This got me thinking: if I could “pocket” my data, restrict certain tweets to certain geographies on the OUTBOUND side of Twitter, then that’d be neat. I mean, most smartphone apps of Twitter have my location. What if they could say to the API, “Only send this to people within 25 miles of this location?”

Then, at CES, I could opt for “geopocketed” tweets, so that you don’t get bored to death about hearing where I am, who I’m meeting up with, etc, but then I can tweet to the “unlocal” people the “news” that I find. See where I’m going?

What if we had a way to geo-restrict our OUTGOING tweets for certain uses?

Photo credit heiwa4126

Education.

Kenny, or rather MTV, has partnered up with some folks to work on GetSchooled.com. Essentially, the site hopes to work on the problem of the school dropout rate, and secondarily, the college admissions rate. The stats that Kenny gave me were staggering (and as I immediately forget numbers, they were something like 30% of all kids who enter high school don’t finish or some similar – you can correct me). They made my head fog up as I thought about what it’d mean to try and solve those problems.

Evidently, our education problems cost us something like 350 Billion US Dollars a year in lost revenue (or similar – again, I don’t remember such things well). That’s crazy. So essentially, just fixing a few bits of education, just improving a few parts, would change the way this country works.

Faith, it turns out, has all kinds of knowledge about the education system and she and Kenny started riffing on all the cool projects. She told me about GetIdeas.org and TeacherTube, and how Cisco is working on 21st Century Schools iniatives. Kenny and Faith told me about Big Picture Schools and Green Dot SChools and Marc Ecko’s Sweat Equity enterprises, and several other great projects.

The question remains:

How Could New Ideas Change Education?

In a way, I’m already noodling with this. With Whitney Hoffman and Christopher S. Penn, I started PodCamp as a way to teach about media making with alternative methods. This is the unconference model, but it’s started me down a path to learn more about the DNA of Disruption, and what I could do by applying alternative education models to other situations.

I’m not interested in becoming a teacher. In fact, I’m not much interested in the existing systems. I’ll let others figure out how to fix those from within. However, I am more than interested about what else can be done outside of the boxes. I’m curious what we could do to change the laws, change the rules, make new games, and create success from cradle to grave.

Think about this: my 3-year-old boy knows more about navigating the web than most school computer programs. My 7-year-old daughter’s fascination with the Titanic would give her a great springboard for learning engineering, forensics, and many other sciences, though the original assignment was simply to read a few books for the sake of reading. Neither of my kids are being taught leadership (directly), nor are they being taught entrepreneurial studies (directly). The old system, make factory workers, is still firmly in place, and we’re trying to patch that. I don’t think that’s how I want to roll.

I was talking with Dr. Lynn Dorman tonight on twitter, and as she nears 70, she’s facing the same fate that lots of people fall into: younger generations don’t understand how to learn from the body of work of their successors, even if their only learning is in which systems have failed in the past. How can we marry up all the great resources of people who know something great to those of us who could stand to learn more?

I’m also interested in educational models for business workers. We’re in a society where HR is less and less about career development and more and more about benefits management. Companies are no longer the stewards of your development and career. How can I help those of us who lived in the cubicle farms, and what can I do to share that information in a way that will empower others?

I’ve no idea where I will go with this in the larger context. I just wanted to put the thoughts out there. I’m curious as to what you’re thinking about it.

How can we build new learning models? How can we equip our youth and/or our students and/or our business professionals? How do we share what we’ve learned with these new tools? How do we equip our kids to do something with all we’ve learned from social media?

What’s your take on all these kinds of projects? If Kenny Miller’s working on it, I know it’s important. I’m also wondering what else would could do with our combined knowledge. We’re the smartest people around supposedly, right? How can we help?

I just checked out a project from Federated Media called BingTweets.com. It sniffs Twitter’s trending topics and merges that with Microsoft Bing search results (note: parts of Microsoft are client of NML, but NOT the folks at BING).

What’s cool about that is there are MANY times when we see trends on Twitter and we wonder what the backstory is. In my example, I clicked half-blood prince and got local showtimes for the new Harry Potter movie (hmmm, I could sneak off and watch THAT). I think this can be pretty darned useful.

But think about this: this is actually an ADVERTISEMENT, and yet, it’s useful. Chew on that a bit. It’s a relationship with an application built by Federated Media to help Microsoft promote Bing.

This beats the HELL out of a banner ad, don’t you think?

What’s your take?

