The Internet Has Been a Force for Good” No. In the days when the Internet was young, our hopes were high. As with any budding love affair, we wanted to believe our newfound object of fascination could change the world. The Internet was lauded as the ultimate tool to foster tolerance, destroy nationalism, and transform the planet into one great wired global village. Writing in 1994, a group of digital aficionados led by Esther Dyson and Alvin Toffler published a manifesto modestly subtitled “A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age” that promised the rise of  “‘electronic neighborhoods’ bound together not by geography but by shared interests.” Nicholas Negroponte, then the famed head of the MIT MediaLab, dramatically predicted in 1997 that the Internet would shatter borders between nations and usher in a new era of world peace. Read more at www.foreignpolicy.com

Twitter offers a great way to get your information spread far and wide: the retweet.

Making Re-Tweet Ready Posts Make sure your post info has room for your original info plus a retweet. If your original post is close to 140 characters, the person retweeting has to edit your post to send it back out. Smells like work? People won’t make extra effort to retweet you if they have to edit your posts. Make sure you use URL shorteners like bit.ly or is.gd or ow.ly (there are dozens) to get back more of your real estate. If you’re going to tweet a URL, give folks a sense of what they’re clicking into. For instance, I use (video) or (youtube) when pointing to a YouTube video. And make sure you use (NSFW) on things that are Not Safe For Work. The more helpful or entertaining your tweet, the more likely people will take an action. The more jumbled with @ names and multiple urls and hashtags your tweet is, the less likely it will be retweeted. People will gladly retweet causes (unless you fatigue us). Starting a tweet with an @ means that a good chunk of folks won’t see it.

Retweet other people and promote other people 15x to every 1 time of your effort. Don’t tweet every damned thing you write about or do. Folks will fatigue quickly. Befriend and add value to the best retweeters. It’s a live network, a human network, a give-and-take relationship. That’s it. That’s how I do it. What about you? How are you getting it done? Photo credit Mike Baird ShareThis Tags: communication, howto, socialmedia, twitter ChrisBrogan.com runs on the Thesis Theme for WordPress Thesis is the search engine optimized WordPress theme of choice for serious online publishers. If you’re a blogger who doesn’t understand a lot of PHP, Thesis will give a ton of functionality without having to alter any code. For the advanced, Thesis has incredible customization possibilities via Thesis hooks. With so many design options, you can use the template over and over and never have it look like the same site. The theme is robust and flexible enough not only to accommodate a site like ChrisBrogan.com, but also to enable the site to run far more efficiently than it ever has before. Go on a guided video tour of Thesis and see the amazing things you can do with this theme! Seriously, you’ll love it. Check out the Thesis demo site See more Thesis-based sites in the gallery showcase

A slideshow here on how hospitals are using Twitter

Perhaps we need to ensure that the future world is “info friendly”?

Using word pictures like “the pig’s blood of technology,” award-winning science fiction author Greg Bear urged Friday’s TEDxSeattle audience to be mindful of our increasingly public and digitally-archived lives. “The web that knows who you are … do you want it to?” he asked.“All of us are neural nodes” in a massive and “vast social brain.” What does it mean to live in a world where finding a moment of private time — for nefarious or honorable reasons — becomes nearly impossible?We don’t know, Bear asserted. “We must understand that we cannot predict the ultimate social response to technology.” In part, that is because society changes over time. Bear painted two scenarios related to our increasingly visible digital lives.In one, he used humor to take us to a world where everyone has a digital dossierBut in the other world, a darker world, social mores have changed. In that future world, behavior that was “acceptable” in 2010 (like drinking coffee) is no longer legal.Read more at wiredpen.com 

We’re standing on the shoulders of thought leaders who got social media rolling, time to take the next steps: Better Research Better Metrics and a better understanding of what they mean Defining Ethical & Acceptable Practices Educating others and never wavering from the core elements of social media: What do you want to accomplish? How best do we work to accomplish your goal? How do we measure it? The author adds, “…so I’m done reading the 10 ways to better engagement and follower strategies. It’s either junk science or its been said already.The theories and practices are already defined, it’s time to go to work and use them.”

Geoff Livingston, a long time PR blogger, is calling it quits because, “I have run out of things to say.” Further into his post he shared a profound state of social media. Though the pioneering phase is done or may be near done, it’s actually a robust time for social media. Widespread adoption is occurring and best practices within verticals continue. It’s just time for new voices here and abroad (YOU GUYS) to carry the social PR conversation.

The internet and people are not new but the past 5 years have been a Social Media explosion. A breathless gold rush to a brave new country and anytime that happens great explorers emerge to lead the way.But the revolution is over

India's new copyright bill sounds like a pretty good piece of work: it declares private, personal copying to be "fair dealing" (like US fair use) and limits the prohibition on breaking DRM so that it's only illegal to do so if you're also violating copyright. That means that you can break the DRM on your iPad to move your books to your Kindle or vice-versa. It also makes it legal to make, distribute and sell tools to accomplish this.

