Oddly, I just discovered that the White House now has a flickr feed with high-resolution photos available for public viewing and civic use. Duh, of course a social media enabled campaign leads naturally to a social media enabled White House. Our political discourse takes a leap forward permanently (unless the next American President deletes all these social media accounts, or these social media services cease operations).
Wow, elementary school SHOULD be awesome now, assuming kids get to use digital media tools and the Internet to assemble commentaries and reflections with all this great material available for mashup (somehow, I fear we're not even close to this at the moment).
Well deserved recognition at Demo 09 for a lot of hard work on a very innovative communications app called Sharegrove.
Back around 1991, at the dawn of the interactive media "revolution", I made a silly vow that the largest video display in my home would always be a computer monitor. The line of reasoning was "everthing worthwhile would emit from a computer screen rather than a television screen". The Internet is the greatest generation gap since rock and roll. We're now witnessing one aspect of that generation gap: the younger generation chats digitally, and the older generation treats those chats as written correspondence. Until our CEOs blog, our Congressmen Twitter, and our world leaders send each other LOLcats – until we have a Presidential election where both candidates have a complete history on social networking sites from before they were teenagers– we aren't fully an information age society.
When everyone leaves a public digital trail of their personal thoughts since birth, no one will think twice about it being there. Obama might be on the younger side of the generation gap, but the rules he's operating under were written by the older side. It will take another generation before society's tolerance for digital ephemera changes.
Now I recall mulling over this same issue a couple of years ago...framed at the time as the "transparent versus opaque generation gap".
... something I am surprised has not been more widely expressed. Colin Powell concludes his endorsement of Barack Obama with the observation that conjecture about whether Obama was ever a Muslim is wrong-headed. What ever happened to the principle of religious freedom in America?
For much of this week, I witnessed first-hand Netflix's integrity in dealing with a major service outage. Colleagues worked round the clock. Throughout the ranks, there was resolve rather than fear, and always a determination to do the right thing.
Ironically gratifying to see Y! Smart Ads, the initiative I incubated with many wonderful collaborators, featured on this slide about Yahoo's efforts to maintain a leadership position in display advertising. Part of a shareholder presentation, filed with the SEC in late June 2008, that argues to preserve the company's present strategy, management team and board of directors.
