Global Neighborhoods

I have a great many reasons to be grateful for what blogging has done for me. Not the least of them is that my circle of friends has geographically expanded and sometimes this allows me to get together with people I've met either through blogging or because of it.

[Marco Palombi.  Photos by Shel]

Yesterday, I took some time off and walked on the beach with Marco Palombi, founder of Splinder and one of Italy's most successful entrepreneurs. He is planning to move to Silicon Valley and study artificial intelligence and the Semantic Web issues. We talked about the difference in Italian and California cultures and he reminded me of how valuable the tech culture is where I live.

A couple of weeks ago I had dinner with Loic LeMeur and his lovely wife Geraldine. They too are moving to this area. The leMeurs have bought a house in San Francisco and Loic plans to start a technology Joost Channel of online TV. Loic and I healed an old personal wound and remembered how much we enjoy each other. I'm glad he's coming and that we now share a passion for the coming video dominated web.

[Ignacio Escribano, Argentine Citizen Journalist]

Also two weeks ago, I enjoyed a fabulous four-hour lunch with Ignacio Escribano and Eduardo Lomanto, from Buenos Aires, Argentina, both of La Nacion, the national newspaper. They were here to learn more about social media because Ignacio has started a Citizen Journalism site for the paper. It was a first meeting but the relationship is ongoing. I plan to interview Ignacio for the SAP Global Survey. He's a true Renaissance Man, a Boston-educated doctor, former traditional journalist, recorded vocalist who has lived in five countries.

Then there was Allan Martinson, an Estonian VC, who was my host-guide to Estonia last October.  It was Allan who introduced me to the Estonian President, the former prime minister, some social networking entrepreneurs and the top guy at Skype headquarters.  Allan and I had lunch in July and discussed business in Russia the Baltics and the US, where he pointed out there are far greater opportunities than everywhere else.

[Pat Phelan, roaming freely]

Next month, my good friend Pat Phelan, founder of Roam4Free who will be over here from Cork, Ire. I coached Pat on blogging when he first started and I am excited about the possibilities of his Roam4Free startup which should make it easy and extremely cheap to talk by phone without the carriers sucking money out of our pockets by the minute.

I just love all this. As Marco and I discussed while walking on the beach yesterday.  I am from a small industrial city in Massachusetts.  I knew the world was bigger than where I lived and I was restless by age 10 to go beyond it.

It is a great pleasure to meet and talk with so many people from so many places who share my passion for technology and bring so many cultural perspectives to my awareness.

I'm sitting at  Chicago's O'Hare with a couple of hours to spare. It is the first time in a while I've had to reflect on some big issues, at least ones that are big to me.

It been a few months since I announced the postponement Global Neighbourhoods, what I hope will e my next book. The primary reason, as I stated, was that I make more money consulting than I do writing books and speaking about them. I had strayed to far to the fame side of the fame/fortune continuum.

But there were other reasons for tabling Global.  One was I could describe a situation that every business thinker needs to consider, but I could not get far enough ahead of the relentless changes in the world of social media far enough to write a book thjat could remain relevant for at least a couple of years. There I was thinking about what a flat world meant for non-American startups, when YouTube became part of Google, when young people stared slipping out of the vast walled city of MySpace; when people started Twittering and then Powncing as they realized their First Life was better than the second.

You just can't write a hard cover book on a constantly changing situation.

Things, I had written became generic and common knowledge.  My core concept was that the social media sites were not the key relevance, but the way people self organized along topical rather than geographic lines was. That we and no more than 200 online friends would bop from one site to another finding each other time after time after time.

I was among the first to note that the importance of social media to business rested not in ourselves but in our children who would soon replace us at the prime movers in the workplace and in the market.

I got lots of encouragement for these and a few other ideas. But I couldn't quite figure out where it was going, and what part of this thinking would endure for a couple of years, rather than become blatantly obvious.

I was never quite satisfied with our Naked Conversations ending.  We declared the beginning of a new Conversational Era, replace the Broadcast Era.By the time you read the book, that was quite obvious, I would wager. For Global Neighborhoods, I wanted to paint a bigger picture with broader strokes, and I couldn't quite see where all this was going.

Then Facebook opened it's APIs. Two months later, there are 2000 approved 3rd-party applications and 10,000 or so, waiting to be approved. Students continue to do what they have always done on Facebook, not noticing that millions of business users are stampeding into Facebook, that most social media organizations are enjoying bursts of popuarity by using Facebook as a distribution platform. 

People are self organizing on Facebook.  The are building their own small groups of friends who share common interests. They are bopping around from one group to another, sharing thoughts, watching video clips, watching pictures, organizing face-to-face events, meeting new people based on mutual friends or interests.

Facebook comes closer to being the Global Neighborhood than I had imagined something could.

Maybe I should just write a book on Facebook. Maybe I should write it, notion my blog but on Facebook.

What do you think?

It's not the numbers it's the geography.  If the truth be told, my range is pretty constant.  If I blog a lot, I have about 25,000 visitors a month.  If I'm sparser in posting, I drop to about 17,000.  At the peak of Naked Conversations, we were hitting 30,000 a month and when Robert and I got into a virtual barroom brawl with Amazon's CTO, we had our only 50,000 visitor month ever. I don't really need to look to know what's going on there. The signals I get from Technorati, Typepad and Analytics all reinforce the accuracy of each other.  They come closer all the time.

What fascinates me, and the reason I spend time every day on Google Analytics  is the map overlay of where people are sitting when they visit this blog. If you look at it by continent, country and city many stories get told. I am more popular by far in cities where I've made public appearances than not. About 40 percent of my readership comes from outside the US. Per total population, I am more widely read in Canada than in the US.

I am more popular in Dublin than anywhere else on Earth. I assume Analytics includes in includes Cork, where I have visited twice and enjoy a few ongoing friendships and conversations with people there.  Toronto and London are usually in my top five or six cities and they are also places where I maintain friendships and have spoken. I'm bigger in Tallinn, Estonia than in Moscow and that is no surprise.  When I wrote about Russia being a cyberbully to their little neighbor, my Tallinn readership swelled by over 500%. Actually, it was the first time I saw noticeable readership in Moscow as well and it is nice to know that even when I'm shouting, someone seems to be listening.

Mentions help. When my friend KD Paine spoke in Dubai, she mentioned me. My readership there shot from 2 to about 90.  Now a month later, I have an average of 35 visits a day from Dubai, and that residual impact is greatly appreciated.

The diversity is amazing. I have been visited in the past month by people on all continents, residing in 2,234 communities. I had a regular reader in Rwanda, but he seems to have disappeared.Overall, I have nearly 300 African visitors daily.  I have 11 readers in the Palestinian territories and as many readers in Arab states as I have in Israel. Someone in a place called Petah Tiqua seems to read me daily. More than 500 people read me in the happy isles of Oceana.

To my knowledge, there has never been a day when my readership from any city on Earth has exceeded four percent of my total. This pleases me because it indicates that this blog is sort of a global neighborhood onto itself. Speaking of which, Global Neighborhoods is not spiked as a couple of fictitious blog characters have written.  It is postponed.  I needed to get my consultng business going again and it is coming along nicely. But there will be a book and my return to serious work on it is not all that far away.

