweeters still wonder what Gingrich was smoking.

But wait a minute. Forget who the source is. Think about the idea. We elected the current incumbent because we thought he had a vision for America, because his eloquence fooled us into thinking he could lead better than he has led. And among his early actions was to shut down NASA’s manned space program. Too expensive he said. These are tough times.

So a bunch of our nation’s brightest scientists got laid off and a whole supply chain of human’s got financially hurt in the name of this great frugality.

Years ago, a young visionary president who made great speeches was elected president. In his first, special address to Congress, in his first of three springtimes in office Jack Kennedy said, “Before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important in the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”

And, as I recall, their was a landslide of comic parody, as well as editorial columns explaining why man could never walk on the moon and besides what would he do once he got there?

The answer, of course, is the reason people should walk on the moon is the same reason why humpback whales jump completely out of the ocean: Because they can.

It seems to me, that what makes us unique from other animals is that our entire history is based on going beyond what we have done. Before we consider the benefits or catastrophes, we simply have to see if we can do it.

Why should man walk on the moon? Because some day, we can build a colony on it? What will we do then? Look around and see what else we can do, where else we can go, we can learn more about the moon, and thus about the earth and our universe and how life got to here and anywhere else that it might exist.

And yes the cost is huge at a time when people are losing their homes. But to me, the cost is an investment, one that will create a great many new jobs that may be more appealing than the manufacturing our current president seems to be focused upon.

What we learn along the way will give the world new technology that is likely to pervade into computing, science, medecine, earth sciences, the classroom and places that we cannot yet imagine.

It seems to me that Newt’s Moon Colony is the only idea I’ve heard from any candidate for president, and what we need more than business managers, speechmakers and ideologues in the White House is someone with vision and leadership capabilities.

No I do not want Newt to be president. But I do think he should be commended–not ridiculed–for this idea which s entirely worthy of consideration and intelligent debate.

Don’t you?

Chris Abraham is one of a large handful of PR professionals, who in my view, gets it about social media and PR. Yesterday , he had a decent post on tips for PR operatives trying to comprehend blogger outreach.

What he wrote, makes sense and is good advice for inexperienced swimmers in the Ocean of Clueless smilers-and-dialers who seem to plague those of us who write about topics of interest.

But there is something about the term, blogger outreach, that bothers me. When Chris asked me for feedback, I tweeted: “My condensed view: 1. read my stuff  b4 you pitch me & 2. Treat me like any other media pro.”

Seems simple enough. But, in fact, there’s a lot of issues going on here. With all these conferences, blogs and articles about how to pitch the press, PR people just don’t seem to read the editors they pitch.

I told Chris that my most frequent conversation with a PR person goes a bit like this:

PR Person: “Your readers will love to hear what my client has to say about [fill in the blank]!!!”

Me: “Sorry, I don’t cover that.”

PR Person: “No? Then, what do you cover?”

Me: “READ MY STUFF!!!!”

My stuff sometimes appears as a blog; in the form of  an online column and in a few rare examples, it appears on paper in books or magazine articles.

To the client, it really doesn’t matter where I write, so much as what I write and who reads it.

When someone pitches a story to me, I am attentive and curious if the story sounds like it’s interesting to my readers. If not, I have learned to be less friendly and more cryptic than is my usual nature. There are just too many swimmers in the Ocean of Clueless.

Blogger Outreach implies that bloggers should be treated as different or separate than plain old-fashioned press. But we are not. All of us are just media, and if you are in PR you will do better if you think of us that way.

Chances are if you read the NY Times you do it online–just like if you were reading Robert Scoble. The difference is that Scoble is probably more accessible and if you need a tech audience, more valuable.

We are all media. We play by the same rules or should be expected to do so. What we want from people who pitch us is a good story in the category where we report, opine or analyze. As a blogger, I want to be treated precisely as I want to be treated as an editor. As a PR professional, you should expect–and require–that I play by the same ethical rules.

My advice to PR folk is to consider us your customers. Your clients will come and go. Consider them manufacturers that give you something that some of your customers might like. You need to understand who in the media will find which  products useful or interesting.

If the last time you talked to an editor, you had something he or she used, chances are high they will listen to you next time.

If the last time you talked to a tech editor, you pitched toy fire trucks for Christmas, then chances are the editor will not respond warmly to your new effort to get their attention and time.

In 2006, I was invited by a PR operative to attend a Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. Sounded titillating, I thought, but what does it have to do with my focus of social media for business?

Their PR person, sounded confused. “But you wrote Naked Conversations, didn’t you,” she asked.

It was clear she saw my name on a list. She saw the single word “Naked,” and went after me, without going to Amazon and reading two sentences of book description. She saved two minutes and wasted ten of mine.

I get about five pitches a day. There are those who receive many times that number. Multiply each bad pitch times ten minutes and you see the basic problem. Treat me as an outreach blogger and you’ll compound the problem by insulting me with offers for free tee shirts or that you can drive traffic to my site.

Chris Abraham would never do such a thing. He uses social media to connect with a great number of professional writers. He seems to understand that his first step is to establish a credible relationship long before he has to pitch.

He is well-suited to teach others how to practice his profession right. But I wish he would just call it “editorial relationships.”  Somehow “blogger outreach” makes me think of social workers helping lost people find help.

If size matter, then TechCrunch Disrupt [TC Disrupt] wins the prize. With 2600 attendees, it is arguably the largest US-based tech industry conference. With 200 companies exhibiting–often for  just one of three days–it often took on the characteristics of a trade show.

I just love the promise and excitement in young start-ups exploding with grand visions. While many of these visions will turn out to have been hallucinations, but others will be real and will disrupt something large and institutional who will disdain them until it is too late.

For companies showing the ability to disrupt this was just about the best show I’ve attended in more than 25 years in the tech industry.

That should be what this column is about, and it part it is. But the the conversation going in and coming out of this event was more directed at the drama and trauma that is Michael Arrington and his hand-picked TechCrunch team.

If you like controversy, well this one was juicier than crushed peaches in your pocket.

At the very core of it, of course, was Michael Arrington, the charismatic, controversial former lawyer, turned startup founder, turned  TechCrunch founder turned angel investor. The fact that these serial entrepreneurial endeavors have overlapped are at the root of all this controversy.

TechCrunch covers startups. Arrington has long invested in them in the earliest phases and TechCrunch writes about them. While there have been some utterances of there being no conflict, no one seems to be able to recall an incident where an Arrington company has not been favorably covered in the TechCrunch newsletter that enjoys two million unique visits each month.

I have previously described Arrington  as the Rupert Murdoch of our industry. Both have incredible power and influence over publications that reach mass audiences all over the world. Both influence investors and other media. Both have been called bullies, and in my view, for good reason. And most recently both have been called to rask for questionable ethical practices particularly the venerable New York Times.

For all these reasons,  Arrington, like Murdoch, seems to make enemies by the truckload.

Arrington’s controversies reached something of a crescendo the week before TC Disrupt opening Sept. 12.

The week prior, usually is filled with editorial speculations on what new media and web-based apps and trends would be unveiled. Instead it was filled with fast-breaking news of Arrington’s abrupt and dramatic termination from AOL who had bought TechCrunch for $30 million last year, a deal that disrupted a prior Disrupt event.

Each of these incidents seem to me to be a distraction. Journalists are taught in 101 courses never to get in the way of your story. Yet Arrington seems to be a persistant roadblock of his own production, this time featuring 200 very promising companies exhibiting and 30 presenting on the stage;  2600 people gathered in the vast, dark San Francisco Design Center and tens of thousands more watching the livestream worldwide.

