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When I put together the chart in the Content Nation book a few months back showing how most of the top Web sites were social media Web sites, the stats that I was pulling from, like most industry stats, didn't list Web sites that post what is called in polite circles "adult entertainment." Taken in sum pornography is one of the most popular types of Web destinations, accounting for about 1 in 5 searches a few years ago, according to Hitwise. But in a Reuters article today it's noted that searches for porno sites are about half of what they were a few years ago and that the new leader in online surfing is social media sites.

Now I would be the first to trumpet this as progress in using the Web for building real relationships through social media, and I do believe strongly that social media is enabling people to build much more constructive relationships with one another than in ways that traditional media outlets have never facilitated very well. There's no doubt that social media is changing our attitudes towards other people through our own publishing, creating a global conversation that is staggering in its scope and its implications for our future.

However, it's also important to point out that many social media outlets are in their own ways havens for the behaviors that used to be found exclusively on adult Web sites. In Second Life , for example, some estimate that as much as half of spending in this virtual reality world is based on "adult interests," while a recent Wired article noted that on a recent day Sexy Beach, one of several regions in Second Life that offer virtual sex shops, dancing, and no-strings hookups, came in at 133,000, while major corporate locations in Second Life such as The Sears store on IBM's Innovation Island had a traffic score of 281 and Coke's Virtual Thirst pavilion only 27 visitors. Second Life's traffic has stagnated in the past year after its initial aggressive growth, in part, some speculate, because of its newcomer-hostile design, but perhaps people are finding better ways to connect with people than a world in which much of the activity seems to focus on selling of one kind or another rather than real person-to-person relationships. Tellingly, recent data from Second Life indicates that about 57 percent of its users are male and nearly half above the age of 35. It appears that this kind of fantasy world may be more appealing to mature adults.

By contrast, the social media sites that emphasize real-world relationships such as Facebook and LinkedIn continue to soar in popularity, underscoring that the real power in social media is its ability to help people form more multi-dimensional relationships with one another. Where traditional media continues to emphasize luring people into brand relationships with mass producers, social media helps people to be their own attractive brands that build up power one relationship at a time, even as traditional brands learn how to have a similar conversations. It's these kinds of social media properties that are the key for both marketers and for people trying to build geniune person-to-person relationships with one another. Social media is not going to change human behavior overnight - after more than a century of seduction-based advertising and programming through mass media people are going to re-program their interests only bit by bit - but already social media's ability to treat people as more than just consumers of mass-produced goods and entertainment is attracting people to Content Nation far faster than older forms of publishing. After all, who needs "Reality TV" when people make their own reality through their own content?

It's been interesting coming up for air after several weeks of book-writing to see that it's time for the introduction of Spore , a new simulation game that allows people to build entire virtual ecologies and civilizations through their inventive software. I had highlighted Spore in Chapter 8 of the Content Nation book, which is entitled "The New Survival: How Content Nation Redefines the Future of Humanity." Spore is a very interesting example of how social media is capable of extending the very essence of what it means to be human into a whole new realm. Here's the section from Chapter 8 on Spore:

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A hint as to how efficient the human species can be at reinventing the organisms of civilization through social media came recently from the coming introduction of a new computer game based on mastering the evolution of species. Spore is a game that enables people to create their own worlds of virtual creatures that they can design themselves and share with others via the Web. Spore was under development in 2008 when its creators decided to get people involved in the product ahead of the release of the actual gaming software by releasing a software tool that would allow people to develop and share the creatures that they could use in their game once that it was released.

When the Spore development team first decided to release the Creature Creator software in June 2008, their thought was that they might be able to encourage people to develop about 100,000 new kinds of evolving creatures by the time that the software was scheduled to launch in September 2008. Much to their surprise, the number of Spore creatures created by people downloading Creature Creator had surpassed the 100,000 mark. Within about a week Spore users had created and shared more than 1,000,000 different types of Spore creatures with one another and within a month they had created more than 1.8 million Spore creatures - more than the estimated 1.5 million known species alive today on our planet. At this point the Spore development team is expecting that by September 2008 Spore users would have created for sharing about 20 million different kinds of software-based species - more than 13 times the number of species living on the earth today.

The Spore phenomenon is certainly an indication of the number of creative computer game players in the world, but it's all an indication of how quickly humans can conceive of and share different ways to adapt to and survive in an environment through social media. The impetus to be creative is a universal human trait, not limited to a few fortunate people whose works of art have been played in concert halls or hung in art galleries. Combine that essential human creativity in response to survival challenges with the ability to create altruistic bonds via social media publishing and there are more patterns that could emerge for human survival than exist in nature for every kind of living being on earth.