I have often quipped that I have a master's degree in blog typos. It seems this carried over to my filling out the form to register my domain with GoDaddy.com several months ago.

I registered Global Neighourhoods.com, not Global Neighborhoods.  The GoDaddy folk then redirected Global Neighborhoods to my core blog url of RedCouch.typepad.com. Are you with me so far?

Then nearly a year goes by until today.  When somebody--actually a new business prospect--tells me that when she types in my url she gets directed to a link farm. Crisply, I tell her she forgot the "u" and send her back.  She goes back and then tells me there was no typo.
Quickly I post the previous warning. The I dial up GoDaddy, preparing to use my most assertive voice in the key of shriek. As happens whenever I call GoDaddy, I reach a real human in support in a very short time, perhaps two minutes. As usual, he's brief and sharp in confirming that I am me. I relate the problem. He asks me to hold and comes back to tell me that I had typoed my domain name.

The way Link Farms work is simple and nasty. They use computers to find available URLs and they register them. Then they use the redirected traffic to sell advertising and to sell URLs to people who want to use them for legitimate business. When I tried to buy Global Neighborhoods.com at the beginning of this journey, they asking price was $10,000.  I countered with a$1 offer and the deal was never consummated.

"Don't feel badly," my GoDaddy guy tells me. "This mistake has been made by thousands of people,"he tells me. Yeah, but hw many people does GoDaddy register?

"Quite a few million," he tells me, which puts me in that one percentile club that I didn't want to join.

So, I register http://globalneighbourhoods.net and put a forward on it, which should kick in sometime in the next 24 hours. As residual winner here is Hugh Macleod
because now I have to buy a few thousand new Street cards from him with the .net replacing .com.

We now return to our regularly scheduled day.

I had a great time last night at the blog dinner honoring the illustrative Hugh MacLeod, except people kept asking me how the new book is coming and the short answer is that for right now it isn't.

I want very much to immerse myself. I love the concept and I love nothing more than writing particularly, books.  I think the concept of Global Neighborhoods and of what the world looks like when our kids replace us in the marketplace are interesting and important to a great many people. I have amassed great stories from people all over the Western world.

But I need to face up to bread and butter issues.  Being an author is not as lucrative as many people might think. Nor are the speaking engagements. In fact, on the fame-and-fortune continuum, I have been way over on the fame side and need to move closer to the fortune side, at least to the mortgage-covering side.

I don't think I'll have much trouble increasing my consulting practice, but just so you know, I have immediate openings for new clients.  To learn more, email me here.

Long before Naked Conversations was even a glimmer in anyone's eye, I had an idea for a global local newspaper.  I got passionate about it, event putting together a small business plan. My issue was that it was not a small concept.

The essential concept was that every event of interest to anyone could e locally covered. My "global, local blog newspaper," as I called it, would cover the local Little League sports teams, would let citizens file stories on pot holes in their town's rats in slumlord buildings.  They would write and take pictures and maybe someday, video record events everywhere. Their may be regional editors who reviewed these stories, but more important, the blogosphere would be the fact checker the way ysers were becoming the fact checker on a new phenomenon called Wikipedia.

There was a monetization concept and it was tied to local advertising.  The local girl's soccer team coverage might be sponsored by local merchants, national events by major brands.  All payment would be based on a buck-a-click charge to advertisers. My global-local-blog-newspaper would then split the ad revenues with its global legions of citizen journalists.

I actually peddled the idea.  i thought I found my partners who had money and were interested in the ad model. except a closer look at them revealed they were direct marketing wolves in social media clothing.  I then pitched the idea to a couple of "online media" folk at Knight Ridder, who used that kindly pedantic attitude that essentially said they did not believe for a minute this idea would every work.

It was too big and too complicated for me to start up on my own, so I put it aside as something I would get back to someday.  As the song goes, someday never came.

So when I started reading some of the enthusiasm for the new, improved Topix among bloggers, I respect, I decided to take a long hard look. I had met Topix CEO Rich Skrenta at a conference a few months back and like what he had to say about community focus.  I also found it amazing that as we sat on a panel in Miami, I discovered that we both lived less than a mile apart in San Carlos, CA. In his talk he had been hinting along the lines of my old dusty project, and we talked about getting together once we were back in the hood. We never did.

I spent a couple of hours kicking around the new Topix this morning and I cannot say that it has fulfilled the vision I had back in 2003.  But I do think it has built out the essential framework and has the potential to build out the entire concept of the Global-local-blog newspaper.

I hope so. I'll keep watching.

According to Reuters, Google is working on a whole news approach to translating from one language into another.  To me this is extremely important because the largest single barrier I see to my vision of Global Neighborhoods is language.

As it stands now, computer translations, such as you get from Babblefish and Google translate are rarely close to accurate and often a bit goofy. The new approach, called "statistical machine translations" may still be a bit awkward and will still contain a few literal errors, but comes a whole lot closer to providing computer translations that come a whole lot closer to what human translators would give you.

Right now, I have conversations quite often with people all over the world, I like to say.  But in fact, they are only people who speak English, the only language in which I have any proficiency. With the right translation technology  could speak every day with people whose primary language was Chinese or Japanese, Russian, Farsi or whatever.

So could everybody.

If you think about it, the implications are really huge. People could everwhere could speak to people everywhere else.  We would not have the filtering of third-party organizations deciding on what gets translated and how that translation will be nuanced.

[NOTE: I tweaked this after posting it and have just changed the text from the original throughout the post.]

The following are my draft talking points for my talk Thursday in Chicago at the Bulldog reporter PR University. I am not entirely satisfied with the closing poiints and would welcome some more additions.  If I use your comments I will credit them to you in my talk.

1. I am a “recovering publicist.” One day, early in  2001, I scrawled “Stop me before I pitch again” across a mirror. …been going to “Pitch-enders” ever since.

2. Was in PR more than 25 years. Worked with tech startups. Loved it. Loved the creativity and integrity of most PR people I knew.

3. I left for many reasons. A few I recall:

• Tech bubble popped. Left no clients, no payroll and a bunch of bubble goo all over my nice Italian suit.
• Role changed. PR went from relationship-building to buzz-generating. Buzz is the last sound you hear before you get stung. PR moise level had become Deafening.  Trying to tell a client’s story was like“hollering in a hurricane.”
• At the same time the audiences we were struggling to reach were exhausted from the pitches they had already heard.
• Result: PR image deteriorated. Nasty jokes. Lawyers/PR guys. Screw you in PR talk: trust me. Edelman says:  Less credible than lawyers.

4. Environmental changes

• Traditional media went into atrophy. Will be fatal for many. NY Times forecast.
• Relentless rise of blogging, wikis, internet audio video and online communities.
• ‘Kid’s Stuff.’  New generation emerging with Teflon resistance to ads, PR & trad marketing. Don’t read newspapers. More time on YouTube than TV. Listen to more iTunes than radio. Ignore authority.
• Online, people started to ignore marketing. They went back to the way the market worked from the time people were cave dwellers until the 1940s in the US. They influenced each other on what to buy, where to go, listen to, watch and even maybe who to vote for.
• Only one small significant change had occurred. Instead of exercising this influence in cafes and over the backyard fence, we started doing it online.

