Global Neighbourhoods

Social Media & Government

2009-11-20T14:53:37-08:00

I had a chapter in Twitterville about government in Twitter. My research for the book took place in about February. At the time I saw great promise in government using social media to get closer with constituents, mostly in the day-to-day conducting of government government business and information distribution.

Two examples of this that I used in Twitterville were the San Diego Metro Transit System, which is one of many public transit systems using twitter to giver passengers real time information about delays, snags and changes. I also liked Newcastle [UK] City Council's whose secretary Alistair Smith tweets school closings, with greater currency than than the BBC can provide.

But since I wrote the chapter six months have gone by. The size of Twitter has at least doubled and by some estimates tripled. And I was curious if government, which usually lags behind other segments in tech adoption has been keeping pace.

So I went back to Twitter and I asked a couple of times for examples of government using Twitter--any part of government in any country, state, province or municipality. Beyond that I was intentionally open-ended and vague.

I received over 50 responses in a 24-hour period, which is a lot higher than my requests usually generate. But as was the case six months ago, about half the suggestions were for politics, not government. The two are of course, closely related. But my interest is not in social media efforts to sell a cause or candidate; nor was it to see how well organizations are raising money or pushing messages.

I just wanted to see if much of government. in its day-to-day operations was adopting a tool that could allow it's mid-level workers to serve the needs of constituents with greater efficiency. I was wondering about the barriers and fears that have been prevalent, not just in government, but in all the organizational segments including business, nonprofits, education and so on.

I found there has been a great deal happening in the western developed world. I have yet to hear about government using social media in Asia, Africa or South America. There were some encouraging and surprising examples.

I was curious in part, because I had a couple of private visits with government officials in both Ireland and Northern Ireland, where I found representatives of both national governments well-informed and looking for useful, pragmatic insight and information. Both gave me lots of examples of how they are using social media and both had just begun. In Dublin Bord Bia, the Irish Food Board is exploring ways to use social media to educate constituents as to where and how and why food is raised,in a time where local grown and organic are emerging complex issues.

Northern Ireland has become active in social media as well in the last six months. Their web-based NIDirect, has started using Twitter and in October used it to get accurate information out quickly related to swine flu.

In Ireland and Norther Ireland where I found absolutely nothing six months ago, I met privately on a recent trip with government officials who were well-informed and dedicated to using social media in a variety of ways ranging from education on how food is raised to information about swine flu to handling license fees online.

Neither group was looking at lofty "world-changing" approaches, but upon the day-to-day interactions where government interacts with constituents, often to the frustration of both sides.

I got several other stories through Twitter of activity where there was none before. New Zealander Katarina Sorstedt educated me how government keeps people current on earthquakes and geologic activity in the South Pacific via Twitter . New Zealand's Parliament has posted a mere 15 times, but has begun a bipartisan effort to post information to Twitter.

In the US, there is a great deal happening on state and local levels. Mayoral offices in at least a dozen cities have blogs, Twitter and Facebook accounts where they directly, usually promptly and somewhat transparently answer constituent queries and comments. I liked Washington State's Department of Transportation's use of social media to to let people know of any changes regarding any public way, be it roads, water, airports or tracks.

In the US Federal government a majority of Congress uses social media with varied levels of direct conversation and self-serving promotion. The Obama Administration's White House has several promising initiatives, but so far seem more intent on sending messages out than listening to what people have to say. All executive wing departments are now using social media to varying degrees as are most state governments.

Six months ago each of those areas were at less than the 50 percent mark.

Law enforcement in the US, UK, Canada and Mexico are using social media. Fire Departments are too and seem generally focused on using social media as a set of new communications tools to warn people of impending disasters to avoid. The Los Angeles Fire Department, a pioneer in using online and conversational resources, recently warned residents of fast shifts in the deadly path of the recent Station Fire.

What interesting is that I found little conversation of grandiose social media activities such as, say, a national town meeting on healthcare. The idea that we could have big audience/big issue simultaneous conversation never seemed realistic to me. We have too many cases of government issues that have been sullied by people with agendas and everyone talking at once.

In governments of the West, what I am seeing is softer, less dramatic and entirely realistic. Social media is being used to help midlevel government workers help constituents with every day, recurrent issues. It is becoming normal in some quiet frontiers to guide constituents away from the phone and email and website and onto the Twitter and Facebook accounts.

And in tiny spoonfuls like those, social media is starting to make governments just a little bit better.

Social Media, Power & Metcalfe's Law

2009-11-16T12:26:54-08:00

The question was: " What do you think is more important for attaining power: followers or who you follow?" It was directed at me as I sat on a panel at the Social Media Summit, produced by London-headquartered Lewis PR.

It took me by surprise and one live tweeter accused me of skirting the issue and not understanding about power. I disagree with his assessment but that's besides the point.

It took me by surprise because most people who follow me know that I see social media as all about the conversation; not power. It involves personal and corporate branding issues, but not power. It even is about influence, which may touch upon power but it is not the same.

The way social media works just about the same way computer networks work. They both adhere to Metcalfe's Law, which loosely stated says the value of a network is determined by the sum of your users. It was true for telecommunications and it seems to me to apply very clearly to social networks as well.

But value for the individual simply does not translate into power. The power is in the sum of the users on the network. In social media, each of us is a node and the more nodes we connect with has something to do with power.

But each of us matters very little to the sum of the massive networks we connect with. If some one with five followers leaves a network it matters very little. If someone with over a million users departs, it may get noticed for a short while, but the power of that network stays close to the same. Why? Because those millions of other people are still there, are still connected; still contain nearly all the knowledge, data, wisdom, ideas and energy as they did prior to the departure of that one really big node.

Networks have great power in social media. People don't, not really. Each of us is too easily replaced.

We can, however, benefit greatly from the power of the networks we join. As to the specific question, almost everyone who has examined twitter believes that in most cases there is greater value in who we follow than in who follows us. Those people are out newspapers. They are our source of much inspiration. We care about people and those people give us all sorts of valuable stuff.

Social media is about so many things. But if you have come to it for power, I really think you'd be happier going to work for an Electal utility.

So, Just who's a Social Media Expert?

2009-11-14T15:54:57-08:00

I get uncomfortable whenever I get introduced as a social media expert or guru. First off, whenever I hear someone else called that, I have a tendency to fold my arms and think, "Oh Yeah?" I find myself poised to pounce if that person makes anything close to a mistake.

When people call themselves either of those titles, my inclination gets amplified.

Judging by the surplus of Twitter and blogs shots being taken at those marketing themselves as coaches, gurus and experts, it appears that I am not alone in my inclinations. But that does not make us right.