Social media will release an explosion of ways in which human genes can be extended to create bonds of trust and collaboration that will lead to rapidly evolving strategies for surviving and thriving in a rapidly changing world. We have developed a relative handful of successful civilizations through traditional publishing in 7,000 years compared to what may emerge from the experiments of people who can define any number of altruistic relationships through social media.

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Chapter 8 has lots of neat insights into how publishing in general and social media in particular is an extension of our genetic code, but wait until you get to Chapter 10 when Content Nation peers into the future of humankind in earnest. I hope that it will be kind of a "whoa" moment for you!

Read Chapter 10 now!

Social media is changing our work, our lives and our future in ways that we're only beginning to understand. How deeply will social media change our lives? Chapter 10 of the Content Nation book explores what social media will mean to the future of humankind 50, 100, 1,000 and 10,000 years from now - and in the process of doing so brings us both to a radically different way of life for most humans and to a way of life that is at the same time startlingly familiar. Since the birth of publishing is something that grew out of the evolution of human culture after the last ice age more than ten thousand years ago in Chapter 10 I pose the troubling question: how much is the past a prologue to the future? More importantly, perhaps, what will social media do to human society that may impact the evolution of humankind itself in that time frame? Come visit a world of global protein computing, remarkable changes to human civilization and some things that just don't change - like our sense of humor.

Read Chapter 10 now!

Read Chapter 9 now!

The thing that inspired me to write the book Content Nation was the realization that there was something more important about its impact on our lives than the usual Silicon Valley gibberish about "new paradigms" or whatever. While not meaning any disrespect to people focused constantly on the "new, new thing" (I am one of them, after all) it began to occur to me that social media was tied into far broader trends in human existance, trends that were on the scale of tens of thousands of years rather than mere decades, centuries or millenia.

As I saw it, the ability of people to survive and to thrive in a rapidly changing environment through social media publishing was bringing us back to many of our key human traits that allowed us to survive and to thrive before the rise of publishing. Through social media, the formula for success in life was beginning to resemble that of our ice-age ancestors at least as much as formulas for success in our modern era. If the DNA of the organism known as civilization expresses itself through publishing and that DNA is changing rapidly through social media, then it becomes very important to understand what made us successful as humans before the rise of traditional publishing.

Chapter 9 of Content Nation focuses on some of the key traits of fundamental humanness that are being liberated by social media to act in more effective ways to help us to survive and to thrive in a rapidly changing world. The chapter also takes a look at some of the key examples of how the virtues of the ice-age code are helping people to realize success in innovative ways through some of the more exciting experiments at the leading edge of social media publishing. The chapter also takes a look at how the global openness of social media challenges us to act successfully in a world that is still very much a modern place and how that openness is forming the basis for a new kind of society - an "open source society." Finally I sum up how this new way of living is really about liberatng us to experience the joy of being human through one of our most fundamental human traits - publishing.

It's a great chapter, but it's not quite the end. Chapter 10 will take you from the worlds of yesterday's and today's publishing to a future shaped by social media. Stay tuned!

Read Chapter 9 now!

This is a really, really neat chapter to have written. What is the future of civilization in a world in which social media begins to dominate publishing? Well, this brings up the more basic question: what exactly is human civilization? I have come to realize through my research that the adaptation to our natural environment called civilization is a tool for survival as much as the bows and arrows of our early human ancestors were adaptations to their natural surroundings. At the heart of this adaptation was a key tool: publishing. The centralized publishing of early civilizations enabled humans to extend their genes through publishing to create a common code of human conduct that enabled civilizations to grow like enormous organisms.

This is the good news for civilization. Now the bad news: it's an organism that has the potential to be facing extinction-level events. As a result, the tools that define the organism of civilization must adapt in order for it to survive. In Chapter 8 I explore the following fundamental premise:

From the standpoint of ensuring the survival of humankind the development of today's diverse array of social media publishing tools already in wide use is probably the most significant event in human history since the dawn of large-scale human civilizations. Social media publishing is important to this significant degree not just because it is revolutionary in light of our current civilization but because it enables humans to reclaim our ability to survive and to thrive in an overwhelmed global civilization that must adapt to diverse and increasingly unstable conditions in nature and in civilization itself. Other advances in technology have allowed us to survive and thrive in relatively predictable conditions: social media prepares us to evolve survival and success responses rapidly and flexibly in a highly unpredictable world.

It's a neat, neat chapter - I hope - and one which I hope will help people to ponder just how significant social media may be for the future of humankind. Enjoy!

Read Chapter 8 now!

How does social media impact society as a whole? Far more than some of us may imagine. When everyone's a publisher with the ability to scale globally, the world changes. It challenges the very nature of many institutions. What happens when a tsunami takes more than 240,000 lives and the people of Content Nation equipped with today's social media publishing tools respond more effectively than governments? What happens when you can invite anyone from around the world to the scene at your local coffee shop or pub? What happens when markets really ARE global conversations on Facebook or Twitter that anyone in the world can join? What happens when the world collaborates to create knowledge? What happens when the audience at a concert asks for more content from a performer by lighting up their own publishing machines instead of matches or lighters?