5. The generation now emerging, the one who will inherit my desktop and my generation in the workplace is now 25 or younger. They are the Online Generation –“Onliners” for short.

6. The overriding question that you need to ask yourselves is what happens when the Onliners come of age, replacing we 60s kids and boomers as we drive off to Jurassic Park to join the other fossils who could not adapt to change? What tools to reach the Online Generation?

• Forget the press release. That won’t reach the Onliners, even if somehow tangible newspapers still exist down the line.
• Forget your sacred list of influential contacts. Those influencers can’t even get their kids to put down their cellphones and come to dinner.
• If this is kid’s stuff, there seems to be a whole lot of kids.  Look at the numbers. Over 60 m bloggers, but that’s chickenfeed.  YouTube has 100m daily downloads. MySpace 200 million registered users by year end. Facebook more than 1 b photos. 3 m elementary school kids forming global friendships at Club Penguin.
• Onliners are today’s early adopters. Early adopters as most of you know, influence everyone else. You can’t reach them by smiling and dialing, although text chatting would help.
• If you always do what you’ve always done, you will get less response next time than you did last time.
• Political candidates figuring this out. Mayor of DC, governor counsel of Canada, John Edwards, Barack Obama. David Cameron, Three Italian cabinet members. President of Iran blogs as does disgraced congressman Tom Delay. The California Republican Party blogs.  So do members of El Quaida.
• Why? Because that’s where the young voters are going and will be found for years to come. These voters won’t stay young.  They will stay online and they will be voting for the next 50 years.

6. So once again:  How does PR adapt? What is the practitioner’s role moving forward? Does PR even have a role? Is this change a threat or an opportunity?

7. I'll answer that last question first.  It’s the easiest and the most ambiguous: Social media is both threat and opportunity for PR. … a threat because there is a fundamental change in the way people are influenced on what they buy, watch, read and listen to. Change is disruptive.  When there is disruption some companies rise and others fall. Rarely do they ever rise again.

Social Media is simultaneously an opportunity because PR people are generally great conversationalists and we are entering the Conversational Era. In it, we are transitioning from monologue into dialog. Through conversations you can find out what customers want simply by asking them. You can deliver more popular products just by doing what they tell you to do.

PR also has an opportunity also because advertising is more broken than PR and will take longer to fix. Companies will be turning to PR sooner for more immediate answers. It will be a wise agency who is ready with answers.

8. This Conversational Era has just now begun. PR in 5, 10 & 20 years will have a far more value than it does today—not just for your clients, but for the communities those clients wish to be part of. What's also relevant about the next 20 years is a fundamental shift in the habits of the people leaving the marketplace and those who are preschoolers and young adults today.

9.  Two cautions:

• Don’t stop doing what you’re doing. Not yet. These are transitional times. Moving from Broadcast Era into Conversational Era. The day the physical newspapers die has not arrived. And only a fool would disdain the influence of prominent coverage in say Page One of the Wall street Journal.
• The bigger your agency, the faster you need to move. You move like supertankers  at full throttle. You need time and distance to turn around. If you don't start soon, you just might wind up on the rocks.

10. As you take a look at social media consider this phenomenon: Power is moving from the large organization into communities. People who are most generous in these communities are the most influential.

11. Consider also: The online community is nt confined to any single URL. You won’t succeed by marketing to MySpace and more than you would by sending the same messages to the ruling class and shantytowns of Sao Paolo and MySpace is many times larger.

12. Here’s what’s actually happening. People with shared interests from all over the world are bopping from one place to another.  The same people are meeting up with the same people at blogs and photo sites.  They are downloading the same music and videos. In these virtual spaces, real and lasting trusted social networks are forming. Often people meet online first, then encounter each other face-to-face later.  It's like meeting old friends for the first time.

13. I call these groups who are defined by neither geography nor URL Global neighborhoods. They are smaller and more intimate than the huge online communities. They are comprised of people who share diverse passions,  on almost any subject: hummingbirds or Hummers, Global warming or urban terrorism,  Religious fundamentalism or fundamental paganism. I'm writing a book called Global Neighborhoods, which is about just their relevance to business. The challenge is to be brief.

14. Global neighborhoods work very much like the tangible ones where you live in. You get to know some of your neighbors. The more time you spend there the more familiar you become. Trust builds on neighborhood issues. You know to ask about recommend movies or where to get your car fixed. You know how to avoid commuter snarls and where it's safe to walk alone or not.

Over time, each neighborhood resident earns a personal brand.

Transition:Now, Bulldog folk don’t let you up onto the dais without specific tactical advice. That’s hard for me because I’m more concerned with where you are going than how you are going to get there. But I’ll try to give you a few tips. I blogged about this and got a few tips from people in my own Global neighborhood, which includes a good number of PR bloggers.

• Use your eyes and ears more than your mouth. Start reading the PR bloggers. I read Phil Gomes and PR measurement maven Katie Paine, who spoke earlier today. I also read Mike Manuel, David Parmet, Brian Oberkirch, Joe Thornley, Kami Huyse and Scott Baradel to name a few. They, in turn point me other bloggers and online places that are either interesting or useful to me. I rarely see these people face to face, but I consider them my friends. It starts with just reading, but overtime it evolves. You leave a comment. You start your own blog and link back. You become another node in the global neighborhood. You meet face to face and it keeps getting broader and deeper and richer.
• Learn generosity. I think this goes to the nature of many PR people. But instead of giving fame to clients, news to editors and special promotional offers, this new technology gives you the tools to give insight, information to your global neighborhood. Do not just give information that is useful to your clients. Contribute to the community interest and needs. They will give back and much of that will be valuable to your clients. More important, you will be more valuable to your clients.
• Be a node. Metcalfe’s Law proves that the power of the network is enhanced by each additional node. It sed to be the node was the computer. You are now the node. If you have news, the social media allows you to distribute it without disintermediation. In short, as newspapers and traditional media get smaller and less influential you become the direct distributor of news. You are each part of the newspaper of the future.  But remember, the most influential members of the Broadcast Era now closing were the most credible. This is even more true in the Conversational Era.
• Be an intelligent agent. Use the simple search tools that let you find what is written online on topics that matter to your clients. Join those communities, not to pitch, but to hear and see and learn.  Look for the most favorable and negative comments impacting your clients.
• Treat the brand as a community. This came from a comment on my blog by Chuck Tanowitz of http://mediametamorphosis.blogspot.com says : “Start thinking about your brand as a community, with the customers, partners, advisers, etc. as members of that community. Once you do that, the tools of PR become about building the community, not simply making announcements. You start conversations rather than shouting from mountain tops.” This seems to me to be great advice.
• “Share, learn and connect,” says Joe Thornley, of Pro PR who reinforces the Cult of Generosity. He adds “You'll get back more than you give. If you listen to what is given back, you'll learn, learn. And if you blend online exchanges with participation in real world events, you'll find you make friendships with people from all over North America (and the world) who share you passion.”