The unthinkable has happened: Twitter has decided to make money. Longtime users of the microblogging service, which for years has operated without a viable business model, are anguished at the prospect of paid ads appearing among their tweets. But advertising is just the tip of the iceberg. Twitter’s vast and ever-growing data store will be the true profit center, say company execs — both for Twitter and for independent developers.Exactly to what extent Twitter plans to make its data available to outside parties remains unclear, but the company’s APIs are already accessible for developers to access its services, and last October it signed deals with Google and Microsoft to allow tweets to appear alongside search results. Now Twitter is reportedly developing “analytical products” aimed at marketers who want to mine the Twittersphere for insight into public opinion about companies, products, and brands — and it’s encouraging others to do the same.Read more at infoworld.com

There’s an argument circulating that we don’t care about our privacy as much as we did when Facebook rolled out with its “promises”, justifying, in part, this decision. Where do you stand? Will you take steps to remove information from Facebook to keep it from going public? See the article for clarification of Facebook’s claim that these changes are “opt in”.

Once upon a time, Facebook could be used simply to share your interests and information with a select small community of your own choosing. As Facebook’s privacy policy once promised, “No personal information that you submit to Facebook will be available to any user of the Web Site who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings.”How times have changed.Today, Facebook removed its users’ ability to control who can see their own interests and personal information. Certain parts of users’ profiles, “including your current city, hometown, education and work, and likes and interests” will now be transformed into “connections,” meaning that they will be shared publicly. If you don’t want these parts of your profile to be made public, your only option is to delete them.Read more at www.eff.org

Name one social platform that is focused on enabling long form conversations.

If you take the time to create good content, take the time to share it well. There is no magic formula, only thoughtfulness + tools. Know the Flow is my approach to social media data flow. Over the next week I’ll be sharing some of my theory and tips that I touched on in a recent #SoSocial presentation. Consider this the starter pack. Tools & Theory for social media content distribution

Distribution Tools

Social Blogs

Outstanding research group that sees the future in a very different way. The entire site is worth a day’s reading and I’ll probably wind up Amplifying a lot of it here….its that good

See more at www.ingenesist.com 

A new phase in social media underway.

Force Field Analysis in Social Sciences analysis reflected on how things are accomplished or hindered by the way that people internalize external experiences in the process of their own psychological development.Now, suppose that an individual goes out and influences social situations in their community.  Also suppose that social media could amplify the persons exterior impact – this would likewise impact internal psychology, etc., setting up a form of polarity between two positions.  The greater the difference (diversity) in those positions, the greater the potential (energy state) of the outcome.The “Local Social” Force FieldSocial media is about to enter a new phase called “local social”.  The hyperlinks that bind the web will become the hyperlinks that bind a community.  The difference is that hyperlinks in “Global Social” environment converge down to specific information, Hyperlinks in Local Social will diverge up to diverse knowledge assets.Read more at www.ingenesist.com

Opportunities emerge from the deep semantic web

Economics is the science of incentives. While the promise of searching a huge store of databases may not sound like Saturday social night at the local drive in burger joint, it does by extension, introduce new incentives.  The new technology will drive people to build databases.  A new generation of entrepreneurs will collect, organize, analyze and create – not information – but data.Database of databases of databasesThe first things entrepreneurs will organize are human knowledge data – starting with their own, then relating it to others. Not unlike the human genome project, the vast human knowledge reservoir will be mapped. Entrepreneurs will enter their communities (on line, neighborhood, work, school, church, social networks) and create a database for what other people know and parse the data in any number of important and useful databases.The reason for this is simple; data are collections of human observations.This is the only thing people are willing to pay forRead more at www.conversationalcurrency.com

nterested? The backbone of Conversational Currency ™ is whatever social medium a person likes using. Where one takes it from there is the value this community provides

Amplify’d from www.conversationalcurrency.comThis community shares  tactical applications with community members on a one-to-one basis. We do not share the ‘secret sauce’ on a static website since there exists a myriad of customized solutions which can be developed using the fundamentals and vehicles being invented.Since we based all communications using the power of social media, we ask viewers to start with a very general engagement opportunity:Here we invite the world of bloggers who want to discuss, and propagate their knowledge about, and need for “Conversational Currency ™ “. A special invitation goes out to brands who can advertise their “conversations” on our site, and ultimately learn about our ‘solution’ one-on-one.Selected blogs (and particularly brand implementation plans) will be inserted into Business Week…drawing national attention and exposure to your demonstrated ability to turn ‘Conversation into Currency’…and perhaps be the 1st!!Read more at www.conversationalcurrency.com