It means that Content Nation has arrived. A world of global publishers is challenging how modern society sees itself and organizes itself. Their abilities and their creations will shake the very foundation of human society - and how we will survive and thrive as humans.

Chapter 7: The New Society - Content Nation Redefines How People Live Their Lives

As you can probably tell by my low profile I am deep into book -cranking mode, but to tide you over here's a tidbit on a recent new development in Chapter 7, which covers social media's impact on society:

The folks at Microsoft , having done some research on the impact of altruism on the marketing value of a company's brand, decided recently to do a nice thing: they decided that for a limited time they would donate to charity a portion of the ad revenue every time someone used their Windows Live Messenger instant messaging product or their Windows Live Hotmail webmail service The basic concept: the more messages you send, the more Microsoft would give to charities. Microsoft called this product promotion the I'm Talkathon, an effort that seemed to be hitting all of the right buttons. Microsoft was honest about what they were trying to accomplish ultimately (promote their products and services), all you really had to do was to register at the event Web site to have your messages count towards the charitable goal. So far, so good - people like to do the right thing, and a fund-raiser was a concept more likely to generate use of the products than any sort of small rebate or other direct financial incentive would provide.

And then came Parker.

Parker appeared as the author of a weblog associated with the I'm talkathon campaign, saying in a note on the home page of the weblog, "I’m just a guy with a computer and good intentions. A couple of months ago, I found out about the i’m Initiative...I hope you join me. Thanks for checking out the Talkathon!" Parker's blog entries had links to his pages on major social media outlets, the ability to post comments, embedded videos - all the things that one would expect from an enthusiast's weblog.

There was just one problem. Parker was fake, an actor hired to play the role of a blogger along with "friends" who would appear in videos. A disclaimer at the very bottom of the weblog notes: "If you’re reading this, your BS detector is chirping like a smoke detector with a dicey 9-volt. As you’ve probably guessed, this blog is fictional, but the causes, and the i’m Initiative most certainly are not. The purpose of this blog is to raise awareness of the i’m Initiative and the worthy causes it helps. If we rubbed you the wrong way in the process that wasn’t our intention, so “sorry, our bad.” The alternate was something called an 'e-mail blast.' But, believe us that’s not nearly as exciting as it sounds." Funny in its own way, perhaps, and probably acceptable to many people used to staged "reality" television shows - but words that came no doubt from McCann Worldgroup, an advertising agency hired to develop and to promote the fund-raiser. The weblog was received for what it was - a promotion that was entertaining, but not real - but the weblog received few comments and its YouTube videos were viewed by a small handful of people. The link to Facebook and to other social media Web sites connected to dummy accounts; no person, real or otherwise, was there to respond.

Promoting charities is a good idea for marketers, but if your aim is to position your company's brands in the marketplace as being more sincere and in touch with your customers, why would you use a pretend spokesperson instead of a real person? If altruism in social media is about allowing yourself to become vulnerable enough to offer something to a community who will give back to you social rewards, why would you be afraid to put someone out in front of the public as a spokesperson who was real? Why use a medium that's all about genuine conversations to promote a cause based on genuine conversations by using social media to provide fake conversations? And most importantly, why go out of your way to pretend to be linked in to other social media networks and then allow people to see that these were fake presences?

People accept that companies are trying to use social media for their own marketing and people accept that actors can be entertaining, even in social media outlets. But it's probably a mistake to try to create something that's supposed to be promoting altruism with an actor pretending to be a person doing something for purely altruistic reasons. It may be an indication of how much some companies struggle to engage a public that has grown cynical from mass marketing in general, but it's also an indication of how hard it is for some people to accept that altruism is truly about getting benefits back from society as a whole where and when society as a whole is able to give them.

Content Nation Social Rule #12: It's possible to mix your own commercial goals with social goals through social media, but pretending to be sincere about social goals is not a good way to go about it.

P.S. - Late-breaking edit - If you'd like to see a good way to do altrusitic marketing without a Fake Parker to spoil the party, check out the WikiAnswers Answerthon , coming up July 26th-27th.

Google's new Lively virtual reality platform is now available, a stab at helping Google to find a place in the expanding world of virtual worlds. In its just-up form it's not surprisingly a work in progress - Windows-only compatablity, a thin inventory of virtual looks and gear and apparent problems with memory management and networking - but there's enough to see that this is a different kind of play from other simming environments.

