Russ Smariga's Weblog

Countries I have visited -- click here to create a map of your own

"Social Media" is all the rage today. If you are not involved with it in some way, there is a large group of folks who would relegate you to the ranks of the uninformed, or, worse yet, the un-phat.

How true or untrue this may be, the tools and concepts being used in the social media world today have huge potential for accelerating personal and group creativity and productivity. There are many examples showing how this can be true. One example can be introduced with the question, "How long would it take you, as an individual, to find the top twenty (or more) technology news items on the web?" One answer would be "forever" because I do not have any tools by which to judge their 'popularity'. Another reasonable answer might be "several hours of dedicated browsing on the major news sites such as Yahoo, CNN, Fox, MSN, Slashdot, etc., with some followup time to correlate between all the sites."

Now, enter one site's interpretation of a social media concept embodied by digg.com. More specifically, check out: http://digg.com/view/technology

There, immediately at your fingertips (mouse pointertip), are many, many technology news items representing the vast majority of what is available, right now, on the web. How long did that take you? Couple of seconds?

But, you might say, "How many of the people participating in "digging" technology news items will I actually agree with? IMO it does not matter. What matters is that somebody, rather many somebodies are highlighting technology news that might be interesting, thereby freeing me from the drudgery of searching. And this gives me vastly more time to actually process the data into something useful, instead of wasting cycles "in the hunt."

And that is just a single social media concept. A single tool.

Imagine what might happen if two, three, or several social media concepts were leveraged. Thoughtful integration in this space is already revolutionizing our ability to review, assimilate and create. Imagine how much better it is going to be!