My closing thought: those of you in this room, are part of a profession filled with brilliant conversationalists, people with knowledge and passion.  You are more generous than your current image would have people believe. We are entering  ‘’The Conversational Era.’

This is your time. Join the conversation. Enjoy.

First, off thank for all the astoundingly valuable comments, once I shouted and pouted a bit. I am taking a couple of weeks to think through what I've heard and will do a version 5 of the Overview at that time.

But what has been interesting to me is that several people complained that the five sections of the overview was too much to read.  "People are too busy now, to read all those words, " I was told. "It may have been fine the first time around, but these days you need to keep it shorter.

This is interesting.  The five parts I posted came out to 3750 words.  The book will be about 80,000 words.  If I follow the pattern of posting interview notes and updates on all sorts of things, as Scoble and I did for Naked Conversations, it means that I will post about 250,000 words on Global Neighborhoods.  Some chapters will contain 10,000 words or more.

This was all pretty popular when we did it back in 2005.  But perhaps, as one person commented, "The Novelty has worn off."

Maybe. David Weinberger used his blog to some degree on his last book, "Small Pieces Loosely Joined." He didn't to that this time for "All Things Miscellaneous." Taking the blog out of it makes it easier and faster to write a book. Your mistakes get caught by an editor, rather than the general public.

There's just one catch.  The blogosphere helped Naked Conversations to write a better book.  We could not have done it that well without the collaboration of hundreds of bloggers. This weekend I received the quantity and quality of comments that have already significantly improved Global Neighbourhoods.

This may cost me some points in Technorati ranking.  My goal however is to write a book much more than it is to bask in the glory of Technorati measurement. In the Big Media Era of paper publishing, now coming to a close, tabloids usually outsold more esteemed publications. I won't call me esteemed, but I think many of you visitors are.

I think some of you will stay with me. I value you and I hope I provide some useful and interesting material, although I will have little choice but to go long on this book project. For those of you who want it, I will offer either a downloadable version or I'll email a Word version to whoever requests it.

It will be interesting to see how it works now that the novelty has gone.

Last week, I posted the first half of my new Global Neighborhoods overview.  I broke it into five parts, because last time around, folk told me it was too long to read as a blog post. This time, I received even fewer comments than I did on the previous free overviews.

Here are the links to Parts 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5. Please go there and take a quick read.  Then either post about it, leave a comment or email me.  Help me write a better book.

I cannot understand why almost no one has commented.  If you think the book concept and how I'm handling it needs great improvement, let me know.  If you think that it sounds like a candidate for the Nobel Literature Prize let me know as well. That's what collaboration is supposed to be about.

The deal is this: I work my ass of to write this book and you folks tell me how I can improve it.  You tell me when I ring true and when I don't. You tell me when my facts are a bit off. You give me leads and tell me what parts are boring.

Before I continue along the track I'm on I need to know if this is the right track. I'm kicking back on this topic for a while. I'll be sitting here alone in the dark waiting to hear from you.

Part 5. The Marketer’s Dilemma

People are a mixture sameness and change. Human nature for the most part has remained the same mixture of kindness and savagery since we were cave dwellers.  What keeps changing  are our tools.  For the past six or seven decades the tools of conversation were disrupted by the tools of broadcasting. As we evolve from generation to generation those tools have, among other things, allowed us to communicate and travel more easily with more people in more places.

But for a period of several decades, something went awry in the marketplace. As the benchmark Cluetrain Manifesto so eloquently pointed out, markets are conversations. But for about 60 years, the communications tools made marketing communications, a one directional.  Traditional marketing’s arsenal of advertising, promoting, researching and targeting customers worked well for a great many years. From the enterprise perspective, this has worked well for a long time, but all that seems to be coming to a rapid halt.

As almost any branding, advertising, marketing or PR professional will tell you, traditional broadcast marketing  programs have become excessively expensive almost at the same rate as they have become less effective. Part of the problem is that the messengers are dying. Newspapers and traditional broadcast media are atrophying. The head of the New York Times online division has predicted that the paper edition of the venerable publication will cease to exist in five years. In the US, TV network news has one third the viewers as it did 30 years ago and the average viewer’s age is 60.

That is the state of traditional marketing as that industry has practiced it.  Few would argue that it is broken, many would say irreparably. All this has occurred simultaneous to the explosion of blogging blogging, wikis, digital audio and video programs. Just as the communications industry has tried to get its arms around those innovations comes the remarkable explosion of new online social media tools that all everyday people to create, inform, record and store whatever they want without so much as a marketing jingle or focus group to study their behavior.

When a serious business strategist examines sites like MySpace, it is a scary proposition. Is this really where a company will have to go to build awareness, sales and loyalty with the next generation? Should a communications officer really advise a CEO to don a virtual costume and go barter for an intangible currency on Second Life?

With a few exceptions, these could be career shortening tactics.

The problem is that’s where the customers are.  That’s where conversations that will shape the future of your company are.  These tools are shaping the culture of an entire generation.  Even the politicians in most western democracies are flocking to Online Communities because that’s where the voters are and will be.

This is the marketer’s dilemma.  They are at a crossroads.  One route is safe and familiar, but it may lead to Jurassic park where the other fossils who could not adapt to change reside. The other choice is to start to understand the strange and mysterious world of Onliners, to use your ears and eyes to see how it works to join other people’s conversations before even trying to start your own about your company, goods and services.

Joining Onliners where they spend their time creates a classic good news/bad news situation. The good news is that by using the efficient and powerful new tools you will save your company a bundle.  You can use the money to improve products and support and still have some left over to increase investor returns.

The bad news is that you are going to have to do things differently, very, very differently and in the traditional enterprise change comes slowly and painfully. Even worse, while an established company contemplates change, a bunch of Onliners can start a company free of legacy baggage and built to exist mostly online where they can compete against you with amazing agility.

Global Neighborhoods does not advise companies to abandon the programs they have been using.  But it urges them to understand that the end to a great  many of them is coming and coming sooner than they may think. While harvesting those programs, the book urges companies to begin to understand the massive shift in direction coming over the next few years.
A few companies companies have been wise to start in this direction. None of them are considered radical disruptors to the status quo. A few examples:

•     Hitachi Data Systems who started a wiki, not about themselves, but addressing the issues of data storage.  Not only are customers and prospects invited to join in, but so are competitors. Companies can say what they want, but inside the wiki, the customer is the decision maker.  How does Hitachi win?  It started the wiki, thus creating an online water cooler for anyone who cares about data storage. Every sale that somehow connects to the wiki will not go to Hitachi, but, as first mover, it has earned the respect and is generally perceived as the topical thought leader.

•    Wells Fargo Bank, wishing to show it cares about home owners and property, has started a blog on disaster preparedness. When a disaster—a flood, fire or other act of natural violence occurs, Wells Fargo becomes the news center for information updates and advice on resources for victims. The goal is to have the bank’s brand perceived as the most caring in the category.  To achieve it, they need to write about matters far removed from how wonderful the local branch serves small businesses.

