Gladwell dismisses (or at least denigrates) less risky forms of activism and the weak ties that can enable it. Weak ties (and the social media that supports and enables them) can lead to low-risk activism (say a donation to the Haiti relief fund, or voting for one candidate instead of another) or even medium-risk activism (submitting something to wiki-leaks).

Why in the world shouldn’t we celebrate and encourage such lower-risk activism? And it’s not just social media activities that fail the “high risk” test. Most marches and demonstrations in Washington are pretty low risk, so are they unworthy of our efforts? Are silent vigils? Are fund raising events like “walks for <fill in the blank>”?

Gladwell comes off as implying that only high-risk activism makes a difference and that any other form of activism is some sort of cop-out: “It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact.” So if I’m not willing to risk my life in my activism, I shouldn’t even bother? Or I shouldn’t call it activism?

Sorry. I don’t buy it. I think every little bit helps change the world. Small is beautiful…even small change.

We both own my content

Given your legal language below, twitter effectively jointly "owns" my content. In other words, anything I can do with my content, twitter can too. You might want to change your "tip" to reflect this.

Currently the tip says: "This license is you authorizing us to make your Tweets available to the rest of the world and to let others do the same. But what’s yours is yours – you own your content." When told they own something, most non-lawyers assume that have EXCLUSIVE rights of ownership. That is NOT the case with twitter content. Twitter effectively has ALL the ownership rights to my content that I have. Twitter can use or sell (license) my content any way I can.

I think your "tip" should make that clearer. How about: "This license is you authorizing us to have all the same rights to the content that you have. Your content is twitter’s content — we both effectively own it."

LEGAL LANGUAGE:
You retain your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed).

For example, if I type the phrase mars lander, Zemanta will automatically do wonderful things. Well it’s supposed to do amazing things, but I don’t see anything happening. Would the concept of Gartner make a difference. Or the happenings in Iran. Nada. The movie, The Watchmen seems pretty cool.

It’s working now as you can see. The problem was that I was running an old version of Windows Live Writer. Now let’s see if it can handle more obscure terms like meiosis, or stigmergy, or tsallis entropy. Wow, it did all of them except for stigmergy, even though stigmergy is in Wikipedia.

Hmmn… It looks as if pictures is not working. I’d love to see a picture of Dolphins, or some Transformers, or maybe even Spider-Man.

I think I’ll try it for a while…

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Facebook called a halt to the promotion because the promotion actually told the dropped friends they had been dropped…for a hamburger. Ouch! Something about privacy issues. How about just plain human cruelty issues? Can you top this one?

I would really like to me the person would came up with such a wickedly perverse marketing campaign. I think we would really hit it off.

PS I would never drop 10 Facebook friends for a mere hamburger. I’d need at least a Triple Whopper with Cheese. uhhhHHHhhrghhhuuuuHHHggrruhhhHHhh

What you should have said in your email was:

   STOP! DO NOT POST ANOTHER EMAIL IN THIS THREAD!

   Instead, click on this link: ?URL?

   And post your comment there.

   Thank you.

We all know the inertia of human nature. To counter it you have to

1. Hit people with a 2×4 to get their attention (like the above email)
2. Make it like falling off a log for them to do the new thing (providing them the link to the specific post)

Any other ideas for shifting an internal email thread to an external blog thread?

Well, here’s an interesting response: Blogging’s not dead, it’s becoming like air. I like the point made in the post that people don’t lose interest and just go into listen mode. Instead, they STILL participate in the web, but in myriad different ways – especially twitter, FB, and MySpace.

BTW, That’s why we called our effort “Gartner Web Participation”. It’s about participating in the Web, not just reading or writing blogs. For example, I participate actively in both the REST-discuss and SOA Yahoo Groups. I also twitter, and I even find time to add my very small part to Wikipedia.

I think it’s a real stretch (but one that Nick Carr is good at) to characterize the Blogosphere annual report as the “death of blogging”. I urge everyone to read all 5 of the reports that make up the annual report. It paints a very different picture from the one Carr draws. Here’s an interesting chart from day 2:

Most Professional and Corporate Bloggers have benefited professionally
The majority of corporate and professional bloggers have seen a positive impact as a result of their blog. Half are better known in their industry, and one in four have used their blog as a resume enhancement. Fewer than one in ten have seen a negative impact from blogging and one in three have yet to see an impact.