I think this controversy has been accelerated because people have started making money teaching others about social media. And when they and their friends come up against competition they take a very old school approach. They badmouth people they do not know, and assume the right to point a derogatory finger simply because they were doing the stuff first.

Among my circle of personal social media friends, I have heard the argument that we were here first and anyone we don't know, anyone who does not go way back to the good old days of say 2006 must not be an expert.

This, of course, is a mountain of mole dung.

There are now hundreds of millions of people using social media. Many of them have them have spent thousands of hours using the tools; have drunk the same brands of KoolAid as others have, feel the same passion we have and are very, very capable of teaching others the strategies and tactics of using social media; who understand that social media is about conversations not about monologue.

The global neighborhoods of all the virtual social spaces are filled with people I have never met; who have attended events and meet ups I have not attended does not diminish their knowledge.

While I may not feel comfortable calling myself an expert, that does not require them to make the same choice. There are score, perhaps hundreds or even thousands of people who are capable of teaching others why and how to use social media and it seems to me, they can call themselves "guru" "coach," "expert" or whatever they damned well please. And those who feel that for some reason their timeline seniority allows them to challenge the claim should sit down and shut up.

Let the clients and customers, the students and friends; the attendees and workshop participants determine who is expert and who is not.

Book of Kells: Not Available on eBook

2009-11-08T03:52:55-08:00

It's been my week for hallowed halls of academia.

First, I spent a couple of days in the Harvard Faculty Club at the 4th SNCR Symposium, then hopped a red-eye to Dublin where I start a three-city book tour with a pub-based tweet up tonight.

Yesterday was my jet lag recovery day and I used the afternoon to walk a strip of this city of 1.4 million. The highlight was my 2nd tour of Trinity College, Ireland's top-rated University, where Jonathan Swift, Samuel Becket, Oscar Wilde and many other giants went to school.

First Harvard. Then Trinity. Had I applied for admission to either of these two schools the Admissions officers would have been rolling on the floor laughing.

I got to Trinity via a stroll through St. Stephen's Green a small but very attractive park; Grafton Street, a crowded, thriving shopping district and Temple Bar, an historic district of shops and pubs where I most enjoyed the organic market recommended to me on Twitter.

I took the irreverent, but informative walking tour of Trinity Campus, where a recent grad told us a few juicy anecdotes, including Chancellor Salmon, who rule Trinity for many years. In 1904, he was confronted with proponents of allowing women into Trinity. "Over my dead body," he declared, then three days later proceeded to die. Women started attending a few months later. Salmon was interred at the south entrance of the university and for several years women were directed to enter the school via that route literally stepping over the chancellor's dead body.

I had taken this tour before. But last time, time required that I had to drop off before a visit to Trinity's Old Library, where the Book of Kells is displayed under glass. Hand-inked onto stretched calfskin by monks more than 1300 years ago. It is a beautiful work with an amazing amount of detail and colors which remain vivid despite centuries of aging.

Equally jaw dropping was the Long Room, a single space, two stories high containing 200,000 volumes of books, the most recent of which is more than 300 years old. They are arranged, not by author, title or topic, but by physical size. It seems the library was set up before there was a Dewey Decimal System, not to mention Google.

Students are allowed to use the library, but none do. First they can't find anything specific because the books are arranged by physical dimension not topic and second, there's no Internet connection in the building.

I did all this touring through historic volumes with an iPhone in my pocket and an eBook on my wish list, feeling more than a little ambivalent. Something there is that loves an old book, a hand-etched illustration created with patience, passion and inspiration by people who lived so many centuries past.

I am of a time in which the printed word is on the wane and the electronic book is on a relentless ascent. The benefits are clear. Tomorrow's eBook might contain almost as many volumes and words as do the Long Room. The environment benefits, the costs to all parties is reduced.

But something remains that loves an old book and I hope the future generations will know and see how books first came into being and how recorded words and illustrations were born so many centuries ago.

Some Social Media Department [SMD] granularity

2009-11-03T09:41:45-08:00

I am heartened that I've received some comments and thoughtful questions that indicate I am not alone in thinking the time has come to establish social media departments in the enterprise.

This follow up post offers a few thoughts on just what this department would--and would not--do. And I need to start with a disclaimer. I do not think this new department should own social media in the enterprise. That is as bad an idea as one department owning email and deciding how it should be used, or the telephone and so on. Social media encompasses a set of tools that improve communications by making them interactive and by decentralizing who can speak for the enterprise.

Why am I pushing this? It seems to me that recent recession has caused most enterprise thinkers to recalibrate what their organization can and should look like as recovery becomes more real. We seem to be pretty much at a turning point. The smart business thinker realizes that it would be unwise to just go back to the way it was before the bottom started falling out.

It is now time to evaluate what works with te greatest efficiency and effectiveness and in a great many cases, the answer is social media worked and traditional marketing did not.

But the issue is what to do about it. And the answer is to make a few adjustments to allow social media to take its rightful place on the org chart. It cannot reach it's full potential by remaining some sort of ad hoc, penniless orphan constantly scurrying for resources.

My answer to tat is now is the time to create a social media department [SMD]. Here are some of ways I see them functioning:

The SMD should be the center of expertise in social media just like IT is allegedly the center of expertise in enterprise technology. They should be paid and entrusted to explore the possibilities of social media. They should attend conferences and events where they can learn and share ideas and information on social media. Its team members should explore the guidelines by which social media should be used in their organizations.
They should incubate new ways to use social media and educate other enterprise community members on smart--an lame-ways to use social media. In fact,SMDs should be charged with training, informing and advising other departments including marketing, support, product development, investor relations and corporate communications on how to use social media wisely. It should have a help desk for the enterprise and ints infrastructure.
SMDs should become experts on how to measure social media programs. Many enterprise experts now understand that ROI, followers and visitors are not always the most valuable measurements to a social media program. But the SMD should help companies think through just what a social media enterprise is intended to achieve and how to best evaluate it for better or worse.
Structurally, the SMD should be equal to the marketing department. It should report to the same level. It will have its own budget and will be accountable for the money it spends. It should run some of the showcase social media programs, because it's team members should be the most expert on the subject in the enterprise. But it will not be in command or control f other programs by other departments. Instead it will be an expert resource for refining and improving those departments.

Time to draw a Social Media box into the org chart

2009-11-02T20:52:45-08:00

I was having lunch with an old friend who has spent the better part of the last four years pushing the social media rock up the enterprise mountain. She was frustrated. Marketing, after disdaining and ignoring her social media team efforts four years ago; after having then gotten angry and tried to shut down the social media efforts two years ago, now wanted to fold the social media team into the marketing department.

