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I had the privilege of speaking today at the Future Trends 2008 conference in Miami Beach, a get-together of forecasters and seers from many different sectors in business and market research. Future Trends has a consumer slant, so it was a different mix than many of the conferences that I attend, but given the nature of Content Nation I was glad to have a venue like Future Trends to excercise my slide deck for the book. There were a lot of interesting presentations at Future Trends, some of which were somewhat gloom-and-doom but many of which were embracing the global changes to culture that have Content Nation at their center.

On the negative side of the forecast there were a wide variety of slides showing how every exponential curve in the world was about to reach "the singularity" or come crashing down. The environment, the economy, you name it - the recent economic challenges in the global economy have the fear-mongers working overtime.

But there were was overall much more optimism from the presenters than gloom, in part because they were very plugged into the global changes that are developing new markets that are developing into the worldwide foundation of Content Nation. Jeff Yang of iconoculture highlighted how in China, Brazil and other rapidly emerging markets. I was particularly interested in Jerry's higlighting of "star children," China's emerging generation of young women who were born during China's "one child" family policy. Because young women were the only shot at having children for many families, the importance of the success of these young women has broken down many patriarchial barriers in China.

While Jeff's presentation was coming from a different angle than mine, I think that we both agree that social media is at the center of a new generation of independent and self-assured people who are using social media to be activists on many fronts and who already have had an enormous impact on the pace of social and business change in the world. One presenter eyeballed the rate of likely technology change in the 21st century to beomce 80 times that of the 20th century. That may turn out to be true for all I know, but I think that we're going to see a "big sombrero" model being applied to that change. In other words, there will be indeed enormous technology change in the 21st century but a lot of it will be propogated via social media to local and global niche markets. We're  not going to see ten thousand new ways to build a light bulb, but we may wind up with ten thousand ways to generate light around the world tied into national and global standards for electricity generation, for example.

This is similar to the diversity that I highlight in the Content Nation book, of course. In Chapter 8, you'll see that the players of the explosively popular computer game Spore generated more than 3 million types of evolving creatures for the game in just a few months before its launch, twice the number of known species in the world. If social media is the DNA for a new kind of civilization, it's important to remember that this new kind of civilization is not going to be all one monolithic culture. The "big sombrero" model reminds us that in social media the value created in an enormous number of small, highly focused groups of people is likely to be greater than that created by that created by mass groups focused on mass culture. We are at the brink of creating more types of civilizations and cultures with social media as their "glue" than we can possibly imagine today.

The other neat thing that was highlighted at Future Trends 2008 was the generation of human tissue such as organs and thumbs from genetic "cloning" experiments. Looking at these experiments and thinkiing of what I highlighted in Chapter 10 of the book about how social media will eventually be offered to people through organic implants and organic computing and wireless computing. Perhaps my thoughts about people a thousand years in the future adapting social media into their human DNA is not so far-fetched. Perhaps I am too conservative as to when this may happen!

Anyhow, it was a great conference, I recommend it strongly for executives looking for fresh perspectives on their markets and major trends.

The use of social media technology in the 2008 U.S. elections is well documented in Chapter 6 of the Content Nation book, but now that the election is over social media's impact on an incoming administration in Washington has been rather an unknown. Enter Change.gov, a new Web site launched just three days after the election that is designed to continue the social media communication methods that were leveraged successfully in the campaign by many candidates. While not fully open for business - there is a registration process that is not quite fully functional - the main portions of the site enable people to subscribe to the incoming Obama administration's weblog, contribute ideas as to how the new administration should tackle the nation's issues and a signup for jobs in the new administration.

In structure and concept it is not so different from the Obama campaign Web site, but it establishes a strong hint of things to come with a change of power in Washington. The White House has had a Web site for well over a decade and even today there are opportunities to communicate with the office of the President and administration officials. There are even RSS feeds and podcasts for people wanting to keep track of specific streams of information coming from the White House. But the Change.gov Web site is less about communicating information than it is communicating politically with a nation that has just chosen a new President. The fact that Change.gov is more like a social media campaign Web site than an administator's Web site indicates that this new administration in Washington is intent on using social media to continue to influence the political dialogue in Washington much as it did on the campaign trail.