BTW, In a comment to his post Carr “clarifies” his position to say that:

“There are blogs, Tim [Bray], and long may they live (yours very much included); it’s the idea of the blogosphere that’s pushing up the daisies. If you come up with a new word for what remains, do let us know. Blogipelago, perhaps?”

So to use Carr’s deeply flawed analogy, he’s claiming that we’ll all be listening to only the top 100 blogs in a couple years, because only the HAM fringe will be listening to themselves. So to back this up Carr should show some stats regarding the average web user’s viewing habits. How often are they reading top 100 blogs vs. reading hoi polloi blogs?

The best analogy is the Web itself. The Web hasn’t “died” just because some Web sites are mainstream. The Web and the Blogosphere are still media in which individuals with little investment and no license can attain a global voice overnight – if their stuff is interesting enough.

Here’s a great example from Sunday’s New York Times, Finding Fame With a Prescient Call for Obama:

In an election season of unlikely outcomes, Mr. Silver, 30, is perhaps the most unlikely media star to emerge. A baseball statistician who began analyzing political polls only last year, he introduced his site, FiveThirtyEight.com, in March, where he used his own formula to predict federal and state results and run Election Day possibilities based on a host of factors.

Other sites combine polls, notably RealClearPolitics and Pollster, but FiveThirtyEight, which drew almost five million page views on Election Day, has become one of the breakout online stars of the year. Mr. Silver recognized that people wanted to play politics like they played fantasy baseball, and pick apart poll numbers for themselves instead of waiting for an evening news anchor to interpret polls for them.

[Updated: 11/14/2008: Fixed some typos and added some links.]

Whenever a major organization develops a new system as an official standard for X, the primary result is the widespread adoption of some simpler system as a de facto standard for X.

Sowa’s law is closer in spirit to what I am trying to highlight — that the key to success is simplifying the complex.

Second, Anthony poses a far more difficult challenge: “I don’t see social applications as immune to the innovators dilemma.” In a nutshell, Clay Christensen predicts that an innovator’s product starts simple, but then the innovator adds functionality over time to satisfy the needs of the upper end of the market until the product overshoot the needs of the mainstream market. So why wouldn’t this happen to social software products?

Well, I’m going out on a limb here because I really do admire Christensen’s work. But I think a certain class of products, or at least a certain aspect of products, resists creeping featuritus — and even occasionally exhibits diminishing featuritis: User Interfaces. User interfaces tend to increase in complexity much more slowly than the technology behind the interface. For a paradigm example, look at the dashboard of an automobile (just the controls used to drive, not the stereo or climate control). One could argue that the dashboard has gotten simpler since the early days when you needed meters for oil pressure, voltage, water temperature, and other “engine monitoring” indicators. Even the tachometer (RPMs) is mostly there for show.

Another example is the QWERTY keyboard, which hasn’t gotten too much more complex — despite Microsoft’s attempts to add Window and Menu buttons, etc. And look at the mouse — Apple actually decreased the number of buttons from two to one.

What Clay Sharky highlighted in his talk but I neglected to mention in my post, is that the reason social interfaces may tend toward simplification (contrary to Christensen’s Law) is that the most important thing about some social interfaces is the speed and ease of personal interactions they enable. Any UI complexity that gets in the way of the immediacy (and intimacy) of personal interactions, tends to get whittled away over time.

Let me give a couple more examples of things that have gotten simpler instead of more complex:

1. A twitter post is simpler than a blog post
2. An IM/SMS message is simpler than an email
3. An iPod’s interface is simpler than the MP3 players it displaced
4. An iPhone’s interface (only one button) is simpler than a typical cell phone’s
5. Google’s search interface is simpler than the search portals it displaced
6. A WII controller is simpler than previous game controllers

I could go on. But I think I’ve established my point that it is an oversimplification to say that every product or every aspect of a product inevitably gets more complex. I do think there is something special about User Interfaces that tends to keep them simpler longer and that when they do get overly complex, they tend to refactor into a simpler replacement faster.

People’s need to connect with one another is so deep and so powerful that they are constantly seeking simpler ways to do it.