That’s right: my library has become Blockbuster.

But no, not really, and let’s not malign this, because my library is adapting to what its patrons are demanding, and they evidently want newly released movies about the mafia and aliens and anything starring Nicholas Cage or Jim Carrey. And this gets us thinking about what a library’s mission REALLY is today.

My library has a half dozen computers with Internet access, plus free wifi. So they’ve given us pipes to the largest reference system in the world. They have media in paper and DVD and audio CD form, as well as links into all kinds of electronic document repositories (such as eBooks and the like).

In conversations over a year ago with some library futurethinkers, we discussed the possibility of libraries outside of the walls of the library. Why not use geotagging to drop rich data in the air beside monuments, to denote historic battles, to lay out political stories? Why not have geotagging tied to online video libraries that show me the ecological history of a place? Why not have bird guides that fly onto my iPhone when I’m standing in the nature reserve, versus that pesky distraction of visiting a building downtown that has become a video rental depot?

What do libraries really stand for today? Who do they serve? How should they evolve? What are your thoughts?

I was thinking about an old article that quoted Joshua Schachter, founder of Delicious, where he talked about how he organized his site to have obvious syntax. He said, that once you get the hang of it, it became very easy to use the site, even from a browser window. Example: If I want to read any pages saved with the tag “chrisbrogan”, I can search http://delicious.com/tag/chrisbrogan . Now, replace my name with whatever else you want to search up on the address bar of your browser, and you pretty much know how to surf through Delicious without any effort.

For the record, Craigslist.org is like this. I can navigate it simply and from the address bar, and I understand what I’m searching out.

The entire concept of the URL, the uniform resource LOCATOR, was that we’d have a way to find resources (or web pages, or files, or whatever information) by way of coordinates that wouldn’t change.

Twitter introduced the need for URL shortening services. They were around before, but Twitter made them necessary. Now, they’re practically a business unto themselves.

And I’m thinking about projects like Glue and now Sidewiki (Google’s little “stick a wiki against any website but only if you’re using this application to see it” project). They’ve obfuscated the clarity of web pages. Okay, I get the notion of annotating the web. I understand the premise behind having ways to see things in our own way out in the wild web, but I think it messes up the point.

People had some real mixed emotions about Seth Godin’s Brands in Public project, but I couldn’t see the fuss. Seth just organized a bunch of information that was out there, and gave brands the opportunity to buy into his effort. The brands could’ve done all the work themselves. Seth saved them a step. The project, however, doesn’t create two webs. It just revisits this information in another format.

The splintering of commentary and conversations problem (how services like FriendFeed and Twitter and Facebook scatter our conversations all over the web instead of consolidating them) is real, and yet, it’s a matter of views. We’re interacting with data where we consume it, which is sensible enough. The missing tech, actually, is just the ability to get those comments all corralled and easy to respond to in some way (and many companies are trying to make that easier).

So where does this take us?

First, I think abstraction is here to stay. I don’t think we’ll have simple URLs to remember for all things (wish it were, but it’s not). I think the trend of shorteners that supposedly add value is here for a while, too. I think the fractured conversation is here to stay.

Now, will this impact business? Not exactly. Instead, it will require us to pick our battles, to determine just how splintered and muddy we want to get to catch up every drop of conversational/business goodness, and it will require us to keep futurists and sages on speed dial (how quaint a term is that?).

Funny thing is: many will never even know this war is even being waged.

Photo credit Jared

As I look down the speaker list for Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin it’s hard not to yawn. Pretty much the same voices I could have seen at any combination of web conference around the world in 2005, 2006 and 2007. When are we going to hear something new? OK so it’s not all regurgitated stuff but after three years of the most relentless pimping I’ve seen for an idea, are we not a tad worn out with hearing the same stuff? More to the point and despite Forrester’s feel good Groundswell, surely we deserve better?