She is not alone. Almost every enterprise has a small band of social media champions. They have almost operated as a skunkworks operation, one who existed from project to project with money they scraped and cajoled from various org chart boxes--PR, marketing, branding corporate communications, vendor agencies.

Their salaries and operational budgets have been historically chump change, funds perhaps from a few ads that got canceled or a PR budget for a canceled product press tour.

But now we are in a time of prolonged budget cuts. Fat marketing budgets have been scraped to the white bone. Now chump change matters. So does control. One fact has emerged and that is that social media does get results that can now be measured and quantified with increasing accuracy. Social media is efficient.

Yet, in almost no cases does a social media department have its own place on the org chart which means it does not have its own budget. It is always a muddy and complex issue determining who the head of a social media team should report to.

Lately, marketing departments, smarting from the pain of having had several legs either amputated or trimmed seems to be trying to take over. After all, they are the message people. More and more marketing is being conducted in social media venues, why not fold it in neatly to the corporate structure.

The answer is simple. Social media is for communications and communications is not the purview of any one department. Marketing, PR, brand managers, communications officers, customer support all need to use social media increasingly to get the information they need, to share ideas and build relationships with customers. HR needs social media to recruit, train and inform employees. In fact most departments need social media.

It seems to me that if you fold social media into marketing, it becomes a marketing tool and support will suffer. Conversely, if you put it into support, marketing will suffer and so on.

It seems to me the time has come to build a new department into the enterprise org chart, one that interacts with various departments just as product managers or IT do, one that has its own budget, operational plan and roadmap into the future.

If any incumbent department takes ownership, the company will lose far more than it gains. More important, so will the customers.

Personal Brand & the Humanization of Corporate Brand

2009-11-02T09:29:37-08:00

A great deal is being said these days about personal brand and as is usually the case, with a new term, there is debate on how new or important it is. There are those who feel personal brand is just a new term for good old-fashioned reputation and others who feel there is an opportunity for old advertisers to try a new spin on their creative attempts to insert position messages into human minds.

I see some truth in all of this, and the whole truth in none of it. To me personal brand is very closely connected to human reputation. There are two aspects that I think make it at least slightly different:

Social media is allowing a tremendous amplification of personal brand and in so doing personal brands can emerge into just another form of contrived marketing noise, and we need to be aware and concerned about that.
Personal brand is changing corporate and product brand in an increasing number of cases. This changes who shapes brand and why and how it is done. It changes how markets perceive brands and this is an area where little thought and conversation has emerged so far.

Corporate brands themselves are defined indifferent ways, but it generally has to do with how someone in your market feels about your company, its products and services. It's primary tools involve advertising and graphic design. Traditionally branding was used to create the illusion that an organization consisting of tens of thousand of employees spoke with a single voice, marched in unison and never, ever made a mistake--or at least one that the company would admit to.

Over time, this form of branding has lost effectiveness and the cost of maintaining this sort of brand strategy has simultaneously become more expensive. Those high costs in these down times have much to do with the current acceleration of large companies into social media.

While there are quite a few exceptions, generally speaking traditional type brand messaging has fallen flat in social media venues while personal brand has thrived.

How does this impact the marketplace? In several ways. But at the essence of them all is the current realization that companies are not branded monoliths but are comprised if many people, diverse people, whose views sometimes differ and even collide; talented people wh sometimes screw up, but are human enough to admit their mistakes and to promise to do better next time.

A fundamental problem with corporate branding is that its strategies are designed to be one directional--to send messages out. This collided with the most common complain people have against large organizations: "they don't listen to me. They don't want to hear my complaints. The support people want to get me off the phone."

But social media lets markets talk back at companies. We can shout, ask or suggest. And we often get answers. Instead of being disdained we are getting respect.

Personal branding has much to do with this. Personal brands are far more human than corporate brands. I think personal brands are reshaping corporate brands and it has far more to do with social media than traditional marketing. We hated Dell when they had the audacity to call us Dude in ads while giving us support people who did not speak our language. But now there are dozens of people there; people we have come to know in social media; people who sometimes don't have good answers, but at least they tried.

Many of us feel better about Dell than we used to and that translates into corporate brand equity.

Much has been said about personal brand and what it does for the individual. If we blog, tweet, podcast or engage in all these new tools it allows us to create a new for of web-based ever-changing resume and that seemed great in a world where we took jobs while simultaneously planning to move on to a new employer a couple of years hence. But the economy's great swan dive into the toilet may have changed that.

We and our personal brands are more likely, I think, to stay put for longer times. The thought of being a lifer just may start inching back into workforce thinking. And this too will apply personal brand to the reshaping of corporate brand.

Time was traditional branders designed our business cards. And when someone received it, that logo may have shaped their view of you. Now it's the opposite. What that person thinks of you is shaping their emotions of your corporate logo. Brand seems to me to work much better on both sides of that business card when there is a perception that real humans are part of those graphic representations.

SM Global Report: Howard Rheingold [Part 2]

2009-10-28T08:35:06-07:00

Where we're going

[Howard Rheingold. Photo by Oscar Espiritusanto]

Note: This is part part 2 of two parts. You can see Part 1, Where we've been here.

This title is just slightly misleading. Howard really offered no predictions of where people and technology is heading in the Conversation Age, and I didn't try to get him him to make forecasts.

While his writings have displayed more than a little prescience, he is more of a thinker than a futurist. But he did offer some interesting observations about at least one emergent technology and some useful insights into his students at Stanford and UC Berkeley and from there you might draw some conclusions yourself.

Q. You were an early champion of virtual reality, which may not have taken off as quickly as you forecast. Do you think it is still likely to evolve? How do you see it being incorporated into social media moving forward?

You win some, you lose some. I can't really take credit for being prescient without taking blame for foreseeing events that have yet to come to pass -- may never come to pass. To be fair to myself, I did note that truly photorealistic immersive virtual worlds would not exist until sufficient affordable computation power came along, some time in the early 21st century. And people like Jeremy Bailenson at Stanford have been doing some extremely valuable social science research using today's version of virtual reality.

There are some fundamental unsolved problems. If you can move your perceptions around a limitless virtual world, what keeps your body from slamming into the wall when you try to run toward the horizon? In regard to social media, I've spent enough time in Second Life to see exactly how seductive to a small portion of the population an immersive virtual world with photorealistic or Photoshop unrealistic avatars that can not only navigate and communicate but build and exchange landscapes, buildings, objects with behaviors can be.

But it's work to create an avatar and learn how to navigate it and where the action is. In an infinite landscape, human actitivies seem to take place far apart. So I don't see such worlds as ever becoming universal.

It's NOT the "future of the Web."

