Younger types and techies tend to be more comfortable with the amorphous nature of social media and digital communication. They don’t need as much linearity or control over every aspect of content creation.

Unlike print, you can’t edit a social media-based web site until it is perfect. Since much of it’s evolution depends on how users behave and what types of content they share, you have to accept more of a role of jazz composer than orchestra conductor.

I have been looking for creative analogies to explain the differences to clients and colleagues.

Here’s what I have come up with so far (thoughts and suggestions are welcome):

• think of web as organic, as opposed to genetically modified: unpredictable and raw instead of manipulated for uniformity
• improv comedy versus sitcom comedy
• raising a child versus raising a houseplant (in terms of flexibility and hopefully not necessarily maintenance)

Dear blog,

I apologize for neglecting you. You mean so much to me. My convoluted musings need a home and you’ve been great about giving them a couch to crash on.

Here’s why I’ve been away…

I’m working with a small web development shop. Actually, I co-founded this little web shop. We wanted to do something meaningful using our skills to help with Haiti relief. In our quest, we found some amazing techie types who were also moved to volunteer their time – including the awe-inspiring innovative crowdsourcing efforts of Ushahidi and Crisis Commons.

To make a long story short, our contribution is a web site that established a network between highly skilled people who want to volunteer to help Haiti and the organizations and individuals who can use their experience and talents. We felt desperate to do something to help and this was what we came up with.

The site has taken on a life of its own: thousands of visitors and hundreds of registered users. Now we’re hearing that people have used the site to connect with other volunteers and organizations, some even forming specialized teams that are planning ways to restore Haiti’s infrastructure in areas such as water and sewage engineering.

It’s a small contribution but we hope it helps. Sadly, it left me little time to think, let alone spend quality time with my blog. Hope you understand. I’m back…

A new study finds that people project their personal beliefs upon the god they worship. An egocentric approach to devotion is probably to be expected. Even those of us who love to argue usually seek some sort of harmony when it comes to prayer. Yankees fans presumably don’t pray to a Red Sox god.

What I do wonder, which this study doesn’t capture, is if polytheistic religions (with more than one god) have the same issues or could they perhaps allow for more complexity. Also, if people are created in god’s image, maybe a there is an aspect of a macro-god that validates even our craziest contradictions.

I spoke at a panel for women entrepreneurs last weekend, where I asserted that community organizing might be an “it” skill of the new generation.

I know there have been a few disparaging public remarks made about “community organizing,” as though it were some sort of euphemism for misspent youth. I’ve worked with quite a few community organizers over the years. I won’t deny that some of them are living in their own stratosphere. However, many others are monumental in skills of doing much with little and are profoundly good at influencing people.

These days everyone from authors to politicians to non-profits to corporate brands are trying to motivate the masses to “follow” or “fan” them. Remember when technology was good to have and how rapidly it became essential to existence? Similarly, having a social presence and community was once a nice bonus but is becoming unavoidable for nearly all of us.

I’m not saying that everyone should go out and try to be a community organizer but we could benefit from looking at their skills, strategy and purpose. How is all this digital wrangling of supporters, friends, and contacts really all that different from good, old fashioned community organizing dressed up in the latest threads?

So, I guess that I would say that there’s hope for the legions of young people who were galvanized around Obama’s message of social progress in the last election, and propelled themselves into organizing (as reported by Elizabeth Mendez Berry in her cover story in the Nation this month). Some of them are struggling to find their place in this discouraging new job market.

Sure they still have more to learn, but I think now more than ever, they deserve credit for a legitimate skill. The many people out there scrambling to make rhyme or reason out of the great new frontier of digital campaigning will hopefully figure out that there is value in putting their experience to good use.

This Saturday is a great opportunity to get your strut on at the quirky, indie, cuteness mecca that is East Atlanta Village. Come one, come all – unless you’re saddling up with the techie mavens at the sold-out Drupal Camp. Big things poppin this weekend. I love the little Drupal Peach logo, by the by.

I was able to get up close and personal with Google Wave this week. The jury’s still out on whether this new open source platform for online collaboration is building a quiet revolution in web life. The skeptics say this is just a case of the “emperors new clothes” or much ado about nothing. Cynics worry that its another mark of the beast in Google’s plan for global dominion. Enthusiasts believe that we’ll all be riding the Wave into the promised land of Web 2.0.

The potential that Wave presents is outstanding. Although no one yet knows exactly where it will take us, the possibility is tantalizing. Will we be communicating in real time with infinite layers of sophistication? Probably not overnight. Google’s offered just enough of a glimpse into its vision to make open source developers start jonesing for sexy new applications. Anticipation is mounting but who knows how long it takes for the hype and our hopes to materialize into something we can sink our teeth into.

I’m reading a book on cosmic forces that was published in the 1970s but has some interesting insights that are still very relevant. It opens with an excerpt from a T.S. Eliot poem that I thought has cautionary wisdom for us living through the information revolution and potential overload.

Choruses from The Rock
T.S.Eliot,1934

The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,
The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Brings us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

The increasing instances of normal media reporting on the happenings of social media — sometimes even relying on those precocious little social media newbies for leads — has me thinking: How long will there be a distinction between new media, social media and just good ole regular media?

For instance, folks know that Twitter and Facebook were disrupted today, possibly by a coordinated attack. I’m just curious about what the implications might have been for the rest of media. Was today a slow news day for old school commercial media because there was scant tweeting and status updates?

How much of regular life and non-social media snafu’ed (yes, I made that word up)? If John Hughes hadn’t died (and I am old enough for him to have been an important influencer on my tween identity), would there have not been much for people to chat n’ post about?

And if there were major lags caused by the two social media giants of the year that reverberated throughout media, maybe we should start looking at these increasingly blurry lines of distinction. After all, other than the number of regular people with open access to broadcast whatever they want, is there anything inherently different about these forms of media?

They’re both just media, just like words, pieces of paper, pictures, etc. Do we need more adjectives for media or just a broader definition for what people typically think of as media?

When I heard about British DJ Steve Miller’s supposed allergy to wi-fi, I immediately looked the guy up on Twitter. What could be more interesting than following someone trying to dodge the electromagnetic telecommunications waves that permeate every moment of our existence these days? Unfortunately, I couldn’t find him.

Some are questioning whether this wifi allergy could possibly be real and suggest that Miller must be trying to get attention or is completely neurotic. I, for one, never dispute the possibility of the human body reacting strangely to any sort of stimulus. People seem to have the potential to develop physical intolerance to anything.

I just want a glimpse into how the guy gets by. I mean, whole cities are wired these days. Where could he possibly find relief? Moreover, where’s the screenplay? Ed Norton could rock that role.

I just knew that the iPhone apps and these GoogleWave robots would lead to bloodthirsty cyborgs someday…

From Daily Galaxy…

“I see a strong parallel between the evolution of robot intelligence and the biological intelligence that preceded it. The largest nervous systems doubled in size about every fifteen million years since the Cambrian explosion 550 million years ago. Robot controllers double in complexity (processing power) every year or two. They are now barely at the lower range of vertebrate complexity, but should catch up with us within a half century.”

Hans Moravec,  pioneer in mobile robot research and founder of Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute.