I am still reading Here Comes Everybody and thinking about the long-term implications of everyone being connected with little to no barriers to participation. I realize that many people still choose not to participate even though they have the tools but I think participation will soon be accepted as the norm.

If the above can be taken at face value, what does that mean for a representative democracy? Do we still need representation when everyone will have easy access to the information they need to make informed decisions? Will government be “run” by politicians or perhaps “coordinated” on an intelligent, semantic web that provides contextualized and personalized information on the pro and cons of pending issues? Certainly intermediates will be necessary on some level but should they be acting “for us” or should they be more akin to ombudsman that are charged with ensuring that information is openly and transparently shared?

No answers for me yet but I feel like I am on the right track. More to come…

I have two Twitter accounts, @JustAnother and @mamadouthiam. I try to limit my Facebook interactions to friends and family. I occasionally participate on Flickr and YouTube. I blog here and on another site related to my wife’s business. And so on…

What box are you in?
One of my biggest struggles in the social pool is trying to solve the identity puzzle. I often feel unsure of the tone I should take, the level of familiarity I should assume and the level of consistency I should present in each of my different online presences. I know that I am not the only one that struggles with this issue. Chris Brogan wrote yesterday about how the boxes you put yourself in (and those others put you in) can limit what you do.

How big is your box?
The issue takes on even more complexity as your audience grows and your visibility increases. I am reading Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky and he talks about how, at a certain point, individuals with even marginal followings are outpaced in their ability to interact with their followers. Christopher Allen also has some very interesting posts on the limitations inherent to individuals, groups and communities.

How the game has changed
In all honesty, many of these issues existed long before the recent social networking and online sharing tools evolved. It seems self-evident that I should interact differently at home with my wife and family than I do with my colleagues at work. The main difference now is that the majority of these formerly private conversations and interactions are public. In the past, I could tailor my message and my tone to my audience. Now, it is much more difficult to do that when the audience could be anyone.

The social dashboard
I wish I could come up with something profound to tie off this post but I don’t really feel that I have any satisfactory answers yet. I can only suggest that these tools and technologies are still in their infancy and it is entirely reasonable to expect that better mechanisms will come along in the near future to better synchronize our offline and online worlds. I can easily imagine a social “dashboard” where I can selectively send messages to friends, colleagues, family and all the potential permutations and combinations. Until then see you here, there and everywhere!

Photo Credit: Terminalnomad - Flickr

I wish I had time research the topic more as I know there has been a considerable amount of writing about the power of new technologies to make the global playing field level. Intellectually, I have long agreed with this proposition but four events have recently given this a more visceral understanding.

1. Mobile access in developing countries is exploding. I returned to Senegal after an 8 year absence last Christmas and the biggest change in the interim was the explosion in mobile phones and mobile technology.
2. I recently bought an iPhone and my brother-in-law (visiting from Senegal) bought an iPod touch. I can’t overstate how legitimately awestruck both of us are at what can be accomplished on these devices.
3. My 2-year old daughter understands the iPhone interface and can move back and forth among the photos in the photo gallery.
4. My wife’s younger siblings in Senegal are all on Facebook and use ooVoo for video chat with us here in the US.

Taken together, my broader interpretation of these events is that as soon as these incredibly powerful devices and social networking technologies get into the hands (in sufficient numbers) of people in developing countries, the digital divide will erode much faster than anyone can image. There is almost no learning curve as much of it is intuitive and there is a collective learning that speeds up the process. What the economic, social, political, environmental and ethical outcomes of this will be, I don’t dare comment on right now. All I know is LOOK OUT….

I just finished Tribes by Seth Godin and it leaves me a little puzzled. Almost every review of the book that I have seen and read has been extremely positive. This includes the standard Internet luminaries and Michael Hyatt, a blogger from the publishing world that I have recently began reading and who has very thoughtful insights and posts.

Seth’s key message, that new Internet tools provide limitless possibilities to create and lead powerful movements, resonates with me. However his style and his analogies were often a distraction. I know that Seth has not been an active member of the Twitter community (which is perfectly fine) but I had the impression that the book was a series of semi-related Tweets strung together (and not always in the right order).

As for the analogies, the one that really made me shake my head was about the havoc that can be caused by a unicorn in a balloon factory.

It’s amazingly easy for a unicorn to completely disrupt a balloon factory. That’s because the factory is organized around a single idea, the idea of soft, quiet stability. The unicorn changes all that.

Seth uses some very good real world examples throughout the book but this analogy did have any meaning for me at all. I got it, I just didn’t think it added anything to the narrative. That being said, I know that some people (including the well-respected C.C. Chapman thought that this analogy was fantastic).

So, where does that leave me? I don’t know. I am open to trying another one of Seth’s books but I have a pretty long list of other books and authors that have my attention first. Next up is Here Comes Everybody - we’ll see how it stacks up

Not much time for a lengthy post this evening as I need to get ready for Thanksgiving and want to spend some time with the family. That being said, I was blown away by the recent outpouring of comments on the Change.gov site and feel compelled to jot down a few thoughts.

