Rackspace is a leading hosting service. It is sponsors Scobleizer's new video show Building 43, which I think has been a venue where Robert has done some of his best work so far.

Just after July 4 weekend, the hosting service experienced a brief downtime caused by a faulty "bus duct," whatever that is. The point is that a significant number of users were incapacitated by the crash.

Rackspace went into immediate action using what I would call the social media playbook, if there were actually such a thing. They used there blog, having Eric Johnson a senior web developer explain clearly what had happened, what the company was doing about it and apologizing for the inconvenience. Meanwhile via FriendFeed and Twitter Scoble was doing what he does best and he was doing it with equal transparency. Rackspace customers chimed in, nearly unanimously expressing loyalty and faith in their hosting company.

Of course major competitors noticed. When a hosting service goes down, there are obvious opportunities. There are unhappy and frightened customers. One competitor, Online Tech of Minneapolis took two days until it posted a blog intended to hijack Rackspace customers with an "easy transition plan" from Rackspace to them. The company boasted that unlike Rackspace, it had never experienced customer downtime. It brought the message into Twitterville and posted a couple of follow blogs.

That is a predictable approach. It comes from a traditional marketing approach based on military strategies. When you see your opponent has a weakness, attack it with extreme prejudice. Take more ground.

But the day before Online Tech posted its blog assault, another competitor ServInt posted this blog by Reed Caldwell, CEO , which takes an entirely different approach, one I find better-suited for the new conversational marketplace  rather than the commercial gladiator approach used Online Tech.

Caldwell, stated that his competitor had been "communicative, forthright and responsive to its customers. He said ServInt stands behind Rackspace and advised customers to do the same.

The conversations heated up in Twitterville, and Friendfeed where Scoble pointed to most of the blog posts and dozens of hosting service customers had joined in. The sentiment was nearly unanimous for Rackspace and particularly ServInt, whose CEO revealed himself to be a class act leading a classy culture.

There may have been a defection or two to Online Tech, but I could find no reports of it. But in the court of Twitterville opinion, the were the clear losers.

ServInt's approach falls into something that I call in Twitterville, lethal generosity. The companies that are most generous to their marketplaces--including competitors--become thought leaders. Those that take more combative approaches become thought followers. Which would you prefer as your vendor?

There are other twists. A tech company should never, NEVER, boast that it hasn't suffered downtime. When one does, it is as sure as the night follows the day, that company will stumble, because in the end all parts break. When it happens to Online Tech, it will have few friends. ServInt conversely will have friends and credibility going for it.

Times have changed. Companies who learn to put their markets before themselves, and happy users before themselves are likely to profit greatly from that generosity. It is one of those difficult to measure issues--but there is an ROI on generosity and Servint is likely to enjoy that return in coming months and perhaps years.

Just about every author I’ve shared notes with see a cart horse relationship between writing books and speaking. Most of us do better on the fame side of the fame-fortune continuum but we need both speaking and books to make a decent living.

My author friends who do the best financially from speaking engagements, invariably use speaker agents. Until a few weeks ago I have not followed suit, although I was aware that I was not doing well on the paid-speaking circuit as several of my peers.

This is because the speaking agents and bureaus I’ve spoke with have not made me comfortable on three simple areas. I want to feel like anyone representing me understands who I am, what I talk about and can help find audiences that want to hear what I have to say in the style I deliver it.

The first agent I ever spoke to was right after Naked Conversations was published. I suspected we had a mismatch when he advised me that he would not use the title of the book in pitching on my behalf. “Naked,” he advised me, would turn off some of the corporate audiences that he would sell me too.

Other agencies have told me how great the agencies were.  Others could not fathom that I was not a technology speaker and so on. My conversations with other bureaus got less frequent and shorter, until I decided to go my own route.

I didn’t do badly, but with a new book, I thought I would give it another try. I actually found two that understood social media and even Twitter.  One was in Boston and represented several of the most respected social media speaker authors, people I look up to, but that agency failed to convince me that they understood where and when I was unique versus another name on the list.