TechCrunch was born in controversy. Arrington and erstwhile founding

partner Jason Calacanis, had attended a DEMO conference. DEMO has been around for 21 years and was a consistent success, until Arrington and Calacanis–sitting at a bar at the DEMO conference–announced they would start Disrupt to directly compete with the well-established IDG production.  By no coincidence, would be held on the same dates as a future DEMO.

Calacanis had previously started two tech news organizations. He sold Silicon Alley Reporter to Murdoch’s Dow Jones Company , which promptly bungled it to death. Then Calacanis sold founded the controversy-loving Engadget, which he sold to AOL who has done rather well with it.

At last year’s San Francisco Disrupt event, Calacanis suddenly disappeared. Arrington went on the dais to announce the couple had gotten a surprise divorce. A court will decide the terms of desolution in a saga that may take a few years and mud wrestling matches to resolve.

Calacanis has since started his own product-intro conference, Launch, which has a similar format and was held in March in the same SF Design Center. Calacanis has announced plans to start a newsletter of its own and few doubt it will compete against TechCrunch.

So, it seemed to me that TechCrunch’s brief history had already become steeped in controversy going into this fall edition. For the 200 companies who hope to build awareness and win customers by strutting their stuff on the stage or in the exhibition hallways, there was some hope that this yer, unlike previous years, there might be some hope that the spotlight would remain on them, without the eruption of a sideshow that would diminish  and divert focus.

But then it hit the fan.

This year’s trauma eclipsed all the traumas that have come before it.  A while back, Arrington announced he was starting an early phase investment fund, calling it CrunchFund. This would mean that CrunchFund could invest in startups that TechCrunch would write about and who could also be stars in TechCrunch events such as Disrupt.

It wasn’t really anything all that new. Arrington has been investing in companies for years. Many have fared well at TechCrunch events–as have other companies in which he did not invest.

I was an early critic of this practice. Other newsletter impresarios of earlier years had gone into investing and immediately divested themselves of any editorial interests to avoid conflict or even the appearance of it. But back then I was hollering in a hurricane. Some people grumbled privately, but no one wanted to take on Arrington whose TechCrunch has proven to be a powerful bully pulpit a great many times.

And for the sake of my own transparency: Michael Arrington and I were once friends. We no longer are. We do not wish each other well. For precisely these reasons, I rarely cover his activities, and when I do, I try to give a balanced view, but advise you to keep in mind my personal perspective.

What had changed for Arrington was that he was no longer a private investor running a privately held company. He was employed by AOL, a publicly held and closely watched company struggling to make a comeback on ground it had previously lost. AOL, it was disclosed, was a major investor in the new CrunchFund.

On Sept. 1, 11 days before Disrupt, Arrington & AOL CEO Tim Armstrong. “TechCrunch is a different property and they have different standards… we have a traditional understanding of journalism with the exception of TechCrunch.”

There are many ways that TechCrunch could have been positioned at that point. It seems to me that Armstrong picked about the lamest approach. Other possible positioning was discussed by TechCrunch’s Paul Carr, who played much of the host role at this year’s conference and is clearly loyal to Arrington.

The response was instant and mostly negative. The lofty, New York Times, which in itself competes with AOL and TechCrunch in the media business hit hard to the negative side challenging the ethics of both Arrington and AOL.

Traveling through Brazil at the time, Arrington’s boss Ariana Huffington, no stranger to controversy herself,decided she couldn’t stand the heat so she threw Arrington out of the kitchen. She unceremoniously sacked Arrington.

And the saga of drama continued into the days immediately preceding the conference, there were all sorts of speculations: the TechCrunch team would resign en mass. Arrington would assemble them to start a new online media organization; Arrington would buy TechCrunch back from AOL; the whole thing was just a stunt to fan fires and grab attention.

Then came the conference. All seats were filled for many reasons. The opening remarks often set the tone for an entire conference. Their was mystery and speculation on who would deliver them and how the issue of Arrington would be folded into it.

Then, none other than Michael  Arrington strode onto the dais.There were murmurs of surprise. He waited until the room became entirely still and then spoke for less than five minutes.

His tone was calm and his style was gracious. He explained that he was an AOL employee for four more days and he was on stage in that light. He talked of his life being filled with personal drama, and urged attendees to focus more on the 30 presenting companies as well as the other startups exhibiting in the StartUp Alley exhibition area.

In my view, it was one of his finest moments.

And for the most part, attendees abided by Arrington’s recommendation. While there was much talk on the controversy, most of the people I talked with were talking about the startups they represented or the ones they enjoyed.

The TechCrunch teams gets to see most industry companies in their earliest phases. They have a good eye for quality, for tech trends and yes companies with the potential of disrupting the status quo where disruption is much needed.

This year showed a couple of companies who promise to make healthcare issues easier for people. One of the Cake Health was a finalist. Another couple were making it easier for people to get organic food from local sources. One of them Farmigo, was a finalist and I’ll be writing about both of them in the future.

My personal favorite was a mobile app from Vocre of San Jose that lets you instantly translate via a mobile app in 13 languages. It won the people’s choice award and is available in beta for iPhone users.

There were at least 15 companies who were focused on small business. This was a pleasant surprise. I’ve long been a champion of social products for small business and this conference showed me that there’s a fast-forming trend to help small business with programs that are more sophisticated and useful than Facebook fan pages.

Also I was at the conference representing American Express Open Forum, and I found a wealth of material there for my columns in the form of some exceptionally fine companies.

Everyone–yes everyone–I spoke with said they were happy they attended and were getting as much or more than they had expected from the conference which filled the large and unfortunately dark San Francisco Design Center to it’s walls.

But elements of controversy seemed to pervade far too much:

• The actual start ups presentations–the real stars of the show did not get to present until the closing hours of each day. Most of the primetime morning stage events were interviews with prominent VCs, many of them are apparently doing business with Arrington.  The quality of these conversations and interviews was not bad–although the questions were often disappointingly softball.
• The winner of TC Disrupt, which receives a $50,000 cash award, and the first runner up were both companies Arrington had invested in–it was disclosed.
• Pressly, a presenting company with visually beautiful graphics for reading media content on a  mobile device did a great presentation then got hammered by two judges who just happened, it turned out, to have investments in Flipbook an obvious competitor of Pressly.
• Robert Scoble was banned from attending. Arrington had told him his crime was that he had favorably covered Calacanis Launch conference earlier in the year. Scoble held court in a small bar across the where many presenting companies went to be video interviewed by him. To bar presenting companies access to Scoble, one of the most influential voices on new technologies seemed to me to be particularly petty and unfair to entrepreneurs.
• The Techcrunch team is clearly pissed that their leader has been taken out of the game. Little shots from the dais were fired at varying intervals for the three days. Arrington, was less gracious then earlier when he pointed out that Om Malik heads a newsletter, yet is part of an investment fund. In my view the comment did not help Arrington, but probably hurt Malik.

AUGUST 2, 1947, NEW YORK, NY– It was a slow news day. I was facing yet another deadline and my mind was as blank as the sheet of paper I had inserted into my trusty old Underwood typewriter.

Outside, the summer sizzle had turned to drizzle. The muted tap dance of raindrops against my window pane had replaced the coo and chirp of city birds.

It was still muggy. I left the windows open a and kept my two room fans from the new Sears store blasting at my face. Their whirr harmonized with the sounds of the rain as the clicking of ice cubes in my bourbon kept rhythm.

Nice audio, except one sound was missing– the sound for which I got paid–the rattatat  of my typewriter keys as they etched words onto my still-blank page.

Maybe it was the mugginess of the day, or the excess of bourbon, or maybe it was the fear that I was losing my way with words, but I sat there blaming my editor and the world in general for not giving me a good news story.