At best, the benefits I’ve seen brought about by web 2.0 adoption are marginal. The notion that ground up business adoption would sweep the earth hasn’t happened. And it won’t. Last week I was in Berlin for SAP TechEd. Say what you will about this company, the fact is their technology touches 50% of the world’s IT systems. Yet as was the case in Las Vegas a few weeks before, less than 5% of the 4,500 attendees had even heard of Twitter, the topic du jour across a thousand blogs. As Fred Wilson said in his recent mea culpa:

Twitter has yet to cross the chasm to mainstream usage. It’s not immediately obvious to anyone why they should use Twitter

He’s right. I’m betting that of the near 2,000 people that follow me, less than 10% are truly active. That’s why we showed three specific use cases when we demonstrated ESME. It is no coincidence that the loudest applause came when we showed messaging inside a testing process. It comes down to a simple truth: content without context and process is meaningless.

I believe the biggest barrier though has come in the use of terms and language that simply don’t resonate with business. In my social psychologist trained mind, the term ‘social media,’ a cornerstone of web 2.0, is one of the most egregious abuses of a term I’ve seen since the early days of ERP. After three years of listening to definitions of the term I can guarantee that 99% of the press releases I see are exactly the same as those I would have received 5, 10 or even 20 years ago. They’re still dopey, riddled with double speak and wrung dry of useful content. So where’s the value in all this socmed stuff? Show me how customer service has radically improved as a result of applying web 2.0/social media services? Where are those most forward of technology adopters – banks – in all this? What about the main consulting groups that drive adoption inside big business? Heck, I’ve got them calling me up – so you know it’s got to be bad.

In what I can only call a moment of serendipitous good fortune, my Irregular colleague Bob Warfield rails against those who think that Web 2.0′s big brother Enterprise 2.0 is dead:

The web is a huge communication channel, fully on par with any other, but younger and growing much more rapidly.  You only have to look to Google’s results yesterday <Google reported good earnings in a lousy economy> to see that the web can change everything.  Every aspect of how companies do business with each other, their partners, customers, employees, and any other entity will be impacted before it’s all over.

Do only a few companies own every aspects of how telephones affect business?  Even just mobile?  What about snail mail?  You name the channel, and the web has a role to play.  Paper versus electronic?  We just talked about that vis a vis O’Reilly <who shipped a white paper on wood pulp instead of electronically>.

Very little in the way of Enterprise Software has properly understood the potential impact the web has on that niche or how to even begin to respond to it.

So, will generic Wikis, Blogs, Forums and the like devolve into just a few companies with most of the players going away?  Sure, but there is a lot more to E2.0 than that.  We’re barely getting started understanding what it all means.

Bob goes on to point out the use cases he sees, drawing links from others who are more positive on the topic. Because we’re so early, we need fresh minds and fresh thinking. An example: I was particularly struck by an SAP Developer Network post that talks about open source software offered for use in disaster situations. The author argued that adding in a social element like ESME (his call not mine) could add fresh potential to providing the right resources in emergency situations. Smart thinking indeed.

In my mind what we should really be talking about is collaboration and not limiting our thoughts to sales and marketing. Neither should we be positioning web 2.0 as a silver bullet. Collaboration is a topic that some of us have been noodling for more than 10 years yet major obstacles remain. You can add all the social software you want but getting more than a small number to actively participate and use is a devil’s own job. I’ve got the scars to prove it from projects I’ve been running the last two years. There are precious few signs that Nielsen’s 1:9:90 participation inequality law is in any danger of being proven wrong. The people I meet squirm at the notion of ‘social anything.’ Sure, the Facebook generation is coming at us older curmudgeonly types. But you can bet the moment they hit the greasy pole that is management progression, they’ll have the stuffing knocked out of them. It is the way of the world if you want to get on. If this ‘stuff’ we talk about is to hit the mainstream, there’s a long road ahead.

Force fitting solutions looking for a problem has never worked as a technology adoption driver. Scream all you like about future and soft benefits, business wants solutions to today’s use case problems with tangible ROI and dramatically lower TCO. It wants breakthrough impact not marginal improvement. Until we as an industry recognize that and apply smart thinking to the immediate problems of doing business, then the well meaning ideology of social anything just ain’t going to cut it.