About then I asked for recommendations on Twitter.  I have obvious faith in Twitterville and I have always trusted the opinions of people I know more than Google searches or what organizations say about themselves on a website.

So when Wallace Wilson recommended Steve Gardner, CEO of Five Star Speakers in Kansas City, I paid attention. When Wallace said he had actually used Five Star, I paid closer attention and when I discovered that Steve actually tweeted I started getting downright optimistic.

Steve has spent well over two hours talking with me on the phone. We have exchanged over 30 emails. We have discussed aspects of our personal life. During all that Steve convinced me that he knows who I am, what I have to say and why people might want to hear it.

I share all this because some of you may need to retain an agent or a consultant. Others of you may be consultants. I thought it might be useful or interesting to share the process and what factors got me to decide to go with Steve and Five Star.

One other note. My "turning pro" does not eliminate the selected free speaking engagements that I have done. I love speaking to the social media community itself. I have just completed a new book and I want to talk about it. Instead, it vastly expands the audiences that I hope to reach.

In fact, there are several ways it may be easier for me to participate in community events, by getting me to cities and venues, where sponsorship might not otherwise be available.

I completed final proofing of Twitterville on June 12. Many authors, myself included, love to conclude a book with a demonstration of some form of Big Picture vision. Mine was a final chapter that explained how on Twitter, we can easily form global neighborhoods-virtual spaces where people all over the world can come together to share information, ideas and passion on any particular subject.

Twitterville concludes that these global neighborhoods lets people in different places and of different cultures talk directly with intermediation of governments, media or employers. When we do that we start to notice our similarities and can find them more compelling than our differences.

It was supposed to be a big thought, a vision of instances that would happen far into the future. But on June 12, in Iran, a country that I knew little about an election was held. By the next morning results of 30 million ballots had been allegedly hand-counted and the incumbent anti-West, pro-terrorist regime declared itself a winner by an overwhelming majority.

The speed and the count defied credibility. Details revealing some districts had counted more than 100 percent of the registered voters led to questions. Unopened ballot boxes photographed in libraries led to expressions of disbelief, spurred by protests from defeated candidates, respected clerics and reasonable people everywhere.

Those who had hoped to see change; who believed they lived in a country that provided them a choice at the ballot box felt they had been robbed of that choice and they took to the streets do demonstrate their disbelief, which soon erupted into outrage.

For the most part, traditional press was hamstrung. It was not that they were shirking responsibilities, but years of budget cuts had thinned the ranks of stringers, correspondents and reporters for mainstream media. Plus the Iran government plays games with journalist visas. Worse when government "requests" are ignored, the leaders of this republic responded by detentions, expulsions, and occasional arrests and perhaps charges of disruption or spying both of which can result in being slowly hanged to death [they raise you by the neck, so that you strangle, rather than just drop you through a trap door so your neck quickly breaks].

This onerous and successful suppression of traditional journalism has worked in many countries all over the world. When certain governments kick the press off a story, it almost always means ugly things are going to happen; unarmed people will suffer, voices for change will be silenced.

But this time there was some new force coming into play; something that had not occurred before. The voices of people on the streets could now be heard on Twitter, where people who supported them could amplify what they had to say by retweeting. Twitter became the voice of the street. It also worked in tandem with YouTube and Flickr to serve as the eyes.

These video not only showed us smoking guns of evidence, it showed us the victim of these smoking guns, such as the sniper killing of Neda Agha-Soltan a 26-year-old student. Twitter filled the void created by the traditional media's inability to report the news and it did it in a grassroots, ad hoc manner that made many news organizations wince.

First off was the issue of sourcing. It was dangerous to Iranian tweeters to identify them. On Twitter, we just agreed to not post names. Many of us also changed our own addresses o appear as if we were in Iran, and we encouraged authentic Iranian Tweeters to say they were from elsewhere--to confuse government investigators.