My editor thought he was doing me a favor when he assigned me to write a feature on the future of technology for this week’s Sunday edition. But features are soft stuff for bleeding hearts and I like to think of myself as a hard-boiled guy, who writes about real people, particularly when they are bilking the public.

I’m a beat reporter. I cover hard news about hard lives in a tough city. I live to find dirt under the fingernails of public officials and usually New York City is filled with my kind of stories almost as good as covering the fat politicians in Washington DC.

But this was August. All the crooks in New York City had gone out to the Hampton’s for the summer.  All the papers were filling their front pages with photos of street kids dancing in the cooling gushers from fire hydrants they had illegally unscrewed.

I sat staring at my blank page and cursing the world for its lack of real news. “It will be fun. Just use your imagination, my editor had boomed into the phone.”

Fun? Imagination? I’m a reporter, not a sci-fi writer. I lead with what bleeds. I write about things that I could never have imagined would happen. Besides, the whole idea was lame.

This was August, 1947. The world had all the technology anyone would ever want. We had cars that got us to places infinitely faster than the horses we rode where I had grown  up outside of Hoboken, some 20 very odd years earlier.

Everyone had a telephone in their home. Rich folks even had extension phones in their bedrooms. These days you could dial directly–putting Mabel the switchboard operator right out of business. The old party lines were disappearing so you could trust the phone company to let you speak in private.

They had started passenger airplanes.  These days you could get you from New York City to Washington DC faster–and cheaper–than on a Greyhound Bus

What more  friggin’ technology could you possibly want?

I took a long tug on my bourbon and sat back, getting lost into the rhythm of the sounds of rain and whirr, angry at my editor and a world that made today a slow news day.

That’s when it got very, very weird. Maybe I blacked out and it was all just a dream. Maybe I have more imagination than I give myself credit for–or maybe, just maybe a Gypsy came by and gave me a glimpse into her crystal ball.

It was all strangely real–or may it was really strange.

I tumbled in time, sort of like I see my shorts tumble when I watch them through the window of the new Bendix washing machine in the new washing machine the wife nagged me into buying.

The first thing I noticed was my daily calendar. Pages were flying off, slowly at first then faster and faster. Time was literally flying as I sat and watched. Suddenly it was 1948, then 1955 and 1976. The calendar whirred into the next century, that slowed and settled down a few years later.

Now, it was August 2011.

It was still my room, but everything had changed. My window now opened sideways instead of up and down. My floor and desk lamps were gone, but new lights were sunken into my ceiling. The room fans were gone, but cold air was flowing through a grated hole in the wall. My steam radiator was gone as well, but I’d worry about that next winter.

My typewriter dramatically kept changing shape as the calendar dates whizzed forward. Suddenly, the word Underwood was replaced, by Smith Corona. Then the keys became a ball and the machine transformed again, this time into an IBM Selectric. As the days flew turned into years of the future the name kept changing into  Altair, Kaypro, Commodore, Compaq then Dell. The shape kept changing.  Suddenly music was playing out of it and as the calendar pages slowed, the calendar itself jumped inside this thing on my desk.

When we stopped, the typewriter had assumed a very sleek shape, like something you’d expect from outer space–if there is anything in outer space. It was now silvery and nice to touch. In the middle of its top was a mysterious logo of an albino Apple–I have no idea why.

I opened this machine, and where my blank paper used to be there was a blank screen. I pushed the button and it came to life. It was a screen filled with color and as I pushed buttons I could talk with people and watch movies, and write my columns, which appeared on other people’s screens.

I reached for my phone, but it too, was transformed into some cute tiny thing. It could fit into my short pocket, just like my Lucky Strike cigarettes. I soon discovered that I could still tak on the thing, but I could do most of the stuff that the Apple thing would allow me to do. I was relieved to discover I could still actually talk to people on it, but that no longer seemed to be the big event. Instead of talking, it seems people of the future will send notes to each other on telephones. It beats me why we would send words when we can actually talk.

Then I noticed my bookshelf. I’d been collecting books for as long as I had my Underwood. Maybe longer. I used to spend my spare time in the bargain bins and back shelves of dusty old book stores, usually managed by eccentric old men  invariably wearing rimless bifocals. The wife and I moved a lot, and the hardest part was toting box after box after box of heavy books. Now my beloved books were gone–every last yellowed and dog-eared one of them.

Now there was just one thing–a flat gray thing. On it was embedded one strange word AmazonKindle. I couldn’t quite get my brain around that. Last I checked, Amazon was a river and Kindle was how you started a fire. Did you use this thing to douse a fire or boil a river?

When I finally figured out how to turn the damn thing on, I discovered that somehow all my books were inside this Kindle thing–even my underlining and bookmarks. I cannot possibly describe it better. I would show you, but it probably only exists in the dreams of writers who drink too much bourbon. It would sure make moving easier if such a device ever really existed.

My desk had also been transformed. It had been cluttered with the tools of a writer’s trade: steno books, pilfered ballpoint pens, carbon paper, White Out, newspaper clippings, and an overflowing ashtray that let you set your burning butt in a flamingo’s beak.

But the desk was far from uncluttered. Where all these objects once had been, there were now all these little boxes, each of which had green and red light blink in uncoordinated sequence to each other. And there were wires everywhere. One connected my little typewriter replacement to something larger than my old Underwood. It somehow managed to type the words I put into the Apple device.

Then, without explanation, I blinked and I was back to August 1947. It had all been a dream. I was back where I lived and I was very, very relieved to be in a time I understand.

Besides, we have all the technology we need, right here, right now in August 2007. It was all just a really strange dream–or was it strangely real.

The only thing, I can’t figure out is that by my typewriter, there’s this little black square. It measures about one inch across. When I turn it on I see that strange white Apple, and then it lists every song, I’ve ever heard. It has all my albums and radio stations. I wonder where it came from or what I’m supposed to do with it.

Anyway, this is isn’t exactly the feature story my editor asked for, and he may spike the story I’m telling you here. I hate it when that happens. I wish I could just talk directly with my readers without lame editors getting in between us.

Most of all, I hope next week, there’s a nice juicy murder in the City. It’s the kind of news story I understand and you readers love.

You may have been busy checking into Costco on Foursquare the other day when Microsoft completed its $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype. So maybe you didn’t notice. But since you’re obviously interested in mobile apps, I thought I’d share my thoughts on this and tell you why Microsoft and Skype are so very important to where mobile apps and computing as a whole is going.

First, a quick comment: I think Skype video is a miracle application and one of the most underrated applications in the Conversational Age. It is the next best thing to being face-to-face, and so much cheaper than flying. Plus, you get much better seats. I use it to talk for free with people all over the world. including my grandchildren who will grow up knowing me even though I live far away. For them, it is no stranger than talking on the phone was for me as a kid.

Skype got forgotten as social media exploded. it was sequestered in some dark cellar during its years under the dysfunctional ownership of eBay who neither improved the core product nor found any reason for having purchased it. Instead of auctioning it off online, they eventually spun it.

Yet, Skype remains very current, with the only glitches belonging to connection blips by carriers who hate anything that give so many people quality services for free or inexpensive. I’ll get back to that issue in a couple of paragraphs.

First I wanted to mention my surprise and hope for Microsoft decision to acquire it. I’ve been scanning the little gray cells of my memory and I think the last Microsoft acquisition of enduring value was in 1987 when they bought Powerpoint for $14 million. It’s hard to believe how recently Microsoft seemed like the unstoppable Godzilla of computing. But one short decade of developing and acquiring technology based of pursuing short-term revenue rather than long-term customer relationships may have had some humbling effect on the company. It certainly has had a level impact on its market position.

