constructive media

I went to my first meeting of the Social Media Club Boston tonight. I'd held off for a while, since I'm not in marketing. Of course, now that I'm on Twitter, I can't help from being in marketing. And, the promised topic was good: "Change-Dot-Gov".

Why do people still read blogs? There are, obviously, many well-written articles tucked into the blog format by professional journalists, as well as by unpaid savants like Nate Silver.

"The thing to do with good ideas," Oscar Wilde never said, "is to just wait until Google develops them, to save you the trouble of doing so yourself."

In September 2002, Clay Shirky sent an essay to his mailing list titled Broadcast Institutions, Community Values. He suggested how the former could employ the latter, and in doing so, explained the difference between the two.

Last month, I sketched out how geotagging could be useful in major emergencies-- such as knowing, should your community be ravished by wildfires, when it is safe to move back (under the presumption that your neighbors have been geotagging their own photos). As such catastrophes don't happen every day, such an idea will take a while to get traction.