Like the popular IMVU service Lively is not an entire alternate world with limited real estate and the ability to travel from one "place" to another geographically. Instead, Lively is a series of rooms or scenes that can be selected from a menu or a search and can be embedded into any Web page with a snippet of HTML code. This makes sense given the embedding strategy that Google is using via its OpenSocial initiative, making it easier to insert a particular room into a particular Web page and making it inviting to people already in your real-world social network. The Second Life concept of defining "scarce" prime locations was appealing only to those used to trying to create artificial scarcity. It's a far better strategy to adapt virtual reality to the unlimited social real estate of the Web, where any context could be the right context for a social experience with people who offer more trusted relationships. The OpenSocial connection will probably put membership in Google's Gtalk messaging service in a different light also, encouraging people to bring their real-world networks into both text and virtual reality communications.

Google's blog mentions the ability to use objects defined in your Lively space on your desktop also, providing a bridge from the virtual into the more personal world, but also made it a point to integrate its own YouTube videos and Picasa photos into a member-defined room to enable people to share in something more than just the usual chat-room banter. The animated avatar figures can also take actions based on typical chat room symbology - [hug] sets someone putting their arms around you, for example - and there seems to be a fair amount of physical exploration embedded into the platform. Still, judging by many curt reactions from some of the early adopters it's not a platform that's going to win over serious gamers and VR zealots.

And that may be OK - if Google can find its own brand of enthusiasts that are interested in how virtual reality can enhance real-world relationships more effectively. Platforms like IMVU and the emerging Twinity platform are popular because they help people to escape into a more ideal world, one in which the real-world barriers of physique, culture, social status and, yes, age are not barriers to social acceptance in the eyes of people needing that kind of security. Lively is likely to be a virtual world in which people can adopt alternative personas if they want to but will be more likely to use a slightly idealized real-world persona to share with other people. That may not appeal heavily to people who need the security of other-worldly worlds to meet and greet other people, but it's probably more likely to appeal to the 80-plus percent of people who are used to being themselves most days. It's hard enough for me to keep up with the real world and my social media networks and I suspect that most adults feel the same.

Google needs some stronger social media mojo beyond its current initiatives and a bridge to a younger generation used to online gaming, so Lively may be an innovative step forward to put their current social media initiatives in a more valuable light. However, if Lively gets the "lame" label early on it may take a while to get that enthusiasm going. Once its capabilites show up in embedded content it's more likely to be an attractive alternative than just text messaging or - gasp! - emails. In the meantime I did find it interesting that one of the Lively rooms was for Digg fans. Fodder for the acquisition rumor mill, but in the meantime a good example of how more Google capabilities need to be in the middle of global conversations that create valuable context for content. I go by my real-world name in Lively, don't diss my gear too much, it's the best I could do on short notice.

How do you write a book chapter on social media in politics? Carefully. Chapter 6 of Content Nation was a lot of fun to write, but it took a lot of weighing of different examples from around the world to come up with stories that were both compelling and politically balanced. But somehow I think that I've managed to pull it off. I mention no one's political party directly (only one indirect reference to parties at all), I talk about terrorism without using the word "terrorism," I talk about political freedom without using the word "freedom" - it's a big world out there, and my hope is that this book can reach as many people as possible around the world and to get them thinking about the power of social media to transform their work, their lives and their future. I think that you'll enjoy my full draft of this chapter. Give it a whirl.

In the U.S. it is Independence Day, the day on which we celebrate the founding of our nation on July 4th, 1776. It is ultimately a day in which we celebrate social media, for the document that declared the birth of the United States of America was not signed on that day, as has been celebrated in folklore: it was the day on which its final wording was agreed to by the delegates assembled in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, at what is today called Independence Hall, and printed for distribution later on that day. So, in the most true sense, Independence Day is a celebration of the publishing of the Declaration of Independence. It is in the creation of those words in a form that could be shared with citizens that the nation was truly born. This is a nation born of content.

As global citizens of Content Nation let us celebrate the social media pioneers who dared to think great thoughts that have in many ways inspired today's freedom of expression through social media. Enjoy your day, wherever you may be.

The Wall Street Journal has coverage of a new report from Forrester Research which claims that most corporate blogs are a dull failure. Lacking imagination, timeliness and engagement, Forrester notes that there are very few new corproate blogs starting up compared to just a year ago and that 53 percent of marketers believe that blogs have a marginal impact at best on their strategies.

I would agree that most corporate blogs tend to flop with a resounding "thud" when executives responsible for them discover that - 'gads! - it's a lot of work to maintain one. Many CEOs, especially those of companies that have publicly issued stock, are so used to the corporate lawyers poring through every sentence that emanates from the company that they fail to develop a style that's engaging and worth reading. Blogs are for people who have something to say to an audience - they're not PR machines in the manner in which a typical marketer would like them to be. They are an opportunity to enable people who