With an eye toward building life long relationships with young people, the bank also started a student loan and debt management advisory blog that educates rather than sells.

•    CNET, born online, CNET is best known for news and product reviews. But in the last few years, it has lost some steam, not to mention ad revenues to rival online media companies. A few years back, it started a communities division whose look and feel is very different from the remainder of the company. CNET communities attempts to amplify the voice of people who do not already have powerful voices online through blogs or other means. For example, if you dine at a restauraunt you love or hate, you could write a letter to your local newspaper editor.  You could review it on a personal blog or you could post as a member of Chowhound, one of CNET’s four, youthful communities. As such the people most passionate about dining where you live would find your comments and thus CNET amplifies your influence. In short, explained Martin Green, general manager, “we amplify the voices of people who feel like they are hollering in a hurricane.” All four communities receive heavy advertising support and are experiencing growth.

But, the book points out, all this has really just begun. Other companies and individuals with formidable track records are moving to adapt the creative and collaborative tools of social media to the enterprise.

Cisco, the leader in infrastructure for the last internet website generation, has moved decisively toward helping corporations modernize into the social media era. They  acquired Five Across, a social media platform as well as Tribe.Net, a once-popular social networking site.

Also of significance, is Ning, a company co-founded by Marc Andreessen, Netscape’s father of the web interface promises its online tools will let any person r company to build their own online social network. Who does what with it remains to be seen.

This is a brief portion of the Overview, but it will be among the longest portions of the first half of the book, which tries to cover what is happening. keeps those cards and letters coming in. If you prefer, email your comments to me as several people have.

4. A Social Media tour

Social
Media stats are both dynamic and astounding. Five times more people visit YouTube
every day than reside in the world’s largest cities. MySpace is on track to
have 200 million registered users by the end of 2007, making it more populous
than all but five of Earth’s countries. Facebook stores over one billion photos for 30 million users, more
photos than were processed by Kodak in the

US

between 1990 and 1999. The
number of minutes spent messaging on cell phones in any given week might exceed
the number of minutes there are in a century.

And
this is all in it’s initial phases. Residents of more than 150 countries participate
in social media. There are localized and
globalize social media sites. An
Estonian social network company has over 95 percent of the countries people
between the ages of 14 and 25.

Global
Neighborhoods will takes the business reader on a tour of these sites, large and
small, global and local to show what’s happening and why it matters so much.

We
talk to executives and founders. We also
interview kids about what they do online and how much of their lives it has
become.

If you just got here, this is Part 3 of God only knows how many parts to the new overview for Global Neighborhoods.Please read the preceding two parts before you get here. I am looking for feedback. I want you to help me write a better book.

3. Culture Blending & World Peace

There’s another way that Onliners are likely to change the world. They are culture blenders. They meet somewhere online and discuss a local pop group in East London, or about Global warming. They sit in their own rooms or cafes or occasionally huts and they bring themselves transparently into the conversation. Because it is on the Internet it is available for others to see and will remain available for a very long time.

This process grinds slowly and steadily at certain historic barriers between cultures. People discover online how much alike they are when they meet to discuss a topic online. Clothing or race or sex may have prevented the conversation from even starting in the real world.  Some cultural barriers remain formidable, language for example.  Yet Onliners manage to side step them at east a little bit through universal languages of music and pictures.
The world of the Onliner is often described as small and getting smaller.  It is simultaneously getting bigger.

A case in point is Annie, a Scottish honors student whose parents rarely travel outside Scotland.  She was accepted into an accelerated languages program when she was 16. As her term project, she created a video podcast version of “The Dating Game,” using classmates as contestants.  Except for one little hitch.  The entire program was conducted in Japanese and was digitally produced on the Internet. There, the Japanese media picked it up and started emailing her for interviews.  She has become quite popular there and has been invited o speak there.  She has also had to turn down a couple of marriage proposals from older Japanese gentlemen.

Culture blending is making something else noticeable, something that has probably been going on all along.  But now, the tools are making it more obvious.

One example: Two Saudi teens are observed sitting at opposite ends of a table in a tent.  They are both children of a wealthy family. Between them, a stern chaperone stays vigilantly. Her job is to make certain that these two are never alone, that they do nothing improper.  Above all they must never touch, at least not until the wedding night that their two families decided on before they ever met. So their they sit at opposite ends, each seemingly ignoring the other, appearing slightly bored, each fidgeting with a cell phones, Beneath the unknowing eyes of their stern-faced chaperone, they are using these phones to send each other text messages. In fact, they are vigorously flirting.

On another peninsula, on another continent, a teenaged boy and girl sit back-to-back in a South Korean shopping center, their fingers dancing on cellular keypads. Even though they are touching each other in a very public venue, they are using phone messaging to send intimate notes to each other. This same behavior is also observed in Finland and among U.S. teens. Part of this story is as old as the human species.  Young people have always flirted with each othe.  But the tools they use have evolved.  They can now be miles apart while passing notes through this new channel. Text chat has other anticipated applications.  In Cupertino California, teacher have caught kids during exams, text messaging with friends outside the school, looking up the right answers in textbooks.

Yet, all this online culture blending cannot offset a universal truth.  Nothing quite beats a face to face meeting. Hopefully, nothing ever will. Most people hope this fact never changes.  But as the Onliners come of age, other low cost networks are making direct communications easier and much less expensive. While everyone knows the power of Skype, which now carries ten percent of the telephone traffic between the US and Europe, but there is a whole new generation of telephony services that will cost users a fraction of what Skype charges and will not require being tethered to your computer.
Even more important, low cost airline services have sprouted up in Europe, North America and Asia. They are providing a safe, bare bones means for people who could never travel before to  visit almost anywhere. This includes people who meet online, who are already starting to meet at international gatherings of people who found out Online that others shared their subjects of passion.

In many ways, the Online Generation is fulfilling the dreams of the Boomers. Like most generations, the Boomers ended up a pragmatic and productive generation.  But they started out an idealistic lot.  They talked of power to the people.  They talked of world peace.

The challenge for business is that the power is now rapidly moving to the people and they will decide more about their futures that enterprises and institutions. The challenge of many of the world’s governments is that their citizens may be more dedicated to peace and tolerance than they are.

There is little doubt that the social media are moving power into the hands of people.  Simple conversations online are already disrupting even the best financed branding campaigns. There is even some scant, but hopeful evidence that not only will  Onliners make business more efficient and transparent, they also accomplish more than the Boomers did in that touchy area of world peace.