Yesterday afternoon, the site initiated a new feature entitled “Join the Discussion” with the question:

What worries you most about the healthcare system in our country?

In 24 hrs somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,000 comments have poured in. Being very interested in social media and how emerging technologies can be leveraged for the greater good, one of the first questions that comes to mind is how to make sense out of this information. The sheer volume poses considerable challenges and I am hoping to give some thought over the next few days (and hopeful a more detailed post) about what strategies could be used to maximize the value of this effort. My first attempt was to use one of my favorite online tools, Wordle, to generate a tag cloud for the comments in the RSS feed. If you look closely, four foreign counties are mentioned no this list. Anyone hear a call for a commission to examine other health care systems? Any other observations?

Photo Credit: Wordle.net

I moved to Columbia, MD about 5 years ago with my wife and then 4 month-old daughter. It happened very much by chance as I had recently completed graduate school, gotten a job with USDA in Beltsville, MD and just happened to stumble upon Columbia while driving in the area. It was one of the best choices I have made.

That being said, there is always room for improvement. Just today, a neighbor came by to get permission to do some exterior renovation on his property. Columbia has some fairly strict rules about what can and can’t be done (and I know that some people really chafe against these) and part of the process involves getting a certain number of signatures from neighbors. Regardless of any feeling I have about the necessity of this, I was struck by the fact that this process was of almost no benefit to anyone else considering similar improvements. With some creative thinking this process could be used to do much more than enforce rules and regulations. For example, by creating a Web site to Vet Improvement Projects you could:

• Allow homeowners to post videos, images etc. about their potential plans and permit authenticated users (neighbors) to vote on the plans and/ or ask questions
• Maintain a directory of contractors that permitted commenting, rating and multimedia examples of past work
• Develop mapping tools that showed where permits had been granted 
• Integrate geospatial and mobile applications so that citizens could look up information about past or current projects in mobile browsers

The ideas above represent a very narrow example of what could be a much greater and more significant project. The point is that we need to find ways to let the many creative and talented people in our community leverage the Web and the currently available social tools in the name of the greater good. The potential of this approach was shown very clearly by the recent Apps for Democracy competition sponsored by the Office of the Chief Technology Officer of Washington D.C. Some amazing tools were developed at a fraction of the cost and effort of using traditional methods. One estimate calculated the ROI for the contest at 4000%. I am hoping that there were people in Columbia watching that contest and taking notes. Columbia is a great place, let’s find a way for everyone to pitch in and make it even better.

This weekend, I had to run to the local home improvement store to pick up a few items for home – a new trash can, trash bags, air filters and a grill cover. I decided to go to Lowe’s rather than Home Depot because 1) our local Lowe’s is newer and better and 2) it was closer to some other errands I had to run. The decision to change stores was not as clear cut as it should have been as I knew that finding the items on the aforementioned list would take additional time at Lowe’s.

I could not have been more correct. All in all, and even after bringing myself to ask for help, it probably took an extra 20 minutes for me to track down everything I needed. I don’t really find this acceptable anymore and have a few ideas about how this could be remedied.

• In-store dedicated “Twitter”applications with hashtags - Why couldn’t large box stores provide free wifi with a dedicated microblogging system that recognized a list of hashtags for common items and would spit back relevant information?
• Text messages -  I don’t use text messages that often but I know for many people they are essential. How about a text system similar to the twitter idea above?
• iTarget, iWalmart, etc. applications - Why don’t the big box stores develop iPhone or other smart phone applications for clients that allowed for in-store applications?
• A “store-aware” iPhone application - Even better than a store-specific application, how about a generic app that recognizes a wide variety of stores.
• Carts hooked into an RFID system - How about carts with search tied to RFID databases and inventory?

There may be some very good technical reasons why these may be difficult to achieve, however the upside seems huge. Imagine if Target had a dedicated mobile app that could not only help people find what they wanted but also could deliver targeted ads and discounts. The buzz alone for something like this would be worth the effort. Let’s hope we see something like this soon.

Very moving and worth the time to watch.

This past week, I have been doing my best to get up to speed in my new position. As a part of this process, I have been visiting the Web sites of organizations doing related work to see what information they have available and what options they provide for receiving updates. I have been very surprised to find that there are many organizations that still have not embraced RSS as a mechanism for syndicating critical updates and information. Moreover, I have come across several instances where Web sites publish updates to a unique url, thus making it very difficult to link to the most up-to-date information.

In my opinion, Web managers have a duty to think about how best to manage, organize and publish their information so that the information is as “liberated” as possible. I have been able to find some workarounds to get much of information that I need (change detection being one of the useful tools I use) but the process would be better for everyone if the sites I used were syndicating their content in a more effective manner.

Photo credit