For the press, who is disciplined to at least attempt some level of objectivity this was a problem. While as a Tweeter I get to say what I think, a professional journalist is trained not to do that, but to attribute a quote to a  credible source.

But second, was the issue of factual credibility. As had been the case in events like Mumbai, the Schezuan Earthquake and Gaza-Israel, there was a huge amount of misinformation being circulated. It was hard to verify and during the days when the story was moving rapidly from streets, to rooftops; from embassies to hospitals and was a definite challenge to determine what was actually happening and to do so with reasonable speed.

For me the Internet posted photos and videos were the verifiers. For the press, posting such content without knowing who took these visual renderings was a challenge.

But the press had been locked out for the most part. They could go talk to some Iranian now sequestered in the safety of a Western university or they could trust the story emanating from the streets of Iran.

After a few days of confusion, much of the press turned to Twitter and social media to report the story. They added some professional vetting that discounted many of the early stories that were seemingly manufactured to overstate an otherwise credible case.

Twitter came first. It told a story that the word is likely to have otherwise overlooked. Tweeters were the feet on the street who wrote the story. They were the videographer and photographers and these citizen journalist did so at great personal risk--as have professional journalist been doing for centuries.

The longer, deeper, more balanced and accurate stories were written by the great traditional institutions such as The New York and Los Angeles Times.

But something new has been happening ever since the China Quake when much of the Western press first learned about a tremor that killed 50,000 people because a Dutch teenager named Casper Oppenhuis de Jong was an eyewitness with WiFi access. The press went with the unknown guy whose feet happened to be on the street and at that point, the strands between citizen and traditional journalism began to intertwine.

This evolved into a full-fledged braiding of traditional and social media by the time Janis Krums used an iPhone to photograph US Air 1549 landing near his passenger ferry on the Hudson River.

By the time Iran erupted, it was becoming clear that to get some stories there needs to be a convergence of of these two reporting systems. In Iran, traditional media started to bend some of its rigid and perhaps outdated rules, simply because they would not have participated in a story that held great interest to many people all over the world.

There are many things that can be said about Iran. There are also many disparaging comments any of us can make bout social and traditional media. But it is becoming clear that we are moving in a direction in which journalism braids, and in so doing people who care can find out more news about events in more places--large and small than has previously been the case.

For a very long time, media institutions have looked disdainfully, even contemptuously on social media coverage. There are more of those days behind us, it seems to me, than there are in front of us.

Events of the last years have varied greatly. But the strands of braided journalism are growing stronger and broader with each passing event.

Since 2005, I have used this blog to post interviews on people who are using social media to change their businesses and lives. So far, I've interviewed over 400 people in 38 countries. The diversity has been enormous--from CEOs of Global 100 companies to people fighting for human rights in countries' that abuse them. I've talked to students, government workers and people passionate about non profits.

At the core of my work has been the Social Media Global Report [SM Global Report]. When work there emerges into specific projects, like Twitterville, I move the conversation over to the new category.

Thanks to the completion of the book, and to BurrellesLuce coming on as a site sponsor, I am reinvigorating my SM Global Report. I am looking for new stories that are useful and interesting to people who are exploring social media. I am looking for stories with business or human angles. Yes, I like to write about prominent people, but equally so, I like to find the stories, that no one has previously told. For example, in Twitterville, one of my favorites is the story of United Linen, a restaurant laundry service in Bartlesville, Okla--a company born in the Great Depression, and using social media to get closer with customers in the current recession.

Please help me. Tell me your stories or stories that interest you. Leave a comment here, or send me email at shelisrael1@gmail.com. Let me share your best social media stories.

A few hours before the actual anniversary began, Isaac Mao, one of China's best-known bloggers, tweeted: "Tienanmen Square is the world's most clean Plaza." He wasn't talking street sweepers. He was talking about the near-total erasure from official history of a massacre that occurred in Beijing's largest and best-know square.