However, I do see them getting less centralized and easier to use, and people will start inventing uses for them that we don't foresee right now, and the population of enthusiasts will grow from a tiny cult following to a small cyber subculture. There are things you can do in such environments that you can't do elsewhere.

[At right--giant sunflowers from Howard's garden. Those suckers are 16 feet tall.]

Q.I’ve argued that social media is disrupting all institutions, business, government, education, health, etc. Do you agree or disagree? What is your vision for how technology will make this a better/world for everyday people 10 or 100 years hence.

Isn't it evident from what I've written that I've been immersed in experiencing, influencing, learning about, and communicating about this disruption precisely because I think it's the single most fundamental critical uncertainty of the present age?

I think "better world" is an unrealistically rosy way of framing the present situation. We're in deep shit. Doug Engelbart and Vannevar Bush saw it coming half a century ago, and the Whole Earth Catalog started looking at planetary-scale systemic problems decades ago -- which is part of what drew me to it. We have ancient human problems of tribalism, hatred, and atrocity meeting modern armaments, including WMDs.

We have global warming, loss of species and habitat, collapse of key populations like salmon, the energy and food needs of the world population, emergent epidemics. I'd say that the main goal of the human species ought to be our own survival. The next 50 years are going to require a lot of problem-solving. The most powerful tool we have are all those people.

If only enough of them could be healthy, fed, and educated enough to help us tackle those problems. Technology and social media and new knowledge about human collective action can help.

But I don't want to be quoted as saying that the technology, the social media themselves are the linchpin. I think the way people end up using these media, our degree of knowledge about how our literacy is connected with a struggle between power and counter-power, the degree of education of the people who pollute or nourish the infosphere, even plain old fashioned netiquette -- all matter now. I am an anti-determinist.

I believe in human agency. But there are no guarantees that democracy will win over totalitarianism, that tools will be used to feed people, that our social and political and economic institutions and our own minds will be able to cope with the pace of change that our inventions have helped us bring on ourselves.

Q. You teach at Stanford and UC Berkeley. How has technology changed education and learning since you were at Reed in the 60s?

Education and learning haven't changed, but the circumstances under which they take place are radically different.

The lecture-and-test method goes back a thousand years, to the days when books were written by hand and chained to a podium, where a professor stood up and read them. In recent years, without (I strongly suspect) any real consultation among faculty about the pedagogical consequences, wireless Internet access was installed in classrooms and lecture halls around the world. For the first time, students could look up information to determine whether the professor really knew what he or she was talking about. Students can now chat and share information among themselves during lectures and if the professor is too boring, there is always Facebook or World of Warcraft.

Many professors are in denial about this, and drone on with the same lecture they've delivered for decades. Other professors make extremely bad use of technology by reading their text-laden PowerPoint slides to their students. Others simply demand their students keep their laptops closed for the duration of class.

Of course, since I teach social media, I can neither ignore nor prohibit laptop use, so I've taken steps to help my students become mindful of the way they deploy their attention.

One strategy is to have only the student co-teaching team keep their laptops open while they are helping me lead the class; one member of the team makes notes on the wiki, sketching in top-level headings that the other students will fill in AFTER class, another member of the team identifies words for the lexicon and adds them to the wiki (and again the class, as a whole, fills in the definitions before the next class), and a third member of the team looks up sites online and projects them (I have three screens in my classroom at Stanford).

Another strategy -- 20% of my students are allowed to have their laptops open at any time, but it's up to them to self-police. I have also made video of my students from my point of view and from theirs and have shown it to them.

More profoundly, social media have enabled students to engage in collaborative inquiry with peers, engaging in online discussions that are no longer solo performances for the teacher, but engage other students in digging down into issues that came up in class via forums, collaborating with each other and me in real time through a Twitter back channel, reflect on their learning for their own benefit and that of classmates on their blog, and learn how to learn and compose collaboratively via the wiki.

The technologies are not used to add contemporary appeal or techie flashiness but are affordances for a kind of learning based more in inquiry, collaboration, and discourse than on trying to detect what is going to be on the test and memorize it.I ask my students to read in advance my extensive description of what is expected of them and to commit themselves in writing to the kind of participation I ask. It has taken me five years, in close consultation with my students, to come up with a set of procedures that work. It's tremendously exciting to see the classroom come alive, and to engage students between class meetings via their blogs, the forums, and the wiki. Here's a presentation of one of our class sessions.

Q. Can you tell me what’s on college student minds these days?

It's not easy to get into Stanford or Berkeley these days. By the time I get them, students are highly trained grade-making machines. They want to know what's on the test. They are so institutionalized that they aren't even aware of it.

For example, in my open classroom, the students come in on the first day and take chairs from stacks and arrange them -- with no direction on my part -- into rows and columns. If I don't intervene, they will do the same thing the second week, and sit in the same place they chose the first day of class.

I ask them to arrange the chairs in a circle -- there is no back row to hide in in a circle. It isn't easy to overcome learned helplessness.

Students are accustomed to having knowledge delivered to them. But in an era where knowledge, media, and professions change so rapidly, storing knowledge is not adequate. Students need to learn how to learn, learn how to evaluate new media as they come along, learn how to evaluate the way they deploy their own attention in an always-on world.

They need to learn how to collaborate, how to find knowledge and how to determine whether what they have found is credible. A whole set of meta-skills are required by the times -- and traditional university education doesn't necessarily introduce those meta-skills. That's why I'm teaching, and that's why I am excited -- and when I do it right, why my students are excited -- by the opportunities afforded by technology.

Explaining my SM Global Report

2009-10-27T08:18:16-07:00

Yesterday, over on Twitter, I asked for suggestions for my SM Global Report and was surprised by the confusion that caused. Some people thought I was offering some sort of proprietary report, perhaps a PDF.

This post is to help me explain and to give me a link I can point to in the future. [If you know all about the SM Global Report and how I use it, just skip this report and come back later.]

The Social Media [SM] Global Report is at the core of what I do. Since 2005, I have interviewed people about how they use social media in their work and lives. In all there have been over 400 interviews with people in 40 countries. These people have varied from CEOs of global enterprises to pioneers in NGOs, elected officials and regime change activists; a cancer victim using Twitter for ideas and support; a member of the Lebanese Parliament using Facebook to talk with constituents while hiding from Hezbollah.

And so on... It began essentially as a business report, but it seems that I am following social media wherever it goes. I am looking for new stories that either inspire others or give pragmatic ideas of new ways social media can be used.

Almost invariably the SM Global Report is at the core of the books and articles I write. People I interview often become subjects for my speaking engagements and when I get a new project, the SM Global Report gets renamed for a period of time. It became "Twitterville Notebook" for a while. when I was working on my recent book.