Take a look at Ine Dehandschutter, now a professional Belgian photographer. At 19, she received a scholarship to study photography in Jerusalem. While there, she developed two strong friendships, one with a Palestinian and the other with an Israeli.  The two young men were equally shocked and disturbed that Ine would be friendly with someone on the other side of the barrier that separates Arab East Jerusalem from the Israeli sector. They continuously used Ine as a conduit to send messages to each other. At first the messages were acerbic, but over time, Ine’s diplomatic skills coupled with her personal passion for peace reduced the tone on both sides to a gentle chiding. After a while, Ine grew tired of serving as their mutual relay station. So she emailed them both and told them to pick up to chat directly and leave her out of it.
This resulted in several days of silence followed by light pings from one to the other then back again. The conversation grew more regular.  The arguments remained impassioned but they became less hostile. The online relationship normalized as the two discovered how much common ground they shared. Eventually they did the natural thing. They met for coffee, face to face and as Ine had predicted, they discovered that they really liked each other. They stopped being an Arab and a Jew and became two friends talking over coffee.

Well, Ine wondered, if it could work between two people, why not between two groups? So she found a teacher’s group already dedicated to fomenting world peace in the classroom and suggested they use social media for a new experiment.  They built a private online community and recruited to high school classes, one Palestinian and one Israeli.
The kids began by discussing simple matters. How do they help their parents prepare for holidays? What do the wear to school? How do they get along with siblings? The two groups share many photos and discover they all look a lot alike. The folk music of the two cultures has certain similarities as do their two languages. Eventually, they too got to meet, share food and play soccer together.  Ine’s biggest hope is that if teens can meet on a soccer field, maybe a few years later, they won’t meet on a battlefield. Buoyed by this success, the educators progressively expand the program to include other teenagers in Europe and Africa continuing to use social media to bring together groups of significant cultural diversity.

Here's the second installment. You should only read this if you have already read the previous installment about the boomer generation.  Again I m looking fr feedback on these.  if you find these to be tedious or boneheaded, let me kn.  If you find them to be inspirational educational or Pulitzer quality writing, I would not mind hear that either. More to come.

2.The Online Generation

Rather than living next door, your child’s best friend may live in another country. Instead of hanging out with other friends in a mall or on a street corner, these pals are increasingly likely to be meeting up on a social media site such as MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, YouTube, Flickr  or SecondLife where hundreds of millions of young people are going every minute of every day. They share words, pictures, sound or maybe video.
These new communities exist only on the Internet. They may be called “virtual,” but the relationships forming there are real. The information exchanged there is frequent, current, valuable and abundant. When it is particularly interesting or valuable, it can spread at lightening speed.

People who contribute the most on any given topic often become extremely influential to others who share their interests.  There are mechanisms set up to allow you to even vote on what commentary or pictures are your favorites.

No category of technology has ever been so rapidly embraced by so many people in so short a period of time. There are hundreds of millions of people participating in the social media including, not just these online communities, but blogs, wikis, audio and video podcasts.

Some business strategists dismiss the social media, particularly the communities “kid’s stuff.”  They have a point.  The demographic shows most users are under 25 and many of them are still pre-adolescent. But for a business o dismiss them could be a lethal mistake. The fact that they are kid’s stuff is the reason they are so important.
Social media is a defining characteristic of the emerging generation, the one that is about to take the jobs and occupy the homes and the physical communities of the outgoing Boomers. They are the Online Generation, “Onliners” for short.

If you want to hire the best and the brightest of them, sell them your products and services you are going to need to adjust course. Your current marketing strategies just may not work with Onliners.

They don’t read newspapers, or watch much television. They prefer MP3 to broadcast radio. Onliners have a Teflon ® resistance to traditional advertising and marketing.  They don’t much trust authority and celebrity endorsements rarely move them.
Instead, they influence each other.  The social media is influencing what Onliners buy, wear, watch, listen to or visit.  The greatest influencers in the social media are people who are the most generous in sharing valuable or interesting information through online conversations.

These influencers are developing their own personal brands and they will shape corporate brands to a huge degree in the coming years.

Onliners are moving the power from the company into the community.
The bigger your company the sooner you need to start. Global enterprises are very much like supertankers moving at full throttle.  It takes a long time to turn them around and not maneuvering fast enough may land you on the rocks.

1.    The legacy of Boomers
For 35 years the Boomers were the watershed generation.  They dominated what happened in business and in the world. They came of age just as man walked on the moon. Disco came in and gratefully died during their tenure. The Soviets and Americans came to détente, only to see a new threats to a peaceful world arise. Television evolved from snowy, colorless things into sleek, elegant digital devices. Anvil-heavy phones were compacted into handy multi-tasking pocket-sized devices.
The workplace was changed dramatically during the Boomer’s tenure. The tools of their fathers--typewriters, adding machines, Mimeographs and Addressographs were all pushed off the desktop and into the Goodwill box.  Even the great information exchanging oasis of yore, the water cooler was replaced in most places by plastic botels of the fluid.
In the marketplace, the change was equally pervasive. Big companies got bigger as small ones disappeared. Brands became ubiquitous all over the world. Marketing campaigns, backed by enormous budgets boomed.  They had to, in order to be heard above all the other marketing campaigns.
But time passes. Paunch happens.  Hair thins. The Boomers aren’t kids anymore. These days, a great many of them are focused more on retirement condominiums than on the revolution many of them talked about in their youth.
    There were disappointments. World Peace was not attained during their tenure.   The Chicago Cubs never won the World Series. In the end, like so many generations before them, much of what they will be remembered for is in the tools they brought into everyday use. Much, but not all.
    As they start to pack up their boxes and yield their desks to a next generation, there are three valuable legacies the Boomers leave that will shape the next watershed generation as it comes of age.
1.The personal computer.  At first, they were outlaw objects. Boomers smuggled them into work to bypass the keepers of the mainframe in the basement.  Over time, the PC would devour up all the other office machines. But it wouldn’t stop there. These machines started talking to the other machines in the office and then to other machines all over the world.
2.The Internet.  Between all these PCs, a new, vast shapeless space formed.  This was a place where nothing was tangible, but people came to meet there, came to share, shop, inform, learn shout and be amused.  The Internet would emerge because of the personal computer, but it would become even more significant to the way people of the world connect to each other.
2.    Daughters and sons. More than the PCs and the Internet, the children of Boomers are now coming of age.  They are as different from their Boomer parents as their parents were from the generation they replaced. For one thing they grew up in the company of computers and immersed in the Internet. They will improve these tools further and they will change the world more than even the Boomers who gave you Star Trek can imagine.
What happens when one watershed generation replaces another in the work and marketplace?  This next generation is about to become your employee, your customer or maybe even your new competitor.  How do you adapt to the change which is coming in the next 5, 10 and 30 years. Where do you look for answers?
You might start by looking in your own kid’s room. The recreational habits of young people age 12-24 today are the social habits that businesses will need to adjust to in the very close future.

MeetUp, the "click and mortar" company that let's you find where people who share your interests actually meet up in the real world has been around for a while.  I subscribe to the Palo Alto version, where on an average week there are some 425 meetups within 25 miles of the city.

What is amazing to me is the diversity. Here's a thin slice sampling of what's happening this week in the area.:

The Antioch Military Families
and Friends Meetup Group

Developing The
Spiritual Path With Sivan Garr

Rudy Giuliani for
President - Bay Area

Married Men's
Actualization Meetup Group

The San Jose Warcraft
& World of Warcraft Meetup Group

Video Game Contest
Meetup

The Los Gatos Art
Modeling Meetup Group

South Bay Ruby on
Rails

Spread The Fire Bible
Study

Bay Area Single-Again
Indians

To me the diversity is something amazing. If you go to the site and read a local list you can see how a significant slice of your area's population is self-organizing along the lines of shared interests and it is very cool.