But, I am too old to assume that buying a quality product with enormous market potential, that Microsoft might not muck it up.

Will we soon start seeing, Professional, Office, Developer, ad nauseam Skype versions? Will they need service packs to stop phishers and governments from eavesdropping on our global Skype conversations? Will the versions randomly be incompatible. Will my iPad Skype be able to talk with your Android Skype? We shall see.

My fears also got enhanced when almost simultaneous to the closing of the deal, the remaining Skpye founders jumped ship. Historically, such hasty departures have not boded well for products. The founders, in this case, could have been motivated by the fact that each has suddenly become enormously wealthy. Another possibility is that a sense of horror  pervaded them when they learned of Microsoft’s go-to-market plan.

And that brings us back to the future of mobile applications. As the NY Times pointed out this morning, The mobile carriers of Europe have been blocking the free Skype apps from their nets flying in the face of EU Net Neutrality regulations.

But Microsoft has pinned its future, many believe, on Windows 7 telephone operating systems. Personally, I think that this is a wise course. Microsoft strategies may prove more formidable than we iPhone/Android-loving cool kids may think.

Microsoft wants to do business with European carriers. Those carriers want free versions of Skype dead. How do you think it’s going to come out? Has Microsoft learned a lesson and now understands that longterm user relationships matter more than next-quarter revenue? We shall see. Did Microsoft just invest $8.5 billion as an investment in European carrier relationships? Once again, we shall see.

What is clear is that Skype is a piece of Microsoft’s mobile strategy, and is the case for every tech company wishing to evolve into the new Conversational Age, mobile strategy is survival strategy.

Here’s a case of how Skype mobile works.  My client Brian Magierski, co-founder & co-CEO of Appconomy, itself a global applications company was in China last week. He was being driven to a meeting and using Skype on his iPhone to meet face-to-face with someone many miles away.

“It worked perfectly,” Brian told me. “It was very natural.”

So far, Skype has been current because it has had no competition. But all of that has recently and dramatically changed. When you buy an iPad, it comes with a native app called Facetime, which also works with any other Mac or iOS device. Facetime integrates with your contacts so you can just call-and-see any of them who also have Facetime. On the iPad, however, the front-and-rear cameras allow you to see a colleague, slide a button and show that person either you kid, or a white board or anything else in visual range.

This is real competition and Microsoft’s first challenge will be to catch up on that compelling feature.

Skype, of course has a huge head start and a huge installed base, but my advise is never, NEVER sell Apple short in a competitive battle against Microsoft. And never sell Apple short when it comes to innovative disruptive technology.

Personally, I don’t care who wins. I’m on the side of us users and competition usually keeps things free and innovation coming. I just hope Microsoft understands both parts of my previous sentence.

Wherever I turn, it seems one of my many friends who work as independent social media consultants  are either looking for fulltime jobs or have recently taken one. I’m not talking about superstars like Chris Brogan. Nor do I include the out-of-nowhere self-proclaimed social media “experts” who usually turn out to be  ” know-nothings.”

The people I’m talking about are the many mid-level professionals who have done quite well in the last couple of years, by helping a great many companies of diverse size and focus to find their way into social media.

When I ask consultants why they’ve chosen this time to leave consulting and seek employment, they usually start by saying, “it’s time.”

They’re absolutely right. It’s time because the times have fast-evolved.

A few short years ago, social media consultants were still evangelists, explaining that the new conversational tools were not a fad; that it is better to listen to angry customers than set barriers to communications, that once you knew what you wanted to do with social media, you could measure almost every aspect of the process and result.

More recently, the business conversation shifted from the fundamental question of “Why should we…” to “how can we,” and the consultants went from being lonely voices in the dark corners, to pragmatic educators of how new tools could be provide significant, scalable and sustainable improvements.

A decade of social media disruption is now coming to an end. To a very large number of mainstream enterprises, large and small, social media is just one more item to integrate into the workflow process. While a few years ago, there were just ideas, today there are processes. While a few years ago social media teams in large enterprises were relegated to skunkworks operations, now social media is being used by marketing, recruiting, communications, business development, sales, support and so much more.

While a few years ago, there was no such thing as a community manager, there are now thousands of them.

In short, social media’s disruption is pretty much over and now the longer, slower, duller process of integrating social media into enterprise fabric, where diverse workers use tools to get their jobs done the same way they use computers, search and email.

consultants are for new waves of change. In the years I have been in the workplace, I’ve seen consultants for IT, for ethernet connection, faxes, email, security and firewall issues. I even recall being trained on how to use the new IBM typewriters with the ball, instead of a striker. Likewise there were experts on each of these subjects, who not only consulted, but they wrote books and spoke and conferences where people who were either puzzled or passionate about the new technologies gathered to listen, learn and occasionally be inspired.

That’s the state of social media today. It is normalizing inside of business. It is becoming an integrated system in place. There are guidelines for ethics. The lawyers have stopped screeching about risk. Operations officers are comfortable measuring results.

If you are really good at social media, there are tons of jobs for companies who want to normalize social media practices. That is an in-house position. The specialist with hard-to-find expertise on the subject is a dime a dozen as more and more people get accustomed to social media.

This is a normal evolution. It is time for many consultants to join companies and spend a few years continuing the normalization process which bring us out of the decade of corruption and into this new Conversational Age.

It’s time.

[NOTE: I am writing a new book. It's a history called, "Pioneers of Social Media--they blazed the trails we follow." This is a draft of Chapter 4, all about Cluetrain Manifesto, which I argue is the pivotal moment in the history of social media.  I am looking for your feedback. I am a big believer in crowd sourcing, so I'm counting on you members of my crowd to help me write a better book. Or, if you really, really love it, I'm looking for your pre-order [click in right sidebar.]

Ch. 4 Struck by the Cluetrain

I was sitting in business class and sipping champagne in June 2000, when the Cluetrain hit me.

At roughly the same time, Rob Key a successful senior executive at Young & Rubicon, completed the book, stepped out of a prestigious and lucrative position and founded Converseon, the first-ever social media agency. Jeremy Geelan was a traditional publisher when he read Cluetrain and he says it began his journey from paper publishing to becoming a leading interactive publisher and producer on cloud computing events.

Eric Norlin was a Denver stockbroker, who would end up being a founder of the Defrag Conference and it’s principal blogger.

There turned out to be a whole lot of people all over the world that got hit by the Cluetrain Manifesto, all in a short period of time. We were living perfectly successful lives. Many of us connected to internet marketing. Then we read this book and our perspective got turned upside down and we knew we had to change something in our lives and we entertained fantasies that together we could change the world.

It took six years for the Cluetrain to roll into Johannesburg, South Africa. Paul Jacobson, a commercial and litigation lawyer, listened to an audio version of Cluetrain in 2006, he stopped his practice in its tracks.

He opened up his country’s first social media consultancy. But he was ahead of South Africa’s social media adoption curve. There just weren’t enough companies using social media, so there weren’t very many clients.

But instead of returning to litigation, he combined his profession with his passion. He became the first and only South African lawyer specializing in social media law. Business keeps getting better and better.

When I spoke with Paul in 2011, he was about to take another step down the Cluetrain line. into a web-based legal advisory service that will provide legal support in the social media space.

“I can comfortably track my inspiration for this path back to that one underrated book I listened to in early 2006,” he told me.

Trigger point

Cluetrain was a book, but it was—and remains—more than that. It was an idea, an idea that the way business was being conducted did not respect customers. It was the thought that the internet could be a great equalizer between institutions and the people they were supposed to serve.

Like so many of the people I’m telling you about, its authors came of age in the 60s and shared many of the ethics and concerns that I told you about earlier.