I am always looking for stories of people who have used social media successfully. It doesn't matter where, but it most certainly matters how. These are case studies. I write about things that have already happened partly in the hope that it will help others make adopt social media in new ways.

In that light, I rarely--if ever--write about new companies with new tools or APIs. Despite that fact, I get more than a few pitches for stories like that and I get very few pitches for the stories I am really after. When I tweeted yesterday that I wrote about people not companies, I immediately received a few company pitches. So if you are a PR practitioner, please keep that in mind. You can email me with story ideas whenever you like, but it would be best for me if you took the time to click on the SM Global Report category button in my sidebar and read a few of the Reports first.

If you have such a story or an idea on how I can find one please let me know.

SM Global Report: Howard Rheingold, Part 1

2009-10-25T12:12:42-07:00

Where we've been

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[Howard Rheingold in his backyard giant sunflower patch. Photo by Shel Israel]

Howard Rheingold is a founding father of the Conversational Era. He has spent much of his past 40 years exploring the impact and promise of the convergence of technology and the human brain. He is a student of the many people, incidents and trends that have brought us to today, and as a prolific thinker, writer and speaker, he has contributed significantly to the body of knowledge and thought.

He's not sure just how many books and articles he has authored or collaborated on, since 1970, but Amazon offers 72 titles with his byline. Two of these books, The Virtual Community [2000] and Smart Mobs [2003] have profoundly influenced my thinking and writing over the past half dozen years and if you happened to be into social media he is among the early pioneers who blazed the trail the rest of us have followed. He has been a friend & colleague of many of the thinkers and doers who have delivered us to today and in many cases he can say he had been there and part of the collaborating team that did that. He has also been often prophetic in seeing the seeds that began as visions and have since become reality.

Arizona-born in 1947, he graduated Reed College in Portland, Oregon, then moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he became an integral part of America's most controversial Renaissance Era. He drank the original KoolAid. He also dabbled at Xerox PARC, the legendary tech experimental tech center where, among other innovations, the personal computer's graphical interface was developed. He started writing professionally in 1970 and has rarely stopped for long.

He was editor of the Whole Earth Catalog Millenium Edition, an almanac that supported the counter-culture lifestyle. Founded by thinker-enterpreneur Stuart Brand, Whole Earth Catalogs were a grassroots compendium of alternative lifestyle resources. A young hippie fruitarian of that time named Steve Jobs would later describe the Catalog as both the forerunner to the Worldwide Web and Google.

Rheingold was an early and enthusiastic member of the San Francisco-based " Well," the first internet-based community to gain widespread notice and momentum. His speaking and writing about it, particularly in The Virtual Community introduced a great number of people to the vision of social media for the first time.

These days he continues to write and speak on issues related to the human brain and technology--his central focus throughout his adult life. He also teaches courses at both Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley.

I have divided this interview into two parts. In this first part, Howard reflects and illuminates on what has happened so far. Most of Part 2 will discuss his thoughts on tomorrow, partly by discussing what he sees in his students.

One word of caution: this is not a quick read. It is filled with links to some of the people and events that have brought about the Conversation Age and I hope that you will follow some of these links to see and learn. Maybe it will give you some ideas on what you can contribute to tomorrow.

Q. You attended Reed College in the mid 60s, an elite liberal arts college known for free thought and lifestyle. How did that experience shape who you have become?

It's very astute to start with this question. My relationship with Reed was co-evolutionary: Reed seems to send out a kind of invisible signal that attracts a certain kind of person, and the people who are able to stick it out (very high dropout rate) tend to remain "Reedies" for life.

I was a National Merit Scholar, which meant I could have gotten into any university, but Reed was the only place I applied! I originally got wind of it because the character in Kerouac's Dharma Bums who was based on Gary Snyder who went to Reed. Snyder, more than Kerouac, was a hero of mine when I was 16 years old, so that was about all I needed to know. In retrospect, I'd say that the dominant characteristics of a person meant for Reed are:

   a. A stubborn commitment to think for oneself
   b. A deep and broad interest in texts and intellectual discourse
   c. Because of the first two characteristics, we were mostly the smart weird kids in our high schools
   d. We dropped out of the brand-name college game

Reed alumni magazine did an article on me, written by Wired [Howard was founding exec editor of Wired.com] writer and fellow Reed alumni Gary Wolf.

The Reed years were 1964-68 for me, so these were also tumultuous times. And I took a lot of LSD. I want to be clear on this: Many of my friends got in serious trouble or died because of drugs (and many more because of one drug: alcohol), so I'm not an advocate of indiscriminate use of recreational drugs. But LSD was an extremely important influence on my thinking.

I didn't drop acid and go to concerts. I dropped acid and stayed in my room and painted, read -- I read most of the Bible on acid -- and explored other dimensions with my fellow travelers.

In particular 1968 -- the Tet offensive, Prague Spring, China's Red Guards and Cultural Revolution; May revolt in Paris; Chicago, and assassinations of RF Kennedy and ML King; riots in American cities. We weren't participants in these events, but the world stage seemed particularly apocalyptic. I became convinced that we were living in times that would decide the future of the human experiment, and just as I went to Reed because I wanted to engage in a meaningful and deep dialogue with others about the curriculum (the sex, drugs, and rock&roll were part of it, but were always secondary to the intellectual quest), I left Reed and entered the world with a conviction that what I said and did with my education would matter not just to me but to everybody.

When I got involved with people I met from the Well, my wife, who I met at Reed said: "This is just like Reed. A bunch of intelligent misfits have found each other and are going to town."

Q. The common thread that seems to tie your considerable writing and thought together is the interaction of the human brain and technology. It seems to have developed in the early 80s between your work with The Whole Earth Catalog and your involvement with The Well. Can you walk me through how that developed?

The brain and technology--and evolution and consciousness--were the subjects of my undergraduate thesis. One of the things that LSD taught me was that what we think we know about our minds is tiny compared to what we have to learn. I felt technology would open a new front, along with that of chemical agents (it's too bad that legitimate psychedelic research was shut down), and the approaches pointed to by Eastern mysticism, in understanding consciousness -- which seemed to me to be the essential stuff of which the universe is made.

I had what I later learned I could call a "noetic" conviction about these conjectures, and was determined to somehow add to our body of knowledge about our minds and how we could control our minds better.

3. You coined the term “Virtual Community” and it became the title of one of your most influential books. It’s first chapter talked about the Parenting group in The Well. Your stories in that chapter are strikingly close to stories I found in Twitter. Can you compare/contrast The Well and Twitter? What has remained the same and what has changed?