Dennis Howlett is an amazing enterprise thinker and still tolerates me. He blogs at Acc Man.

• A.viary is a hardcore photo editing app, kind of like Photoshop without the price tag and disk install. But it’s way cooler than that. It’s a whole lot of really interesting editing abilities and a whole community of people doing their own thing with the tools that makes this one a great choice. Note: it’s still in an invite-only beta period (when does that end, guys?), but maybe I can score you a few invites, if you’re interested. Let me know in the comments, and I’ll ask the team.

• Picnik is a lightweight photo editing tool that gets me through pretty much all of my needs right now. I use it about twice a day, and have found that it does most everything I need from a photo editor. It’s not really good with batch-based activities, but if you’re into editing things one at a time, this is for you.

• Skitch (the bonus round) acts as a screen capture and annotation tool. It’s super easy to use, has just enough tools to be useful but not so many that you feel bloated and misunderstood. I use it to do lots of odd jobs on capture screens and little images from web pages. Definitely good to have.

More and more, I’m choosing tools and applications that live in the cloud. Why? Because after dropping my laptop the other day and losing every on-disk application, I realized that there are lots of benefits to having my data and my tools available from anywhere there’s a web browser. There are some exceptions, of course, but when I find great web tools, I want to share them.

What about you? What are you using on the web that’s cool?

One such application is Oprius. If you are a solo practitioner, or work in a small organization, and need to figure out how to build a sales/marketing practice, dOprius might be the right scale marketing campaign platform for you. It does a variety of things in a very integrated fashion, including letting you build call scripts for folks who have to hit the phones.

My favorite part of the application is contained in the graphic above, the “Phone Assistant.” Upon bringing up someone’s contact, there are some other fields for more information, a lot of ways to capture other data about the conversation.

The company is working towards engaging in conversations with their prospective community, so if you have any questions, feel free to drop them in the comments.

Be Brief On Air, Go Deep Offline

The current champions of this method are NPR. They post all their subsequent materials, including longer versions of interviews, on their website for further review. For people you want to know about, watching or listening to just the snippets that make the news isn’t always enough. Having the option to go deeper is a great service that takes advantage of all the quality work a journalistic team has put into the experience.

This is a value-add for people interested in a particular story, but it’s also clever for marketing and understanding your customer base. We can track and observe and understand the behaviors of people, so that we may better serve them. That’s the first line value.

Integrate Local Social Media Types

Papers and TV are still missing an opportunity to “draft” independent media makers into their work. Move to an upstream, editorial and curation relationship with people who can go into their own communities, surface stories of interest to them, and then bring this body of work to editors and curators who can understand which of these stories are right for the air, which would do fine on the web, and which might merit further professional reporting, with a hat tip back to the original creator.

Embed Community Technology Into Your Sites

Pluck up the best of blogs and videoblogs in the area. Build community conversation sections, even if that invites critics to come out and shoot at your stories a bit. Build chat rooms for during-the-news discussion experiences. There are tons of ways to empower the voice of your audience to have reciprocal value. These are just a few. You probably have a few more.

Make Your Media Portable

Take some of the deep stories and make podcasts out of them. Give us embed codes for your media. Make a spot for metadata like user tagging. Give us ways to build your media into our sites and spread your word to more sources.

Switch Sensation for Causes and Empowerment

We put a premium on stories of what’s going wrong. Of course, it’s important to know about some of the bad news we’re getting out there, but why aren’t stories about where we can help coming to the fore in LOCAL news? Why aren’t we learning about people doing great work more often? Right now, they have that slot at the very end of the newscast, where the two or three people on desk make that weird half smile.

Push the empowerment stories up, and bring that into your deep web coverage as well.

Random and YOUR Ideas

One more thing: do we NEED everyone at a desk with monitors behind them, or sitting in fake living rooms? Aren’t there other settings? We haven’t mixed it up much for over 50 years. I guess this isn’t social media advice, but hey.