Most significantly, Cluetrain was a trigger point in the social media revolution, a watershed moment. For a great many people in a great many places and professionals, the book caused people to stop doing one thing and start doing something new, something they felt was more meaningful and valuable, something that brought them closer to customers, colleagues, students and others who shared their interests.

It is still doing this. It may have changed your life, even if you never heard of the book until you started reading this book.

If you blog, tweet, podcast, lurk, follow or friend, then you too have been struck by the Cluetrain. You and hundreds of millions of people who are not “from the 60s” have now been struck by the Cluetrain. Your life and your work is different because of this book if you use social media.

After Cluetrain, things started happening a whole lot faster.

In my previous three chapters, I covered over 50 years of people and events in about 10,000 words. In the next 10 chapters, I will use 70,000 words to tell you about the pioneers of social media over a period of only 10 years or so.

Bear with me for a few pages, while I tell you my story.

I was on that plane, heading from San Francisco to New York City, a route that I often had taken.  I ran SIPR, a small PR firm that I had founded in 1986. We were different than other PR firms in that we focused just on startups, and very often just on the initial launches. I went to New York City often with Silicon Valley startups who needed to tell their stories to traditional editors and analysts who were still centered in and around Manhattan.

My clients were always in urgent mode, always financially constrained and historically were driven by dreams that their technology could change the world, making it just a little bit better.

The business, however, had been changing for a couple of years by June 2000 when I was enjoying the front end of the plane, sitting next to a client who was footing the bill. He was 27-years-old, roughly half my age. His startup had not yet made a single dime and as it turned out, it never would.

But he had persuaded a group of VCs to invest $21 million in him and his two partners. His company was not a lot different from many others that were erupting like popcorn in a microwave. I wasn’t sure why his company was different or better than other companies that had also recently formed and raised great pools of investment dollars.

His vision, it seemed to me, had nothing to do with making the world a better place. It had a lot to do with acquiring great wealth for himself, his partners and a few employees.

This was not why I had gone into PR. I had been a newspaper reporter and editor for several years before tiring of the vow of poverty, so money was certainly a motivation. But that was not the key motivator. What caught my heart and mind was the incredible collective genius I discovered in the tech sector. As someone who was primarily a story-teller, this was like striking gold in the stream.

From 1979 until I left PR in 2001, I was involved with hundreds of startups. The best of them turned visions into realities. I got to be a story teller for some great startups, companies that gave the world, desktop presentation, mapping, open workstations companies that went from two guys in garages, to IPOs. I loved taking complex stories and making them simple enough for everyday people to understand.

I loved my work.

In 2005, I started working with Virtual Vineyards, my first internet startup. They were the first online wine store. I’ll tell you more about them in a future chapter, when I tell you about Gary Vaynerchuk and Wine Library TV

For now, the relevance is that Virtual Vineyards opened my eyes to how the internet could break down the barriers of geography and thus fundamentally change how—and where—business could be conducted.

I changed my PR agency’s strategy to serve only internet startup companies. We struggled at first. Another PR agency head once sarcastically asked me if my clients paid me in “freeware,” because in 2005 and 2006, no one was yet making much money with a “dotcom” company as they were then called.

By 2007, that had changed. Internet startups abounded and were receiving larger and larger investments and venture capital, who would in turn have larger and less realistic expectations of how big these companies could get and how fast.

SIPR—for the first time—flourished financially. It seemed at times that new business prospects were lining up at the agency door and waving money in my face. But as the money got better and better, it seemed to me that the quality of technology and business acumen got worse and worse.

I looked at these start-up companies and their recent grad CEOs and thought of the rock song that went, “Your money for nothing and your chips for free.”

I had become ambivalent about my clients. I saw no passion to share, but Hell, the money was good.

So there I was in June 2000, flying in business class. When we landed at JFK, a black-suited guy would greet us and carry our bags to a waiting limo. We had rooms reserved at a swank hotel that had recently opened in Manhattans Soho district.

I finished the book as the wheels touched down at JFK. My client was giving me multiple instructions as we taxied in. He was either unhappy because his schedule was too jammed or too sparse. I don’t remember which.

I wasn’t really listening. I was thinking of some of the words and ideas inside the book I had just read, and I knew I would not be doing this sort of work much longer.

A year later, I sold SIPR to employees, and began partnering on a subscription based email newsletter. It was called Conferenza Premium Reports and it covered tech conferences in great depth. We did well for a while, but then some people started showing up. They started writing about what was happening in real time and posting it on the internet.

Instead of competing with each other, as we editors and reporter were doing, they were actually collaborating. When one of them posted something relevant to the conference the others would post links to it.

These guys were called “bloggers.” At first I didn’t know what to make of them, but I couldn’t help by like them as individuals and greatly admire how and what they were doing even as it directly competed with Conferenza.

Conferenza accurately touted its content as the most comprehensive tech conference reports. We would take a week to write up our reports—still considered fast back then. No one blogger could compete with what we were doing, but collectively, the bloggers were doing a great job. More than that, they were delivering content extremely fast and they offered it to anyone who wanted to see it for free.

It took my partner Gary Bolles and me little time to realize that these guys were going to put us out of the subscription-based email newsletter business, which took until 2004.

But it was much, much earlier that these bloggers made me realize that the Cluetrain had hit me again. I started blogging less than a month after I left Conferenza.

In the next decade a great many more traditional media organizations would feel the impact of the same train.

Starting with a simple conversation

Cluetrain began as a three-way series of email and telephone conversations. Cluetrain Manifesto was collaboration between Doc Searls, David Weinberger and Christopher Locke. The project began as nothing more than a conference call instituted by Christopher Locke.

As Doc Searls recalled in 2011, “Chris, David and I were annoyed at how poorly the Net and its implications were being understood. There was so much about the Net that was obvious to us — and presumably to at least a few others — but that part was hardly talked about in the media, and was largely ignored by the flood of venture capitalists funding projects who seemed to regard the Net as ‘TV with a buy button.’ ”

The conference call spawned a series conversations. At some point, Rick Levine, the most technical of the group, accepted an invitation to join the group.

In one conversation, Doc Searls said, “Markets are conversations and conversation is fire.” Therefore, marketing is arson.” Thus, I would say to a prospect, “If you want to set fires, I’m your guy. If you just want to put out press releases, find somebody else.”

So Chris responded with something like, “Okay, so let’s put what we’ve been talking about up on a website, and see if it catches fire.”

Thus The Cluetrain Manifesto website was born.

Addressed to the  ’People of the Earth,’ it began:

“A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.

“These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.”

It caught fire. It spread, particularly among technologists who were inspired to build more and more conversational tools. It spilled over into marketing people and business thinkers in general.

But the real blaze was ignited after David Miller a literary agent, contacted the Cluetrain four and suggested the site be converted into a book. They agreed and worked aggressively to complete the project. The book reached bookshelves in January 2000. It became a best seller.

If one key point was that the internet can make collaboration faster and easier, then the project itself was a case study. The authors and their agent met only twice—both times at Levine’s home in Boulder, Colorado. They kept collaboration simple, adapting their individual writing styles to Christopher Locke’s.

Origin of the Theses

Cluetrain Manifesto is comprised of 95 ‘theses’–the same number that Martin Luther posted on a German church door in 1517, launching the Protestant Reformation against the Catholic Church, the most powerful institution of the time.

“Manifesto,” is simply a public statement of intention, but it is best known as part of  The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx, another work with revolutionary intentions. The Cluetrain guys were talking about a working people’s revolution.