Just read this post on Mashable saying that Google confirms they’ll have an operating system for computers out for late 2010. This is a huge move. A new OS isn’t to be taken lightly, and yet, today I was having the conversation with Rob Hatch that neither of us really use native apps that often. We live in the browser.

This doesn’t hit for another year, so let’s not all go crazy. And yet, think about this.

MSFT has decades of experience. Apple does, too. Linux isn’t a big slouch.

Would you go full-Google?

Photo credit MikeBaird

If you were given a few million bucks from a venture capitalist to build a media company, what would that look like?

Not so easy, eh? So, I’m going to think about it, but then, it’s your invitation to think about it, too. Because some of what you and I come up with here might be useful, don’t you agree? Maybe we’ll figure out where some of these companies might hop next, or maybe we’ll just invent something new.

The Next Media Company Manifesto

Here’s what I believe might need to be true about the next media company:

• Stories are points in time, but won’t end at publication. (Edits, updates, extensions are next.)
• Curators and editors rule, and creators aren’t necessarily on staff.
• Media cannot stick to one form. Text, photos, video, music, audio, animation, etc are a flow.
• Everything must be portable and mobile-ready. (Mobile devices need to evolve here, too).
• Everything must have collaborative opportunities. If I write about a restaurant, you should have wikified access to add to the article directly.
• Advertising cannot be the primary method of revenue.
• In-line content marketing, clearly delineated/disclosed/explained is one revenue stream. One of many.
• Contributors come in many shapes: onstaff, partner (how pros like TechCrunch link to Washington Post), guest (for love and glory only), and conversational come right to mind. Who else?
• Value-add services are another revenue stream. Why not book hotels and flights from my travel magazine directly? Why not buy how-to information on marketing from Ad Age or FastCompany?
• Collaboration rules. Why should I pick the next cover? Why should my picture of the car crash be the best?
• Everything is modular and linkable. Everything is fluid. Meaning, if I want the publication to be a business periodical, then I don’t want to have to read a piece about sports.
• Paper isn’t dead: it’s on demand.
• Do-it-yourself publishing is next for us all. At first.
• We will all audition for mass physical distribution.
• It won’t matter (mass physical distribution) to us, lots of the time.

What Else?

Am I way off here? Is this too Pollyanna? What makes sense? What’s just wrong? How far am I off from your perspective?

I welcome the conversation.

The web gave us the perfect “nowhere.” A Star Trek fan in Houlton, Maine can talk with another fan from Reykjavík, Iceland, without thinking a thing about it. We can be anywhere, and if you follow through, anywhen, and thus, we don’t need proximity to build relationships (or customers, or much of anything). The first web, the brochure web, gave way to the second web, the two-way web. What if the third web is about the relationship of things and places between the physical world and the placeless, timeless world? I’m calling this vplaces (more in a bit).

Our web has already shifted. Bridges tell us when they are up and down. Laundry rooms report their status. The web of things now connects the physical world with the web world. Here’s where my thinking started getting into something else.

vplaces, pplaces, and tplaces

The web of nowhere relates to vplaces. You might be thinking Second Life. I’m not. Well, okay. Second Life can be part of it. But the web of nowhere is the web we have today. I can write this blog post anywhere in the world (Seattle, Boston, Fresno). You can read it anywhere (Mumbai, Glasgow, Detroit). It’s the web of “it doesn’t matter where things are.”

The web of nowhere is not necessarily real time, either. Blogs and plenty of websites Thus, the web of nowhen is also the non-realtime. As we’re starting to become more and more interested in realtime, with tools like FriendFeed and other lifestreaming devices and applications, there’s also more and more pull for the time-shifted web, or tplaces.

What do I mean? Phone calls are synchronous. The real-time web is synchronous. Events and real space activities are synchronous. But there’s value in time-displaced events, too. For instance, if I mix a combo of physical world places (pplaces) and timeshifted information (tplaces), I get services like BrightKite, where I can leave notes in the air in a place for someone to come along and find them.

What other combos are there? If you mix vplaces and pplaces, there are many opportunities. Think about all the various Apple iPhone apps that use GPS as one component, like NIN Access. Think about Microsoft Tag. Think about situations where the web doesn’t have to be a static page any more. Think about a web that comes together are things, around objects talking to each other and us, around places that are a mix of physical and otherwise.

What Am I Ranting About?

I admit this doesn’t have immediate and obvious application, and yet it does. To me, it does. I see this as clearly as anything. To me, if you design for the web of today, you’ll get what everyone else has. If you start planning for these new webs, of places, of timeshifting, of mapping the physical into the web and back again, you’ll start to find the new vectors, the new possibilities.