Absolutely true! In my first months on Twitter, I told fellow Well veterans Twitter felt just like the Well. While it would be a categoric error to call the Twitter population in general a community, it was clear that communities were forming there. People were getting to know each other, strangers were engaging in discussions with each other; new forms of fun were being invented; new ways to use the platform to communicate socially like the hashtag and retweet were being invented by users; people were exchanging and reciprocating knowledge; social capital was accumulating in some groups.

At the same time, Twitter was totally different. In the Well, each user might participate in different topic threads in different conferences (forums), but the discussions were centered on topics and were like places where a group of people accumulated. In each discussion, we paid attention to each other. In Twitter there is no such social symmetry. There are no topics, outside of hashtags and each person sees a different group of others.

Despite, and because of, this asymmetry, Twitter always had a social vibrancy.

Another similarity is the sense among the users that what we were co-creating with the Twitter founders would take on new forms as we went along. The Well was built on Unix, so coders and users were in dialogue, but with the Twitter's open API and the explosion of third-party applications, that co-evolving relationship seems to be in overdrive.

Twestival, 300,000 tweets/hour from Tehran, the Twitpic of the airplane that landed in the Hudson -- events that change our minds about what Twitter can be used for seem to be happening with increasing frequency

Q. For the benefit of our studio audience, just what do you mean when you say the computer is an amplifier of the human mind?

I've learned that most people don't know much history, and those who know it seem to quickly forget it. Until a couple of mavericks who were not at all related to the existing computer industry started thinking seriously about using digital computers to augment human intellect and create new communication media, this was a crazy idea.

Computers were for scientific calculations and business data processing. But JCR Licklider [computer time-sharing], Doug Engelbart [the mouse], Bob Taylor [the internet], Alan Kay [graphical interface] thought differently. What if we could move words around on a screen by pointing at them, instead of retyping the whole page? What if we could create documents as outlines, then expand and contract them so we can zoom from big picture to detail? What if we could command computers by clicking on icons instead of typing commands? What if we could link texts, documents, and different media and move smoothly from one to another by clicking on the link?

By automating these low-level symbol manipulation tasks, would that free the brain to take in larger pictures, see relationships between micro and macro levels that couldn't be observed, try many more hypotheses than old methods afforded? All these capabilities seem obvious today, but not only were they not obvious until Engelbart's Mother of All Demos in 1968. I told the story of this creation of revolutionary innovation by a small group of outsiders in my book, Tools for Thought. I started using a modem when I first started exploring personal computer culture in the early 1980s, but didn't join the Well until after Tools for Thought was published in 1985.

I started out to make a living as a writer when I was 23, in 1970. I had a typewriter, a telephone, and a library card. Comparing the tools I had for thinking, researching, communicating, organizing back then with what I have now, it's like starting out my career with a horse and buggy and now I have my own 747.

It took me about 5 seconds to look up the passage of Engelbart's that originally fired me up, and to copy it. And I did it sitting here in my garden, via laptop and WiFi. Keeping in mind what I said previously about my interests in brain and technology and my conviction regarding this historical moment and my role and responsibility to it, it still makes sense to me as an answer to your question:

By "augmenting human intellect" we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems. Increased capability in this respect is taken to mean a mixture of the following: more-rapid comprehension, better comprehension, the possibility of gaining a useful degree of comprehension in a situation that previously was too complex, speedier solutions, better solutions, and the possibility of finding solutions to problems that before seemed insoluble. And by "complex situations" we include the professional problems of diplomats, executives, social scientists, life scientists, physical scientists, attorneys, designers -- whether the problem situation exists for twenty minutes or twenty years. We do not speak of isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations. We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human "feel for a situation" usefully coexist with powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids. Man's population and gross product are increasing at a considerable rate, but the complexity of his problems grows still faster, and the urgency with which solutions must be found becomes steadily greater in response to the increased rate of activity and the increasingly global nature of that activity. Augmenting man's intellect, in the sense defined above, would warrant full pursuit by an enlightened society if there could be shown a reasonable approach and some plausible benefits.

In 2002, you authored Smart Mobs, which has been critically acclaimed for it’s foreshadowing of social media. Among the incidents that most impressed me was how street people used mobile SMS to out maneuver police & eventually overthrow the government. When the Iran election took place in June of this year, did you see a certain similarity? How did has technology involved to empower people. Where do you see/hope it is ultimately headed?

Let me start with the conclusion and then unpack it: With a billion people on the Internet and 4 billion mobile phones, the ability to gain information, to process it computationally, to organize collective action with others, to publish and broadcast has been radically democratized -- but whether or not that democratized communication and coordination capability will lead to more or less democracy is not a function of the technology but of the social, political, economic activities of the people who use it.

The events in Iran should be an object lesson that access to digital media and networks guarantees that it will be impossible to keep the world from witnessing massive oppression, but does not guarantee the victory of forces of counterpower who seek liberty from oppression. Power always wakes up and mobilizes when counterpower threatens it.

The Iranian regime broadcast disinformation. They shut down Internet access. They ran cloaked proxy servers as honey pots to catch dissidents. So far, they are succeeding.

In China, the Great Firewall and tens of thousands of human cyber-police make sure that over a quarter billion Chinese netizens enjoy the power to do anything they want online as long as it doesn't challenge the authority of the party.

The victory of smart mobs is not guaranteed by the power of the tools they hold in their hands. That's just magical thinking. However, the events I described in my book were real. There were other forces at work in the Philippines -- there are always other forces at work -- but the SMS-organized People Power II demonstrations were a large part of what brought down the Estrada regime. The elections of heads of state were tipped away from the frontrunner through smart-mobbed demonstrations and get out the vote campaigns in Korea and Spain.

Where do I see it headed? My experiences have convinced me that the most important focus for public attention right now should shift to the literacies that bring power to those who possess them and leave behind those who don't know how to use their telephone as a medical instrument, educational medium, social radar, political organizing tool.

Chip fabrication plants, teenage personal computer wizards and moguls, networks of fiber optics and satellites have played and will continue to play their parts in the distribution of computing and communication power to every human on Earth.

But now that devices with such enormous untapped power are in the hands of so many, the factor that will most powerfully shape the resulting social institutions is literacy. My definition of "literacy" builds the thinking of Neil Postman: I mean the inward-looking skill that enables an individual to read and write, to decode and encode messages with a medium, and I also refer to the external community to which this skill provides entrance. As I've written recently in regard to "Crap Detection 101," the literacies I am talking about are not just about individual empowerment, but are crucial to the health of the commons.