I always hope that no one misreads a line and goes to the meeting above or below the one they want on the list. This is to me what the localized version of what Global Neighborhoods is all about.

There is nothing like a face-to-face meeting and hopefully there never will be. But now, through the Internet and social media we can meet people all over the world who share our interests. We may not be able to meet them all face to face, but there is something very heartening to know there are others out there who share a part of what we are about. 

It is remarkable how diverse each of us is in other ways and yet we can now come together online. damn, I gotta get this book going.  It keeps getting bigger in my mind but the pages are not being fruitful, nor are they multplying.

The BBC just announced
that a 22-year-old  blogger,Abdel Kareem Soliman will spend four years
in prison for using his blog to "insult"al-Azhar university and
presdidential strongman Hosni Mubarak.  His trial lasted five minutes.

This is not a case of link love. But two people have mentioned things I've said in recent posts, and to respond I need to link these two citations together.

Jack Krupansky, up in Seattle,  cites my argument that  geography is becoming irrelevant and contrasts that with  J. Pascal  Gregory in the New York Times saying geography is destiny.

Simultaneously, Hyku's Josh Hallett, my good friend quotes me as saying "my friends aren't virtual."

These two dots may not seem to be connected but they are. You'll note that I called Josh "my good friend." In fact, our meeting up last week in Miami is only the second time we have laid eyes on each other. We have become good friends because we often blog on similar topics, because we run onto each other's work on Flickr,because we are both passionate about social media. We read each other and see each other's photos and somehow we are both feel a friendship.  n the rare occasions when we lay eyes on each other, it feels like we are old friends.

Now, this J. Pascal Zachary character from the times, happens to be an old friend.  I can tell you that all his friends call him "Greg," that he has a love for traditional jazz, that he collects old vinyl records because he loves the authentic scratchy sound and that even when he was reported for the Wall Street Journal, he harbored decidedly Socialist beliefs. I have not spoken with Greg in a decade and some of these facts may or may not have changed. 

I do not think Greg will be upset that I shared this stuff. If Greg blogged, and you chose to read him, you would probably know all this.  Some of you would feel a kinship.  If you ran into Greg at a conference you might feel like he's an old friend, even if you were meeting him for the first time.

There is still nothing like a face-to-face meeting. But the Internet has allowed us o get closer, to share more, to know people better and more intimately, even without the physical meeting. That's part of what happened with Josh and me.

My comments to Josh were in part a response to what I heard at the WeMedia conference, where many representatives of big media seem to believe it is Their media, not ours. They kept talking about virtual communities vs. the real world. To me they miss a real and fundamental point. Virtual communities may not be tangible but hey are most certainly are real. We may never meet each other in the real world, but the relationships formed online are most certainly and indisputably real.

Now, Greg's "Geography is destiny" declaration seems to me to be a bit overstated. But what is clear is that their are certain neighborhoods online and off that is better for certain activities than others. For example it is better to start a tech company in Silicon Valley than it is in Ceylon. It is better to discuss geeky stuff on Robert Scoble's blog than at Suicide Girls. In the real world physical boundaries define many people's destiny.  Online shared interests define neighborhoods and destinies.

Geography has become a lot less relevant over a very short period.  It is going to continue in the direction of irrelevance, from my perspective.  But online or off, where you are will still contribute to your destiny, or so it seems to me.

Oh, one other thing: If you see Greg, tell him I said Hello.

[Educator Don Ledingham at home with best friend at home on the Scottish Borders. Photo by Shel]

When VC Rick Segal and I toured Europe back in October, Don Ledingham was our most gracious host.  He brought us into his home, where we shared an outrageous dinner with his family before adjourning to his den where we discussed educational philosophy while sipping wine in the warmth of a blazing fireplace. Don impressed me because he is a career educator who has worked his way up the Scottish public school system.  You would expect him to be a complacent incumbent who disdains social media, but he is not.  He is filled with passion one expects to find in teenagers for the promise of social media in public education and for the future of Scotland in the world.

I didn't know it at the time, but what I heard that night would plant the seed that has become the new focus of Global Neighborhoods. It was in front of Don's 250-year-old hearth that I realized the new book should not be about the companies creating social media, so much as the generation that will grow up using it.

The following is a Q&A with Don.  Extracts from it will undoubtedly find its way into the book. [NOTE: In the interest of brevity, I have condensed certain portions of this interview, trying hard not to alter Don's meaning. I have also Americanized his Scottish spellings]

Q1.  Can you give me an executive summary of your 15 years involvement in Scottish education?

I started as a Phys. Ed teacher in rural elementary schools.  I was my own boss and able to develop learning and teaching approaches. These were seminal years, where I learned to explore alternative solutions and how to engage children in their own learning curricula.

After three years, I was promoted to Head of Physical Education for a high school, then went on to Edinburgh University to lecture undergraduate PE students. I became fascinated by the connections between teachers' intentions and the teaching process - so much so that I earned my master's degree on this theme.

When I returned to my high school post, I was allowed to put into practice the ideas I'd been developing at university. Over a five-year period, my team became recognized as leaders in physical education. However, I wanted to have a broader influence on education than just phys. ed.

In 1996, I became a senior manager in another school where I started a Ph.d with the title "Schools as Learning Organizations: From Theory to Practice."  A major influence on my practice became the online community dedicated to creating learning organizations. It's interesting to reflect how my current belief in the power of social media has been influenced by this earlier experience.

Q2  Just what does the Head of Education for the East Lothian Council do?  How much impact do you have on Scottish public education?

I'm responsible for 15,000 pupils and 1300 staff in the East Lothian School District. Scotland, a country of 5 million, is split into 32 local authorities.  Any wider influence comes through membership of national groups or through others' interest in our work.

Q3.  When and how did you start paying attention to social media?

As I rose through the public school system, I  learned there are
incredible similarities between very different schools. I began to
understand the unlimited possibilities of trust, transparency and
optimism. I've stayed focused on creating a learning experience.

Toward that goal, I started a school website that allowed students
to communicate directly with me as principal. At its peak I was
receiving 15 e-mails a night and this dialog had a major influence upon
my practice and the school's strategic direction. Then in 1998, Duncan Smeed,
one of our parents, and one of Scotland's first bloggers introduced me
to blogging.  We started playing around with an idea called Extreme Learning - which we are now developing as a major curricular initiative.

Around the same time we shifted the school website from a traditional platform to the open source EZ Publish,
which enables multi-users and did not depend upon a web manager - who
had often clogged up the development. This also enabled a blogging
platform for pupils and staff and I started a "Head Teacher's Logbook" using the system to "open the Principal's door" my successor has continued this 'new' tradition

In my last year as school principal, we developed a methodology
which we called "grounded strategy,"founded upon the principle of "in
their own words." We built our strategy upon the values and thoughts of
our key practitioners who unanimously felt that an interactive and
dynamic website could build a community of learners and have a major
impact upon our practice. This became Edubuzz is having a major impact
upon practice in East Lothian and beyond in a way in which we could
only have dreamed when we started the site in 2005. It'sownership is distributed among its users and is not centrally controlled.