What does this say to you? Anything? Did your eyes light up?

Think for a moment about the way we use Twitter, and the way that facility could change online interactions. Not IM. One-to-many opportunities.

Some of the twitters we should want

• Health care help
• Product purchasing help
• Hotel information
• City concierge info
• Prayers ( I think Tony Steward is close with LifeChurch.tv)
• Company logistics (private)
• Up to the minute air travel info (wisdom of crowds)
• Sporting event internal network
• Prenatal care, Postnatal care

Tiny ping networks.

What We Will Need

• A centralized identity
• A way to expose certain profiles to certain networks
• Simple bridges between “zones” or “networks.” (These train tracks have to line up.

And lots more.

What say you? What’s the world with a thousand twitters (lowercase, as Dave Winer likes it)? Does it lose everything? What if we maintain the Twitter as the commons?

(Yes, I’ve heard of Laconi.ca. This isn’t exactly that. But maybe it is. You?)

Photo credit Will Hybrid

What do you know about a brand? What do you know about a company? If I told you that these folks were all social media types from within a big west coast company, and that they were all excited by the trends in personal media making, and in the implications to both the consumer and the enterprise, and if I told you they took me on a tour of their headquarters that ended with a trip to their cool store, where would you guess they work?

What if I said that some of them were working on web-based applications for office productivity, and others were working on the future of podcasting? Something coming to mind? Do you have an idea?

Microsoft. Right!

I was fortunate enough to tour Microsoft’s campuses, including their research facilities (where I saw more patents and cool ideas sitting around than I could imagine in one space), as well as their media production studios (which were just downright incredible and filled with geek goodness), and then I toured the museum and finally the store. I met all kinds of really great folks from the Office Live team, from architecture, from podcasting, and all kinds of other parts of Microsoft. They were passionate, excited, engaged in trying to make great things happen and make products and services that people wanted to use.

So imagine me, a guy who’s had nothing but Macs in his house since 1984, but who has his engineering background in NT 3.51 and NT 4.0 boxes and products, and what I’m thinking about. I met an entire “Social Media Minds” group, and came away thinking that Microsoft really has some neat ideas for the future. ( I wrote about some of this back a year ago.)

As I grow older, while others are putting boxes around their perspectives, and pegging people into certain categories while not others, I’m seeing that there is no box. And I’m pretty damned excited for what that kind of thinking opens up.

Thanks for the tour, Microsoft. I’m grateful for your contributions to the space. Keep opening things up. Keep sharing. Keep trying new things.

If you are an employer, think on this:

Connectivity is Everywhere

It costs you more money to house a work staff than it does to manage them remotely. Cost per cubicle, per in-house service, per enterprise service license. Your network bandwidth costs, your power and cooling costs, the things you have to do to keep people comfortable in an office space, are all worth reconsidering.

Afraid of how they’ll work?

Shift measurements from “being there” to “what you’ve done.” Look for deliverables that are based on pieces of information, goals met, business moved forward.

I’m at a Barnes&Noble on wifi. For $39.99 a month, I could be on Verizon EVDO and writing this by the lake where I took my daughter swimming. I can work ANYWHERE there’s a signal. So can a lot of us. In fact, I do my job much better at a remove (plus, it saves 4 hours of driving, two each way, at $66 a tank of gas twice or more a week).

The Loosely Joined Employee

The age of half-owned brands is upon us. Years ago, it was only Robert Scoble. We watched in awe as he put a whole new face on Microsoft. He then shifted over to PodTech, and it didn’t feel so strange. Is it strange at FastCompany? Kind of. Look at their latest print issue and see how many times they mention one employee, and not the boss.

Charlene Li leaving Forrester is actual news to a lot of us in this space. Why? Because probably five years ago, everyone would clamor to get IN to Forrester. (And by the way, I think it’s a great company, with good people, and all that. That’s not my point.)

But is Jeremiah Owyang about Forrester, or is he a half-owned brand that Forrester can claim for the time being?

As employers, it’s a strange situation. I cause a bit of this grief for my friends and employers at CrossTech Media for sure. Because I’m “me” quite up front, but still functioning as their partner, employee, and representative, and because I’m non-traditional and difficult and a Mac user, an stuff like that. And yet, will I become more of the norm? Will there be more businesses trying to loosely couple with personal brands while building corporate brand equity? I think so. And this doesn’t reflect on employer-employee relations. It just seems to be a shift for some classes of knowledge worker.