We can't stop the Web from being overwhelmed with misinformation, disinformation, hoaxes, urban legends, spam, porn, porn-spam by controlling the sources - the Web is powerful precisely because there are no controls on what people put on it. We can only guarantee the ultimate health of the Web as a source of useful and trustworthy information by encouraging the spread of crap detection skills. That, to me, is the most important meaning of the "social" in "social media" -- that we are not just amplifying our minds and showing off for each other, we are learning and organizing, creating, innovating, building, liberating together.

To me, individualism versus collectivism is a toxically false dichotomy. Humans are humans because of our individual capabilities, the evolved genius of what we've taught each other to do with our expanded forebrains. But the "taught each other to do" part is crucial. Our individual genius would not only be useless, it wouldn't exist without our social interchanges.

Josh Bernoff's Tweet-based interview--an experiment that Teetered

2009-10-16T15:15:39-07:00

Groundswell co-author Josh Bernoff interviewed me on Twitter this morning. You can see his transcript of it here. For 30 minutes, he asked me questions & I answered, Then we opened it up for anyone to ask questions.

It is the fourth such tweet-based experiment in which I participated and I think it will be my last for a while. There are certain aspects of it that I think have potential. In our talk prior to doing the interview, Josh likened it as a panel talk at a conference followed by a Q&A. For two college classrooms, it was a good way of demonstrating what can be accomplished in quick conversational tidbits.

But for folks viewing my interchange with Josh this morning, there were too many moving parts. The latency between Q&A was some times painful. People did not know who to address questions to. Sometimes I forgot to add our #tville hashtag and so on.

Maybe someone will find a way to refine how this sort of interchange could succeed. Maybe Twitter or a third-party will figure out a plug in or addition that will make it work.

Until then, there are lots of other venues. Even for classrooms, I think Skype is a better social media tool. It still leaves a great many useful applications for my favorite tool.

Bloomberg Buys BusinessWeek.

2009-10-15T07:56:06-07:00

I have a few friends at BusinessWeek. I imagine each of them is breathing a little easier today after being purchased yesterday by Bloomberg Business News, for a rumored $5 million.

Bloomberg, a news service for financial and business professionals is only 20 years old, but it has grown into one of the world's largest media companies, thriving in a period when most media companies have waned. It employs 10,000 people, many of them business news reporters covering 160 countries via its legendary computer network that often gets business information out in near realtime. It distributes news through a computer-based wire service, TV, video, and audio.

My sense is that this computer network is at the core of the reason Bloomberg is thriving while most media companies are floundering. Bloomberg was born in the Information Age and has no legacy of loving paper. It's significant subscription fees are based on the value and speed of the information it delivers, not on the medium it uses to deliver it.

Another asset, to my thinking, is New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg who essentially owns the network. Because the news organization is not a public corporation, Bloomberg is not obliged to focus on delivering quarterly profits to shareholders. He is free to do what the families who once owned newspapers used to do: focus on longterm strategy and reputation-enhancing activities.

Unlike, private equity companies, that also considered acquiring BusinessWeek, and were likely to chop the organization up, selling it for parts, Bloomberg Business has vowed to buildup BusinessWeek, improving the content. The cloud of massive layoffs appears to be breaking up. The fact that Bloomberg is a candidate for reelection also seems to be a motivation to build rather than dissect.

The new entity is likely to be called Bloomberg BusinessWeek, according to NPR. It is a good name. It merges two brands that are respected in business sectors. Whie plans are currently to maintain the paper format, the owners roots are on computer networks, not large printing presses in the basement and fleets of delivery trucks. We shall see.

I have said this many times: the world will not be a better, smarter freer place if traditional news organizations perish leaving bloggers and tweeters to fill the void. We don't get to attend many White House news conferences. No one assigns us to cover wars or earthquakes. We don't have editors demanding we find second sources and check our facts. We are mostly amateurs who just happen to be there when news breaks.

I am hoping to see a resurgence of what is now BusinessWeek--perhaps as something new called Bloomberg BusinessWeek. I hope the new magazine has the wisdom and vision to braid social media into a resurgent new entity.

SM Global Report: InBox Alarm's Janis Krums

2009-10-13T10:26:40-07:00

[Janis Krums takes & makes his shot for the Florida Lakewood Ranchers , an amateur league team. He also took another kind of shot in January 2009, which you probably saw. photo by Angie Tyler Jula]

It's one of my favorite stories in Twittterville. In January 2009, Janis Krums, the a 23-year-old entrepreneur from Sarasota, Florida was on a ferry crossing the Hudson River when US Air Flight 1549 careened from the skies, skidding to a halt on the river about 200 yards from the ferry and immediately began to sink as passengers poured out onto the wings.

Janis whipped out his iPhone and took the photo below, which you have probably seen. He handed the phone to another passenger and then assisted in the rescue of a flight attendant who had broken both her legs and needed assistance getting off the plane.

Helping the attendant to safety, Krums got his iPhone back. It was ringing and when he picked up he was surprised to find he was talking to MSNBC and his voice was being carried live on national TV. Viewers were looking at the photo he had taken less than 30 minutes earlier.

In Twitterville, I argued that the incident changed the relationship between professional and amateur journalists; that it has begun to braid the two together on social media venues. I predicted that braided journalism is how most people will consume news in the near future.

It also has changed Janis Krums. The following is an update on what he has been up to since that unintended moment on the Hudson River. He is simultaneously starting two business in two separate categories, one of which has been a passion for years. The second, something called InboxAlarm would probably have not happened had he not happened to be crossing a river at a specific moment in time; and if my favorite social media platform not been victimized by a DDOS attack that rendered it inoperable for several days in early summer.

Please see my recent interview with him below.

Q. How has the incident changed your life?

I am associated with an event that changed the perception of citizen journalism and the evolution of news and media. The coolest part is to see that my one tweet changed the way that CNN, Fox News, and others interact with their viewers. They are actively engaged with viewers now, and seek the opinions in realtime from all the available resources.

Plus, I have a great story to tell at parties!

Q. How active were you in social media before the "Hudson River Miracle" incident? How many follower/following did you have going in to that day? How many do you have now? How much time did you spend on social media before the incident. How much now?

Before the incident I was exploring all the different services and seeing which one made sense for me. I had about 170 followers before the incident. Now I have almost 5,800. Before the incident, I was spending maybe 20 minutes a day on updates. I think right after I was spending a lot of time. Now I have learned some tricks and services (su.pr, tweetdeck, tweetie 2) that I use to monitor and use the different sites more efficiently.

Q. When I interviewed you for Twitterville, you were planning working on Elementz a nutritional enhancement drink for professional athletes. How long have you been working on it? How is it doing?

We started a year ago with the idea of what we wanted to do. At this point we have finalized 5 custom formulations and are finalizing the paperwork to produce the first two products, Vanilla and Chocolate Whey Protein. We have some very influential people on board and will be making some really cool announcements in the near future. You can check out our Facebook page for the latest news.