Twenty years earlier, Chinese people gathered in that square. First it was a handful of students, then more joined in. It went beyond students and everyday people joined in, peasants, workers, professionals even Marxists, people who lived different lives and held different views. The crowd built over up over several days. No one is sure but it is said more than a million people gathered in all. There were no organizers, no leaders, no agenda, no list of demands to be negotiated.

The people in that square were diverse in an extremely diverse country. They shared a common thread. They felt it was time that China's government allow the Chinese people greater freedom's. The oppression of Mao was gone. The ruling Chinese Politburo seemed to e kinder and gentler. The country had walked away from Communism. It was moving rapidly toward a market economy, which in most places of the world had always resulted in a free market and a free people.

The government had already promised the people would have greater freedoms. But they would be given by the Politburo at a pace that the Politburo decided, a pace that would ensure the social stability of a nation that was then nearly a billion people. Many of those billion people felt the pace was to slow and the people, not the government, should set it--particularly in a country that called itself a "People's Republic."

So in early June 1989, they gathered in Tienanmen Square.

The government responded by sending in soldiers and tanks and machine guns mounted on the backs of trucks. They didn't come in like storm troopers, slashing and shooting. They came in slowly, methodically and in a most non-confrontational way.  When one man, Wang Weilin of Hong Kong, stood blocking a column of tanks, there was hope that the people would prevail against those who governed them.

It did not turn out that way. On June 4, 1989, the soldiers suddenly opened fire, spraying masses with bullets, killing at least 1400 and wounding an additional 7,000 or more of its peacefully assembled, unarmed citizens.

The poet TS Eliot wrote, "Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go." The Chinese Government had decided that the Chinese people had gone too far and it responded with great harshness. It did so in the name of social stability. Many of us saw it as having acted in the name of suppression.

What has happened subsequently in my view is not all as bad as what we in the West sometimes assume. I visited China in November 2008. I talked about Tienanmen and freedom and the Politburo with some well-informed people. Each observed that in the past 20 years, the people have been doled larger doses of new freedom, more freedom than their parents or grandparents ever dreamed of having. Many seemed to tolerate--but not endorse--censorship. "We're happy with the Internet we have," I was told. "Everyone in our generation is wealthier than their parents," I heard. The smart social media users, like Isaac Mao can easily bypass China's often clumsy censorship attempts with mime servers and overlooked 3rd-party apps [like Tweetie to get to Twitter] in part because there are simply too many voices online being surveiled by too few governmental ears.

This was relevant in the past 30 days, when China started blocking social media sites. Silicon Dragon Author Rebecca A. Fannin complained she could not get to any social media sites during a recent China visit. Then Chinese bloggers started using workaround technology to complain that blogs, Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube had been blocked. My Chinese friends are telling me they're sure that their abilities to have online conversations will be restored, so long as they do not talk much about topics on a short list of government-culled taboo topics.

Some, like Isaac Mao use "cleansed" methods to make their point, to circumnavigate a government whose continuing policy has been to cleanse the national memory of what happened 20 years ago in Tienanmen Square. NPR ran a piece this week that talked about how an entire generation of Chinese has been born and raised, not knowing what happened there. Even if they did know, their perspectives were different than you might think.

NPR interviewed a school girl who said, that if such a massacre actually happened, the government must have had good reason.

So, I have to wonder. Can a government over time, actually erase a major incident from the nation's memory as China apparently wishes to do? I hope not. I hope that China's citizens will learn what happened in quiet conversations with older family members and in the vast wealth of information that they can sometimes access on the Internet.

I hope that as China's people continues to have conversations with people in the West they will understand what happened and remember what happened. Mostly, I hope that that the people of China continue on their paths of acquiring more freedoms as time goes by.

Perhaps some day that freedom will empower them to choose who governs them. I wish I could predict that this will happen. Perhaps it will and perhaps not.

At Tienanmen, both government and people discovered what happens in an oligopic society when people try to go too far and too fast. It's as though both side stepped back and for 20 years have tried a slower, steadier approach.