How Where Matters

Seth Godin’s post about conferences and workplaces strikes home doubly for me. I’m partly in the conference business. It’s my duty to convince thousands of people that I’ve got great speakers, engaging exhibitors, and passionate attendees for them to meet.

Shel Israel’s post says that more businesses will use social media tools for economical reasons, for one:

Businesses will increasingly use social media to get closer with customers. This, of course, is already happening and happening at a pretty fast rate. But I think the trend is about to accelerate. Because it is getting too expensive and inconvenient to meet face-to-face in the real world, there will be more efforts to bring the conversation to the next best place, in the form of virtual communities.

Steve Rubel says:

Digital Nomads are growing in numbers and they will create ripples. This trend will accelerate use of Web 2.0 technologies in the workplace. Over time, this may slow the efficacy of email marketing and accelerate the reliance on social media engagement.

However, it goes deeper than that. If you don’t allow your employees to become nomadic, they may do so and even compete against you in the process.

Where Will This Go?

In the very near term, I think a few things happen. I think that employers are definitely in a spot where they might have to consider how their employees work. On one side, the management challenges are huge. It’s not easy to shift around leadership and management styles. On the other hand, there are cost savings to be had, a shift in flexibility that might provide some hidden rewards. (Flex hours did this for a lot of companies. Suddenly, they had what amounted to shift workers without having to pay a premium).

I also think that the idea of employees-as-brands-as-employees will stir more bees in the shorter term, but might start to make more sense as we get more comfortable with that lifestyle. Businesses are primarily organized in 1950s-era style right now. If we can adapt measurements and management style, I believe the downstream benefits are going to outweigh the interim headaches. Will all employees at all businesses feel these changes? No. And several employees will still have to be hands on and nearby. (By the way, lots of people can’t manage themselves very well, and can’t work remotely because they’re easily distracted.)

Fuel costs are rising. Bandwidth is everywhere. Jobs are shifting into knowledge delivery and networked communities more than face-to-face affairs.

It sure makes for a complex picture, but I don’t know that we’re going to stop it.

What do you say? Could you work remotely? Do you? What has the price of fuel done for you? What motivates you to attend a face to face event these days? Will you be changing your conference going trends for the rest of the year and 2009?

The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.

Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.

Networks Loose and Taut

Imagine you’re looking for a job. Where do you start? What do you need to know? I’ll give you a hint: the first letter is “p” and the last few letters are “eople.” I have spent time and effort building a robust social network across LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, this blog, and beyond, because it’s my goal to be helpful in as many ways possible. It’s how you were able to help me send a woman to college in under 2 hours. It’s how I help friends find work, get projects, or just connect with like-minded souls.

That doesn’t happen on the fly. Jeremiah covers this very well. Networks are the lifeblood of this new human computer we’re building. You want the network connections to be there ahead of when you need them. And here’s where we get a little more human still.

Be Human About It

Connect with people from the mindset of wanting to be helpful to THEM. Learn what you can do to be useful FAR before you ask them for anything. And do this because you care, not because it’s a strategy, not for some long flung business project. Do it because being a good human matters to you. If you do this, and I mean it, no faking, it will become a very powerful thing. People remember your efforts to be helpful. They remember all the ways in which you do good things for them. And it never has to matter a lick, except sometimes it does.

How this SHOULD Work

In the future, this will be a lot more dynamic. When I show up at a social network, it will ping my profile server, will ask me which personae of mine to expose, and then see which connections I have from other networks that have similar credentials, and offer connections without me thinking much about it. I’ll be able to write metadata above every one of these contacts, very visual stuff, that will allow me on the fly to draw little lines between one person and another few people, showing VISUALLY the networks of people that I’ve met, and how they might relate.

With this information, I’ll be able to pluck threads quickly, and know that someone who has a PHP need is connected through me to someone who’s a PHP expert. I’ll be able to see my network by proximity, by home base, by corporation, without much fuss. I will be able to apply endless filters so that I can squint into the tapestry and find the exact right two people to work with me on a project.

But until then, while it doesn’t work that way, I’m building my own variations on the theme and threading the needle by hand.

If you’d like to connect with me on various social networks, here’s a short list:

• LinkedIn – my email linkedin at chrisbrogan dot com.
• Twitter
• Flickr (photo sharing)
• My newsletter (different than the blog)

Pretty much every where else, I’m also “chrisbrogan.” Feel free to connect.

What do you think? Where should this all reside? What’s the best place to put all this kind of information, and how else might we want to use it in flexible ways?

Photo credit, Twenty Questions