The word “cluetrain” has more obscure roots. According to co-author Doc Searls,  “It was “a ‘snark,’ something of a Silicon Valley epitaph: “The clue train stopped there four times a day for 10 years, but they never took delivery.”

The subtitle, “The end of business as usual” made it clear that this book—categorized as a business book was designed to refute most other business books.

The book came out just at the time that the marketplace was rumbling that a dotcom bubble was inflating.  Greed was blatant and pervasive in the internet community. There was a line lifted from a popular rock song. “Your money for nothing and your chips for free.”  Dotcoms had become a gold rush and as more-and-more investment dollars poured into the dotcom companies, the expectations of what these promising little companies could actually achieve became entirely unrealistic.

Into that environment came Cluetrain Manifesto, which served as a counter proposal for what could and should be on the internet. The book suggested that the internet could be used for people to connect with people, to share authentic, transparent insights, ideas and information, and thus influence more people faster and at lower cost, than the biggest and boldest of ad, PR, branding and marketing campaigns.

Upon its release and into that environment, Cluetrain became an immediate best seller. Ironically, it was highly rated by influential business publications as Forbes magazine and BusinessWeek who listed it as a best-seller. The book hovered for nearly a year on the Amazon top 100 list.

If you have not yet read Cluetrain Manifesto, you really should. I would prefer you support the authors by purchasing it, but if you wish, you can read it for free, because the authors have posted it on their website, where you can read or download it for free.

If you are too lazy or busy to read it, skip to Chapter 4, written by. If you do not have an attention span that lets you cover more than a tweet, then this summary gives you the book’s essence:

“Markets are conversations.”

It was Locke who would provide what became the executive summary of the Manifesto, writing:

“We are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. We are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. Deal with it.”

The site had ignited fires. The book spread the flames far and wide.

It hit the nerves of PR people like me who had begun doubting that my public relations work was about relations with the public rather than generating buzz-the last sound you hear before getting stunned. It caught fire with Rob Key who left a lucrative and safe job and a global advertising agency to start over again with Converseon, a social media agency focused on helping clients listen to customers.

Training trainers

The flames hit Bill Cushard, who wasn’t in marketing at all. He was a corporate trainer at E*TADE, the first online stock trading service. Cushard was accustomed to giving lectures to attendees of his corporate classrooms.

After reading Cluetrain he said, “I thought about the conversations the trainees were having in the hallways, on breaks, or for that matter during class. Maybe my droning on was not always helpful. Maybe they weren’t even listening.

I figured I better get my classes more involved.  I figured they were deciding whether they were going to listen to me, and they were deciding whether and what they would learn from me. In other words, the book helped me see that I was not in control of my class.

The book inspired him to alter course of his course. He had the class break up into groups, assign each group a product, had them research the product and prepare a presentation to the class on their assigned product. “All I did was facilitate the discussions after each presentation. I found that the new hires were really into it. There was a buzz in the room. Most importantly, the questions and discussions after each presentation were quite good and often I found that students were answering each other’s questions…not me. It turned out these so-called “new hires” often knew quite a bit about the products and were happy to share what they knew.”

Teaching teachers to learn

Mark Greenfield is director of web services at the University at Buffalo and he also does some consulting to other colleges and universities to fully leverage the power and potential of social media.

In the late 90s Mark was worked as a web developer at the university. This was at a time when many large organizations were debating where websites belonged in the organization. Often it was between marketing and IT.

“I knew deep inside me that it was completely wrong to think of the web as another marketing channel but I had trouble articulating this, especially to my friends in marketing. Then I read the Cluetrain and it was an epiphany. Simply stated, it has been the single biggest influence in how I approach my job,” he told me.

While many colleagues were debating the mechanics of the web, Mark focused more on the meaning.

“I wanted to be able to answer, in one simple sentence, why a university should have a web site,” he said. He found it in Thesis #25:

“Companies (Universities) need to come down from their Ivory Towers and talk to the people with whom they hope to create relationships.”

I often refer to the Cluetrain as my job manual. It has taught me more about how to approach my job than anything else I’ve ever read. My first copy of the Cluetrain has been within arms reach for the past ten years, complete with a faded cover, more pages dog-eared then not, and the several shades of highlighters I have use over the years has it looking like a coloring book.  To this day, I find myself referring back to it on a regular basis.”

Remembering the train

I interviewed Searls and Weinberger in March2011; a decade after their book triggered the revolution. I selected them in part because they are the two better-known Cluetrain co-authors, but also because I consider the two of them to be my friends.

They are both at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society a research center focused on cyberspace studies.

Weinberger, who holds a doctorate in philosophy has gone on to write two additional critically acclaimed books. He’s a prolific writer, frequently contributing to Wired, Salon, Harvard Business Review and other publications. He also consults businesses of all sizes and is a frequent keynote speaker.

In addition to the Berkman Center Searls is also part of the Center for Information Technology and Society (CITS) at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is senior editor of Linux Journal, a leading open source online publication.  He has contributed to a number of books on open source, including Open Sources 2.0. In The World is Flat, author Thomas L. Friedman called Doc “one of the most respected technology writers in America.” His work has appeared in OMNI, Wired and  PC Magazine among other publications.

At Berkman, Searls started ProjectVRM, [for Vendor relationship Management], which, he says, “has the immodest ambition of liberating customers from entrapment in vendor silos, and improving markets by making it easy for customers to express intentions, form relationships and do business—on their own terms and in their own ways, and not just those provided by sellers.”

When we talked, Searls was enmeshed in writing a book on VRM, called The Intention Economy.

I asked both of them identical questions, which the answered separately, without knowledge of what the other said. In combining them here, it sometimes sounds like they are talking to each other, which was not the case.

I wondered if either of them had any sense of the changes that would come, when they were writing Cluetrain.

The executive summary:  not really.

Weinberger noted, “We were convinced that the primary value of the Net is that it enables us to find others, connect with them, and talk about what we care about in our own voice.  We were thinking about this primarily in contrast to the broadcast regime.”

“We had a sense of what would unfold only to the extent that we had an idea about what the value of the Net is. Beyond that, nope,” he added, “We didn’t predict blogging, because that would have meant figuring out the implementation that would work technically and, more important, socially.”

Searls said he had a “sense that markets would become more conversational, and that more people would speak with their own voices. Cluetrain gets a lot of credit for being visionary about social media, and I think that’s true to the extent that there is much more human interaction on the Net than ever before.”

“But there also was plenty to begin with, even in 1999. Email was already old hat then. So was instant messaging. Blogging had just begun.”

Searls is ambivalent at best about the current explosion of online social networks, particularly Facebook and Twitter.

“I didn’t expect AOL 2.0,” he said. “I didn’t expect the trapping and milking of users into silos.”

“While much good has come of Twitter and Facebook; but if those end up being the highest expressions of Cluetrain’s aspirations, we have failed.”

“How does Facebook speak? Just asking.” He said.

Searls pointed out that the key to Cluetrain’s vision was focused on empowering customers, not companies. “I believe that conversation, of the full Cluetrain-compliant sort, won’t happen for real until our reach — as individuals — exceeds corporate grasp,” he said.

I asked them about their subtitle. “The end of business as usual.” Had that happened and if not, had progress been made?

Weinberger conceded the subtitle was hyperbolic, a common practice in subtitle writing.

“But business has been transformed for sure,” he emphasized.

“Customers routinely seek out other customers before making a significant purchase. Leaders lead differently because they now sound like jerks when they sound like CEOs. Meetings are more informal and more focused now that so much more of the work can be done via email and other tools. Businesses increasingly are willing to acknowledge that they’re made of fallible humans. “

Searls took a slightly more strident view. He said the end of business as usual won’t come about until people, as individuals  “have their own tools for engaging with companies and other organizations. We’ve made plenty of progress on the social front, but on the individual front we’re still subordinated, still submissive, still dependent.”

