So, the questions can’t be rejected. Perhaps what is needed is a re-focused amplification of the cowbell.

There is a whole new generation of platforms evolving, empowering the Web to become a more constructive, productive place – including our start-up amazee.com. Also Check out Socialactions.com – a Montreal based platform that is creating a search interface that consolidates all “social actions” of the associated platforms like bringlight.org, change.org etc. So there are things happening and there’s definitely more to come

Although social media is still pretty rare amongst most companies, most of the ways to use it are fairly obvious after five minutes of playing with it. Be human, honest, transparent and invest time and effort.

But what’s really needed is the life-changing stuff. The stuff that helps people live a better life, or changes the national economy – that’s going to be more effective at changing individuals and companies than another half-hearted Facebook fan page!

Twitter, irc, forums, im, lists, blogs, qwks, wikis, usenet, morse code…are all means to and ends. Too often the method has become the message, the wow factor of the brand new jimmies the thing that get leveraged over the content being tossed around.

If what you are reading/writing all sounds mundane and rehashed then odds are you are, probably, not in a place with a group of participants that will make you feel any better about what is being done, let alone what gizmos are facilitating it being done.

Is it all sound and fury signifying monkeys? Is life a series of rotating praxis with a sales pitch or convention as its main draw…seriously how many damn industry driven events do folks want to fly to in a given year simply to collect a t shirt and gobag that will be forgoten in a pile in a year or two?

Save the world? Does it need saving and if so will it be the New Cyber X-men powered by Intel that will do it, or will it be the mass lumpen of latent soylent green that schlumps westward? Can memeatic incursions spring from enclaves of dinkum thinkum? Oh heck yea. Can they be forced on the populace for a desired effect? Historic evidence shows marketing has a powerful hand in playing those out. Again though I bring us back to the mass lumpen who for better or worse are the body that the memes move.

Now you could go all Harry Seldon and devise the ways to take the trends, the mass lumpen behaviors and harness them in subtle ways to shift the plot lines…

I digress though from the point at hand and that is The (current method of communicating) Sucks..Long Live the Next New Thing..sure sure…but content….as they said many times over, content is king (or queen…do not want to get tilted by the genders)

So…no matter what your reading/writing… Hold it up to a metric of Content rather than Use Of Praxis. Does it’s center hold in that light? Experiment, sure..but to an ends.

Else wise, you have become much as the model rail guys with a basement packed with a stunningly beautiful recreation of a quaint village and surrounding landscape where in all the people move in rutted predetermined motions, the lights all come on with a click of the timer, the trains all run on time every time ….and yes it is gorgeous and yes it is a work that will take you years to unfold and yes you will learn a vocabulary of the scene and it will go….in the same path…over and over and over and over.

Toot Toot Chuga Chuga (big red car)

Where do you want to go today? What tracks are you on?

-tomhiggins

I’m talking about people in under-served communities who don’t have access to broadband and basic education.

Love Marc’s view on this and I’m glad I skipped the recent cheerleader conferences in NYC and Las Vegas. Most of the pictures and tweets reeked of excess and Internet bubble 2.0. Actually, I take that back, I would’ve loved to been in Vegas .

As some on this comment stream know, in Boston we’re following the launch of www.sm4sc.com @sm4sc (Social Media for Social Change) and its founder Gradon Tripp. He’s brand new to this effort and approach, but it really just takes one passionate person who gives a s*it to make a difference.

OK, all right already, most of us get it. Why? because we sit around and re-hash it, over think it, and we talk about it, and talk about it some more, and then we pat each other on the back and wonder why others don’t get it.

They don’t get it because we AREN’T talking to them. We’re just talking to ourselves. It’s like we’re stuck in an elevator. The people that we follow on twitter, the people that read our blogs, those are OUR peeps. Wanna know why the conversation is getting tiresome? There’s your answer.

We all might as well wait for the timer to go off and pull the fries out of the oil, because thats how mundane it’s getting talking about the same shit, and recreating the same app, or same site, over and over and over again.

I’m all for taking this in another direction. I don’t care who drives. Let’s just fucking go.

I’m teaching a class in entrepreneurship in January, and social media is going to be a large part of it, both in how it works, and what the broader social implications are – how it’s affecting charitable efforts, research and the worldwide sharing of ideas.

My head is definitely going to be in this space in the next few months coming up to the class, but if you figure out how to fix the planet in the meantime, I’d love to hear it.

Brian – just call me Senator….