7. More recently, you announced InboxAlarm.com. Can you tell me what it does and how you got the idea for it?

InboxAlarm is burglar alarm for your email inbox. You are able to create decoy emails that can be as simple as fake password information or custom emails that cater to your specific security concern. After creating an email, you send it to one of your personal emails addresses, open it once, and then forget about it. It sits in your archives until someone opens it. Once opened, you are instantly notified by a text message that there has been a breach.

We got the idea after the Twitter breach happened. In that case the hacker had days to gather information and was able to go from one employee's email account all the way up to the CEO's.

We thought that there should be a way for you to protect yourself in the case someone breaks into your inbox. There are other high profile examples; Sarah Palin getting hacked; the latest phishing attack, and countless others that don't make national news.

8. Is InboxAlarm potentially a new business for you, or is it just a one-off from Elementz Nutrition?

InboxAlarm has the potential to be a new business for Eric and I. It is too early to tell how it will go, but the initial reaction has been very positive.

Q. How have sales gone since you announced InboxAlarm?

We have steady sales up to this point. We got some initial press from PCmag.com and BNET, which helped the site's exposure. As well as local Sarasota coverage ) We will be focusing on a major marketing push in the coming weeks.

Q. You have previously told me your two passions are health and social media. Can you compare and contrast starting businesses serving in the two industries? For example how are the the process and time-to-market similar or different? o

It's been very interesting to see the evolution of both Elementz Nutrition and InboxAlarm. For Elementz we had the concept few years ago, but only last year said, lets start the process and develop supplements that we can be proud to stand behind.

We were very naive in our projected timeline to get the products out into the market. We thought that it would take few months to research, develop, test, etc the formulations. That estimate was way off, it took us around a year to finalize the formulas. Right now we are finalizing everything with our manufacturer.

However, with InboxAlarm, we had the idea in July and were able to launch the initial site during the second week of September. We had the core functionality thought out in the first day and after that just kept refining until we thought it was good enough to be released to the public. I agree with Reid Hoffman's observation: "If you're not somewhat embarrassed by your 1.0 product launch, then you've released too late."

We wanted to get it out as soon as possible and then see what the customers did and didn't like. We've improved the sign-up process and have couple of other improvements that are directly linked to the feedback from our users.

No matter how different the market, at the end of the day it's about selling and getting the word out about your product. It doesn't matter what industry you are in, if you don't move product, you will not be around for too long.

A Tweet-based interview with Josh Bernoff

2009-10-12T15:15:56-07:00

I am pleased and flattered that Forrester Principal Analyst Josh Bernoff, co-author [with Charlene Li] of Groundswell, the seminal corporate social media book has asked to interview me for his Groundswell blog. It is fitting that he suggested we do this on Twitter itself. We are set to go at 9 a.m. Pacific this Friday morning.

Josh has the details here. A good way to follow will be to use our hashtag: #tville.

So far, I've done one previous "twinterview" live on Twitter as well as two "tweach-ins" in which we used Twitter as the conversational venue. The first two went great, but a couple of weeks ago when I was talking to students in Mihaela Vorvorreanu's graduate student class at Purdue, a few people started to jump in with questions of their own.

While I had posted that this was a chance for people to observe the conversation, it was apparently not sufficient to cause confusion.

Using Twitter in this fashion is experimental. Both Josh and I--as well as students in two universities see some unique advantages and I hope this time it works better, so that the focus is our conversation--rather than our choice of venue.

From 9-9:30 Pacific, Josh will interview me. If you ask questions Josh will keep them on hold until 9:30 am at which he will then open it up. As he says on his post--it's like a panel talk at a conference that gets opened up to the floor.

I hope you join in. I hope that this experiment proves both useful and interesting. Either way, I hope that when it is completed you will give us your feedback.

Nobel Award: Who more than Obama? I have someone

2009-10-10T13:24:31-07:00

As an admirer of both Barack Obama and the Nobel Peace Prize, I have been scratching my head a bit about his receiving the Nobel Peace Prize.

Yes, the world loves him and his words and approaches and his apparent high-roaded intentions, but I have to admit the world does not seem a more peaceful place since he has taken office. The US is meandering out of a troop investment in one war whose purpose is confusing into another one whose goals seem to me to be equally unclear.

Yes the most people in the world seem to admire the US more under his administration than under the previous guy, but let's face it: George Bush is an easy act to follow. He was arguably the most disliked and distrusted president in history.

“The question we have to ask is who has done the most in the previous year to enhance peace in the world,” the Nobel committee chairman, Thorbjorn Jagland, was quoted as saying in the New York Times yesterday, “And who has done more than Barack Obama?”

That question has had me thinking yesterday and today. Selecting Obama, was clearly a statement of hope more than achievement as critics have charged. And they have a point. But who has done more for world peace in the last year than he has.Perhaps it was just a bad year for wold peace and no one stood out.It would seem better to award the Nobel to someone who seems to be trying than no one else.

Who more than Obama?

Well, I came up with one name, someone who until June of this year we had never heard of and someone who was no longer with us by the end of the year: Neda Agha-Solton, the 27-year-old student gunned down during the unrest that followed Iran's highly tainted June 12 election. The video [below] of her assassination has been seen by millions of people all over the world. If you have seen it, you probably will not forget it. It is a moment that that is etched in the minds of all sorts of people everywhere.

But so what? Why suggest her worthiness for the Peace Prize? Freedom protesters have been slaughtered by the score in every year of the planet's history. In her part of the world, children are being raised and prepared to blow their own bodies in the name of a God that taught peace, yet has disciples who believe in killing on his behalf.

Why Neda?

First, because we saw. Social media has not been present before when such atrocities have occurred. Such slaughters have not even made paragraphs of copy in newspapers, because until social media and handheld devices and students who understood technology better than their governments could not spread the word of what was happening like they can today.

Governments, like Iran's can kick out the free press; but they cannot silence people anymore. Now when they use Gestapo tactics on the people they are supposed to serve, the world will be watching. People will know. Neda did not give her life willingly as a warning to oppressive regime. She was just as student on the street who thought her vote should count. Yet because of the horror of her extermination, governments are now forewarned that the world will see what they do and may think twice about such action.

Second is the issue of many children of the Muslim world; children being raised see Iran's theocracy as a role model; as the type of government worth fighting for, worth killing for; worth dying for. And now,because of Neda, they have witnessed what young people of Iran think of that role model government and how that role model government treats its own young people.

The esteemed Nobel chairman asked, who has done more for peace this year than Barack Obama. I think perhaps Neda has and she has sacrificed far more than he has as well.