Gulping products and crapping cash

At the heart of Cluetrain is a great image of “axe-wielding message-mongers,” marketers who were going to get images into people’s brains whether people liked it or not. I asked them how social media impacted the message-mongers? I wondered if the message mongers hadn’t simply adapted their old tricks to new channels where they are continuing to shovel out the same sort of crap as always?

Searls recalled that marketplaces had been places where buyers and sellers looked each other in the eye, haggles and bartered and cut deals, places where your performance built a reputation that branded you in your community.

“So the customers who once looked you in the eye while hefting your wares in the market were transformed into consumers.  In the words of industry analyst Jerry Michalski, a consumer was no more than ‘a gullet whose only purpose in life is to gulp products and crap cash.’ Power swung so decisively to the supply side that “market” became a verb: something you do to customers.

Then later we wrote in Cluetrain:

“Every one of us knows that marketers are out to get us, and we all struggle to escape their snares. We channel-surf through commercials; we open our mail over the recycling bin, struggling to discern the junk mail without having to open the envelope; we resent the adhesion of commercial messages to everything from sports uniforms to escalator risers.”

We know that the real purpose of marketing is to insinuate the message into our consciousness, to put an axe in our heads without our noticing. Like it or not, they will teach us to sing the jingle and recite the slogan. If the axe finds its mark we toe the line, buy the message, buy the product, and don’t talk back. For the axe of marketing is also meant to silence us, to make conversation in the market as unnecessary as the ox cart.

Weinberger observed that traditional marketing behavior is difficult to unlearn.

“The Net actually makes it easier to pursue many of the old, obnoxious behaviors. Businesses still assume that their interests and the interests of their markets are different. Businesses are thus in a struggle to bend their markets’ will. But the Net is constructed out of the alignment of interests: ‘I link to your site because of a perceived convergence of interest, and I friend you for the same reason.’”

Both saw definite differences from business before Cluetrain and business today. The internet has become an absolute necessity for doing business today. Traditional media having previously disdained online is now flocking there.

“We’re seeing television and radio reform themselves before our eyes and ears, and normalizing to the Net. It’s the same with newspapers and magazines. None of these media will go away, but eventually all of them will be based primarily on the Net and secondarily on their legacy platforms,” Weinberger added.

In my view, the simple statement that markets are conversations has become the legacy.  There has been no line in the sand that has changed business as usual, but today, millions of people engage in billions of conversations online everyday. Geography has become less relevant. Information is shared, not cloistered.

I wondered how has this web-based marketplace that was accelerated by Cluetrain has changed the world.

Weinberger observed that the “web has taught its users that we can own our medium and it can be about and for us. What we say and build together is more interesting, true, and valuable than what media owned by others can possible achieve.”

Under traditionally owned media, certain voices were positioned and promoted as authorities. The internet has changed all that according to Weinberger. “The web has taught us there is no single voice of truth or value. We have learned that difference is more interesting and important than pared-down similarity; that the world is far more interesting than the media ever let on; that curiosity is a value in itself, not merely an itch to be suppressed; that we can build things together for free far more grand than anyone every imagined.”

“Those are world-changing ideas that the Web is teaching us. How has it changed the world? Few big changes happen for any single reason.”

Searls was pleased, “ by the many connections I’ve made with old friends and half-lost relatives, and the way many people who would not otherwise use the Net have come to depend on it for mostly good and helpful things, such as planning reunions and sparking fresh and interesting conversations.”

However, he was simultaneously disappointed that we have come to repeat the mistakes of the past, especially in the creation of giant walled gardens [like Twitter and Facebook] for users, and our unimaginative dependence on advertising as the business model of first resort.

Long ride

The Cluetrain has been chugging along for over a decade. There have been a great many passengers. Some hopped on for a while, got bored, hopped off and went back to doing whatever it was they did before.

Others, such as those of us I talked about in this chapter, hopped onto the Cluetrain and went through a time warp. When we disembarked we discovered we were in places we had never imagined.

Others hopped off and began to build their own tracks, often taking us to places that could never have existed without Cluetrain.

The four authors are among our industry’s founding fathers. But there are others. John Levine, Christopher Locke, David Weinberger and Doc Searls were not alone. There were others who have built and paved and blazed trails that did not exist.

There are others who are founding fathers and many more who then took us to where we are today and paved the way to wherever it is we are going.

The rest of this book is about them.

[ NOTE: This is an excerpt from my new book, Pioneers of Social Media. You can see earlier pieces here, here and here .

The previous chapter closed with the observation that the disruption of the 60s shaped the lives and thinking of the founding fathers of social media.

The section starts of Chapter 2. It will be followed by profiles of several people who contributed to the formation of social media, people such as Justin Hall, the first blogger who I profiled recently.

I post these in part to get feedback, to understand what interests or is useful to readers and to get new ideas for the story I'm telling, so please let me know your thoughts.]

In the 1970s, the word “geeks” emerged as a description for engineers, particularly software developers. It was an odd choice and how it got to be their nickname-of-choice is not entirely clear.

Originally, the term referred to a circus sideshow creature who performed memorably disgusting acts such as biting off the head of a live rat [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geek]. These geeks were actually humans in costume, and with the right lights they could make it look like the rubber rodents they were decapitating were actually alive.

I could find only one possible bridge from these performers and today’s software geeks, as developers call themselves with pride.

It comes in the form of an obscure, short-lived comic book called Brother Power, the Geek, which first –and finally—published in the stormy year 1968.  It creators wanted the title to be Brother Power, the Freak, but DC Comics, the publisher refused. DC –originally Dell Comics—published superheroes to appeal to middle-American teenagers. They owned Superman, Batman and a bevy of other bastions of truth, justice and the allegedly American way.

In 1968, “freaks” referred to mainstream dropouts who used drugs and enjoyed a very nontraditional lifestyle. The artists and publisher reached a compromise. Brother Power was transformed from a freak to a geek. Apparently it a rat head eater was preferable to a drug head rocker.

The story was slightly recast, but remained decidedly freaky. Issue #1 opens with hippies on the lam stumbling into a warehouse where an old where they discover a discarded store mannequin.

A hippy with bloodied clothes swaps his wardrobe with the dummy, then he and his friends run off.  Shortly thereafter, lightening strikes the dummy– and in Frankensteinian fashion–it comes to life.

Thus Brother Power was born so to speak. He wanders about in hippy garb being mistreated by respectable folk throughout the land, until he stumbles onto a circus sideshow, where he finally finds people who can accept him for whatever he is. They charge admission so gawkers can watch him in disgust, but at least he’s never required to bite the head off of any rodents.

Then one day, he discovers he has superpowers. He redirects his career path toward fighting for truth and justice and against his  nemesis the evil Lord Sliderule.

DC Comics had hated the comics from the start. It never improved and the comic was spiked after two issues.

But, it seems that out of mainstream comic racks, Brother Power lived on for some time. Hardcopies were passed around on campus well into the 70s. He was talked about in early online forums. Surviving issues were later sold on eBay for $2.95, about 12 times the original street price. [http://cgi.ebay.com/Brother-Power-Geek-1-DC-Comics-Silver-Age-1968-/110637039406]. In 2011, you could still buy a copy for eight bucks plus shipping from Comix Zone in Syracuse NY [www.comixzone.com]

I asked a half-dozen of my friends who call themselves geeks where it started and they don’t seem to know. I posed the question on Twitter and heard that it started being a badge of honor in the 80s.