And what else? What do you think? How can we fix the news?

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.

We aren’t talking about the marketing department. We aren’t equipping PR professionals. This isn’t a new set of tools for launching campaigns. These are tools to improve interaction, and they are incredibly powerful and game-changing when you consider how much less impact on traditional business resources most of these solutions have.

Velocity

In the United States, in 2008, a “smart” cellular phone costs as little as $150 USD for the device, and under $50 for an account with a data plan. Wifi hotspots are on the rise. A reasonably good laptop can be purchased for under $500 with built-in wireless capabilities. With these two types of units as the base system, we can deliver the following capabilities:

• Instant communication in voice, text, email, photo,video, and even geo-locative.
• Information browsing, including SMS-based and voice search (Google).
• Presence status information (Twitter, dodgeball, jaiku, pownce)
• Shared documents (Google docs)
• Voice Conferencing (freeconferencecall.com and tons more)
• Access to thousands of web-stored applications and data.

All without a cubicle. All without an office, an office manager, any infrastructure whatsoever. We can work out of coffee shops and libraries, at hotels and in the upstairs office, on the side of the road, or across the globe. Fast.

Flexibility

As recently as five years ago, we considered which software our organizations would buy based on the operating systems we supported. (Maybe yours still does.) Before that, we had to choose between Token Ring and Ethernet. Beta and VHS. (Now there’s Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, but you’re not falling for that, right?). Today, we are flexible. There are some considerations to be had, but with so many applications running in the cloud, accessible through browsers, so much of what we choose to equip ourselves with is a personal choice, and is a matter of our Internet access more than any other deciding factor.

• Office apps via Google or Zoho, or desk versions from OpenOffice
• Operating Systems for free with Ubuntu (and hundreds of other Linux distributions), or irrelevant with the browser being our true compatibility choice.
• Collaboration through wikis, shared spaces like Facebook, or in Ning communities.
• Conversations across multiple Instant Messaging vendors via Adium, or Trillium or Meebo
• Blog on WordPress, blogger, movable type, vox, whatever.
• Instant databases through Freebase.com or Zoho
• File storage through Box.net and so many more
• Video hosting from Revver, Blip.tv, Brightcove, YouTube

We can choose from any number of sources, mix and match. Flexibility is abundant. You don’t have to choose what your neighbor chooses. Email can be gmail, yahoo, and whatever else. Just use a domain forwarding/pop3 scheme to keep consistency to external sources.

Economy

Why pay for it when you can use it for free? Cost doesn’t insinuate reliability any more than free predicts uptime. Google is free and it is more diverse than any of your data centers. If you have to consider budget when considering social media, as with the rest of the premise, things fall back to the humans involved. Lots of companies are using ad-supported software models. Others are using services and add-ons and behind-the-firewall implementations to support their efforts. The point is still the same: you don’t have to pay anything (or much) to get into the game.

• Use Skype for free voice conversations (and cheap for SkypeOut)
• Use WordPress.com for free blog hosting, or Blogger, or Vox, or Tumblr.
• Facebook is free. Twitter is free. Gmail is free. Google Docs are free.
• Wikis are free. Freebase is free. Zoho is free.
• STORAGE is cheap (not free) for people making media. Price out 500 Gigabytes of storage these days and you’ll see that it costs less than you used to pay for a box of floppies in the mid 90s.

There are other “costs” in retooling your business practices and the like. And yet, what’s the return? If you’re faster, more flexible, and have cost the company nothing in licensing, what have you hurt?

Beware those selling you “solutions” that are “more robust” than what’s out there. What’s out there is working just fine for lots of people. People out beating the street doing important things are using these free apps, these web-minded apps, these “you can’t always be connected to the Internet” apps.

What’s holding you back? What are the reasons you’re hearing for NOT using social computing technology to enhance the way people do business at your company?

(And yes, security will be one of the prime answers. Let’s hash that out in the comments section. What’s YOUR take?)

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.

Photo credit, Ishrona