In June 2005 I started as the Head of Education (superintendent) in
the East Lothian school district. Since August 2005 I've kept a blog
that I use in an effort to break down the gap between students and
school curricula. It is having a huge influence upon my thinking and
the strategic direction of the district.

I'm lucky that I love my job but it's important to note that this
enjoyment is enhanced by the feeling that I'm part of a community of
fellow professionals - a community which is enhanced through soc

[Dais View of attendees at WeMedia, Miami. Photo by Shel]

I skipped the second day of the WeMedia conference yesterday to get home early and use a pillow to wage my battle against fatigue, a crippling ailment that is easily cured. JD Lasica has a wonderful wrap of Day #2. It kind of makes me wish I had stayed just to hear what young people had to say about their social media habits to many folk in the audience representing traditional media.

I was on the opening panel on social media, a subject very dear to my heart. I don't recall everything that was said, but Alice Eddie Backer of Global Voices live blogged the session and her post seems very accurate to me.

During our 90-minute town hall type discussion, there were at least three references to the "elephant in the room." I'm not quite certain just, which elephant we were discussing--big media vs. social media, the imminent death of media companies who depend on the arcane distribution methods attached to paper and one-way broadcast boxes.  I'm not certain.

But in the discussion between our five-member panel and about 150-200 attendees from big media, academia and assorted other places, I kept hearing from people who claimed to understand the current transformational period which will probably culminate on the inevitable day that newspapers die. They used words like "allow" "brand extension" "control," "company initiative."  These to me are words that have lost their fuzz, like some kids toy whose battery has run down.

It seemed to me that some members of this audience should worry much less about elephants and a lot more about being dinosaurs. After my talk, a representative of one of the most powerful media companies in the world told me, "every year, for three years, we gather together and talk such a good game about the changes we have to make.  Then we go home and do almost nothing until the next WeMedia, when we gather together to talk a good game... ."

In the course of the day, there was much talk about the need for the senior editor who can filter and decide what people should see as news.  They extolled their professionalism in making this decision, but the walkaway line of the day came from David Parmet, who observed that all this self-congratulations was going on on a day when a former WalMart employee who married well, then became widowed and then died herself dominated American news pages and programs throughout the land. So much, it seemed to some attendees, for the discipline and wisdom of the news gatekeepers.

Before it sounds like I'm an ungrateful guest, trashing my hosts, this was a good conference and I met a number of extraordinarily wise people.  But, I am of the mind that the world will not be a better place without traditional news gathering organizations and that is where we are headed. Their problem, for as many years as I can remember, is that they are in love with the wrong aspects of their organization.  They think they have authority over what is interesting or valuable when they don't. They love the process of publishing or broadcasting, processes which have aged faster than Dorean Gray's portrait at the end.  They need to embrace citizen journalism, rather than try to compete with it and they need to do it soon before they become irrelevent

Traditional media has budget--albeit it, a dramatically reduced one, to actually send people out to cover news.  All too often, those reporters have limited time to dig, so they get information from "official sources" who tell them what a great effort is being made by official channels. Meanwhile their are people with blogs, and cameras and eyes and voices who are there when news breaks.  Next time, instead of sending an outside reporter to a second or third world locality, they should turn to the blogs on Alice Eddie Backer's Global Voices.  They should use their media to amplify the voice of people who have been there and lived that and experience life from a different perspective. Then maybe they will be equipped o ask the official sources better and more difficult questions.

Likewise, there was much talk about local news coverage. That gave me an interesting twise, because on my panel, I met  Rich Skrenta of Topix.net, who turned out to live a couple of miles from me in San Carlos, CA, a community whose local newspaper died years ago. We quickly realized that we shared several issues in common.  I have often thought of starting a local blog to put pressure on the rascals and scoundrels who think they run our community. A newspaper is too expensive to start and the ads would cost too much to get most local merchants to support it. But if this were all online then the economics would change and micro advertising, based on click-through revenues could make the model work better for both a news organization and a local advertiser.

Now San Carlos is small potatoes for a large news organization.  We are located in between San Francisco and San Jose, two urban centers with newspapers whose voices and influence, revenues and community reach are accelerating toward vanishing points.  These papers stuff the space between ads with wire copy.  The only good news about their thinning classified ad sections is that fewer trees are dying in the name of used cars and apartments for rent. These two papers have tried just about everything they can think of to survive, everything except reaching out into communities, using bloggers as stringers, forums for community discussions, and yet that is where their readers are heading toward.

There is still hope for media companies. They are lost on what to do online. They have not figured out how to leverage the power of a news gathering organization into a world of bottom up conversationalist who have usurped so much power from the institutions of a few years ago.

The media companies have little time before a new generation comes of age, one that doesn't read newspapers, doesn't listen to the radio, nor does it watch much television anymore.  They have a Teflon(r) resistance to advertising and they don't pay much attention to authority figures. When these young people come into the workplace, that is the day the the big media companies will have little choice but to drive off to Jurassic Park to join the other fossils whose time has past--unless they very shortly get a clue that they are not in control and they never were.

It's been nearly a months since I last posted about Global Neighbourhoods, the book for which this blog has been renamed. Since I last posted, I haven't really done much of anything at all--at least not physically.

I have been anguishing over a couple of issues, plus I have done a great deal of consulting in the last minute, helping three clients get ready for DEMO and Scrapblog ready to showcase it's new stuff at WeMedia, then go live shortly thereafter. I've spent more than a little time helping my 86-year-old mother-in-law who broke her ankle while walking on a beach, and I have survived the curse of a stomach flu that was much mre effective than Jenny Craig for quick weight loss.

All that being said, the book remains my top priority and I've reach a few conclusions. My new book will focus on answering a single question:

"What happens when the Online Generation replaces the boomer generation in  the workplace?"  An exploration of the question and a measured response to it will take about 80,000 words and 6-8 months to answer, or so it seems to me.

The last time I posted, I asked my beloved studio audience whether this should be a sociology book, a business book, an economics book or what? You answered overwhelmingly that it should be a sociology book, and in many ways it will be.

But it will be a sociology book in business attire, just several other books such as Blink, Wisdom of Crowds and other recent books that have sold millions more copies than has Naked Conversations.

I want this book to be on the business shelf.  In bookstores, the sociology shelf is spelled "Siberia." I want to sell lots of books. I want to be invited to speak to business audiences and to consult businesses on how to adapt to social media.

I have a late flight out of Palm Springs.  The DEMO tent has been foilded up and the circus has moved on to other places. I'm spending the rest of today yet again, rewriting my Overview. Before I post it, I will also run it past a book agent whom I respect immensely and will name only if he agrees to represent me. He's good enough that the decision is his, not mine. Or at least other authors who have worked with him say he is.