I like to think the unwashed, unruly, unsociably acceptable Brother Power who fought so hard for justice and freedom during his brief tenure before being silenced by traditional publishers has been the missing thread.

Inherit the earth

But sometime in the 1980s, it became fashionable to be a geek. The outcasts were starting to take their rightful place in society as heroes.

In Silicon Valley, where I spent much of my professional career as a consultant, geeks were the kernels around which we built companies. The companies developed and packaged these ideas into products, many of which fizzled and a few of which changed the world.

Investors got wealthy betting on the ideas of geeks. And the failed ideas kept coming back with greater refinement.

The line from these geeks to social media is not a straight one. And many of the products, which now allow hundreds of millions of people and organizations to engage in relevant and enjoyable conversations, were envisioned, developed and adopted by people who had not a clue that they were contributing to what has now happened.

Now let me tell you about just a few of the geeks who got us there, before most of us even had a clue that there was a “there” to go toward.

[NOTE: Formerly, the SM Global Report, this column has interviewed people all over the world who have extended social media in interesting or useful directions. For the next several months it will focus exclusively on people who will be covered in my next book, Social Media Pioneers.

Your feedback will influence how extensively I cover people. If you can think of someone who I should include, please let me know as well.]

Justin Hall did one of those little things that would make a big difference in 1994. He started a personal diary and he posted it online where everyone could see it. It was called Justin’s Notes from the Underground .

No one had ever done such a thing–although others had been inching in the same direction for a few years. There were no blog authoring tools yet so you had to be fairly geeky to create such a thing–or follow it for that matter.

The diary started to be called a “web log” probably because it resembled ship’s logs that sea captains had maintained for centuries. Everything gets shortened on the internet so it was soon just being called a “blog.”

In college, Justin played around on the internet with an interest in how links connected people. He also spent a lot of time writing. These two converged in his nascent blog. Justin built a significant following–up to 25,000 visitors a day–perhaps because some of his links directed people to sex sites.

I was surprised that I couldn’t find a sample of his writing through Google and Bing searches. Justin had to point me to archived samples. This is a memorable one here and a full archive here. It struck me because his style in 1994 was very much the style I wrote as a college kid in the 60s. In fact, it was a style of most liberal arts college kids in the 60s.

One  of the sub-themes of my book is that the 60s shaped many of the founding fathers of social media and this piece has Justin meeting and talking with Howard Rheingold and Dave Winer [l.] two pioneers who were very much shaped by the 60s and went on to be among the most generous contributors to what we now call social media..

Justin, however, is not of the 60s. Perhaps his parents were. He came of age in the 90s. Growing up in Chicago, he attended the Francis W. Parker  School, a respected independent school, whose charter talks about instilling  ”the joy of learning” into students and emphasizes the importance of  community and citizenship.

From there, he went on to Swarthmore, one of the most respected of all liberal arts colleges.

From college days until now his passion and focus has remained online games. He created the first blog, not as a technologist, but as a gamer who wanted to share his personal experiences with others who shared his interests.

Since college, he has applied himself to social and mobile games.  In 2006, he co-founded GameLayers, an online social games company where he and his team made PMOG/The Nethernet – a game played by surfing the web. They also made social games for Facebook and Firefox.

He’s now independent again, producing mobile internet games with independent game label ngmoco/DeNA. His first title for the company was Touch Pets Cats a 2010 pet simulator for the iPhone that has sustained popularity and fans.

My Q&A with him focused of course on what he did and why he did it back in 1994.

Dostoyevsky inspired a friend of mine who started an underground newspaper at St. John’s College in New Mexico – notes from the underground.  I thought my friend was cool, I thought his underground newspaper was cool, and I thought “from the underground” was an appropriate suffix for the type of content I was serving in 1994, when I was 19 :-)

Great question!  These folks / cultural products taught me:

Hunter Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 – writing the surreal as a lived experience.

Coppola’s Apocalypse Now – making media that pushes through boundaries of commentary into participation.

WB Yeats’ “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop” - an abiding belief that the sacred and the profane are close neighbors.

The music of Jane’s Addiction – record and share screaming when you’re upset, it makes for potent media.

January 1996, these guys: http://links.net/vita/web/suck/ inspired me, I wrote about it here: http://links.net/vita/hw/third.html – I had been writing frequently before, just not organized in a blog-type format.

I wrote my personal web publishing journey up on this page:http://links.net/vita/web/ :-)

Writing explicit content about my life generated a lot of attention!  Emails, conversations, encounters.  Lively stuff!  I wrote in text editors, eMacs mostly, publishing onto a shared server run by my friends.  It was all plain HTML with server-side includes for headers and footers from 1994-2002.

In 2002, I started experimenting with Movable Type, which allowed me to add comments.  Comments escalated the drama around my extremely personal posts, and I stopped blogging from 2005 until 2010. Then when I started writing online again, I used Movable Type because MT can readily write HTML files into my 1994-era file structure.

I stopped because I entered into a relationship that seemed incompatible with the type of personal online writing that motivated me.

Q. How do you feel that blogs changed you and your life?

I started when I was 19 and found an enormous amount of validation by connecting with like-minded souls across the web.  It was a wild personal experiment, challenging and testing my personal relationships.  Also it was a chance to insinuate myself with a community of early, active web lovers.Today I work as an entertainment software producer in San Francisco; my work today proceeds from 1994-era experiments entertaining people online with my self-presentation.

When I first saw Mosaic [the first browser] and browsed the web I had a strong feeling that the web is a fantastic place for people to connect. It’s been cheering to see so many folks participate over the years!

Only that I was a life-long computer game lover :-)http://links.net/dox/warez/games/

Q Additional comments

Fun to think about the past!  I look forward to making more future.

I’m beginning to feel like Johnny Carson, playing  Carnac the Magnificent.

Last week, I was on a panel predicting  social media trends for 2011 put on by the Social Media Club of San Francisco and I posted my thoughts here.  Now, I’ve been asked to discuss social trends when I address the Social Media Breakfast East Bay on Feb. 11.

My co-host Shel Holtz video interviewed me to promote the event and asked me about one I’d previously forgotten to mention, that I call “Braided Journalism.” I wrote about it here a couple of days ago.

But there’s yet another important trend, that I overlooked, one that in the coming decade may fundamentally change segments of institutions such as business and government and certainly encompasses braided journalism.

I call it “blurring boundaries.”

It is the concept that the communications and collaboration taking place between customers and companies, constituents and government employees, traditional and citizen journalists are blurring the boundaries that have separated them. It is also the concept that as people in different geographic areas increase and normalize their conversations with each other, the borders between their countries will figuratively blur.

Unlike most business trends, this one seem to have gone further faster in the B2B sector, rather than the consumer zone. Very large companies such as SAP and IBM have built enormous community networks with customers and partners. Both company attest that by collaborating with customers, they are bringing better received products to market faster and at lower cost. These collaborations are lowering marketing and support costs as well. Additionally, there is time saving in documentation and even partner certification processes.

Intuit hosts a community that serves 500,000 small business users who share there needs. Intuit is said to adjust it’s product strategy accordingly. Last year, when a new version of one of its flagship products was introduced, community members did not like a feature. The company removed it wityh 45 days and sales spiked.

The overriding point of blurring boundaries is that it blurs business perceptions of customers as “targets” or “eyeballs” or dumb things with empty heads you can fill with marketing messages.

Customers like being asked. They like better seeing evidence they are being listened to. Hostile customers become more polite. Customers who are recognized as contributing to the company team very often become company champions and product evangelists.

By blurring boundaries, we can put people on the same team, whether it’s business or people in different countries who discover they share values and goals, fears and traditions.

The more we blur, the more we find we are all in the same boat, paddling in the same direction.