"Steve, what's the next hot online community?" It seems as though everybody
is on the lookout for the successor to MySpace, Twitter or Facebook. Nobody,
even in a difficult economic climate, wants to be viewed as a latecomer.
Perhaps as a defense mechanism to avoid being wrong myself, I now give a
boilerplate answer that I believe can last. In short, the next big community is
not a single destination. Rather, it is going to be everywhere. To paraphrase
Forrester analyst Charlene Li, social networking is becoming "like air."
cysko cysko on 05 Nov 08Article date 11/03/08 Posted purposely after the triumph. The number of all voters who would reject Obama based on his race, and the number more likely to vote for him because of his race, is about the same. There's apparently more than one reason for a racist to vote for Barack Obama; An abysmal economy during which the white candidate's campaign has seemed disorganized and erratic, common sense or shared values can prevail over gut fears about the color of a candidate's skin. People can look past skin color while acting in their own best interests. For whatever reason or reasons -- the economy, healthcare, the Iraq war, Sarah Palin -- some racists are determined to vote for the black guy over the white one. Racism will remain an elusive, unquantifiable force, one whose influence we can't tease out from among the many other conflicting factors that will determine how Americans vote.