Does this mean that we will see the beginnings of a highly accessible "open source" government? With the emphasis on fighting terrorism in recent years, many Washington institutions have been struggling to present a more open face to the public. To make this attitude towards citizen publishing pervasive throughout the government will require both commitment and investment. But it all starts at the top, so there's reason to believe that the Change.gov site is an indication that social media's impact on a government's communications and actions has only just begun. It is also an opportunity for an incoming President to become the President of all of his nation by soliciting feedback and interactions with citizens in a non-partisan manner and to motivate them in the directions that will help them to make progress on critical issues.The tools of the campaign are now becoming the tools of influencing a sitting government.

Come January Mr. Obama will move into the White House, but in the meantime this incoming Publisher-In-Chief already has a virtual White House in place and has invited his nation and the world in for a housewarming. That in and of itself is cause for celebration in a world that is struggling to build and to strengthen its governments in challenging times. But the fact that this virtual house is themed to be a place for citizens as much as for politicians is a strong sign that this is likely to be the first President of the United States that will master social media as an influential political tool of governance in the way that earlier Presidents mastered newspapers, radio and television. We'll see just how open this initiative really becomes, but in the meantime the conversation has begun. Content Nation is in the house - the White House, that is.

In Chapter 6 of Content Nation I highlight the evolution of social media into a powerful tool that influences both opinions and actions in today's politics around the world. Certainly one aspect of this year's dramatic U.S. election that has struck me is its global impact as well as its national impact. People around the world are celebrating in the streets as if this was their election. What aspects of social media do you think have played the most important part in the outcome of this election and how do you think that the American election will influence other nations to use social media more aggressively for their own political processes? Share your thoughts with other Content Nation members and the world in our new forum topic on this subject .

The Huffington Post's Ariana Huffington offers up her take on the U.S. election's big winner - the Internet - but her own site is featuring prominently one of the real social media winners this election: embedded content on social media Web sites. While many traditional news organizations struggled to get an audience edge in an election season that was powered in many ways by the voices of people empowered by social media, sites such as the HuffPost excelled at aggregating widgets, embedded videos and links to content from sites around the Web along with a thin layer of newwire content and their own rotating crew of guest columnists.

On the evening of Election Day HuffPost is featuring a rotating gallery of widgets indicating poll closing times, an electoral vote tracker for the Presidential race, a live vote total tracker and election results widgets from CBS News, CNN and MSNBC. Each of these widgets is a useful tool, but the ability to aggregate them in a place that's a favorite for many political enthusiasts is the beauty of the contexts that social media publishing tools enable them to exploit. It's also a reminder that when news is about real-time events data and graphics are key content types that attract and retain audiences more effectively than text and, oftentimes, video. No wonder that HuffPost kept this rotating gallery of widgets as the "headline story" as the results prepared to come in. More to the point, as a part of their brand-building efforts sites like MSNBC make it easy for anyone to embed these widgets into their sites: it's no longer a huge deal to get this kind of content from a major media outlet into any Web site, including their video content from their proprietary videos that are embedded easily via the industry standard technologies that power social media.

Who will win tonight? We will. As I outline in Chapter 6 of the Content Nation book, the truly amazing impact of social media is in how it has enabled everyday people to have an influence over political processes as never before. In days past it took influential newspapers, books and broadcasters to set the center of the political dialogue. Today social media has brought us the electronic "cracker barrel," the ability of citizens to collect at an electronic commons, similar to how people in small towns used to gather around a cracker barrel or pot-bellied iron stove in a local general store and pass back and forth opinions and insights to their peers. It's also given us the ability to fund candidates who we support, creating a new political power from average citizens that used to be reserved mostly for the wealthy and major businesses. This is only one nation's experience with this technology, of course, but it bodes well for the future of all of Content Nation.

It's my privilege to have worked with Reid Conrad and the team at Near-Time, mostly as a client of theirs and occasionally as a strategy collaborator, and a pleasure to have watched their collaborative social media publishing service bloom into a really robust publishing tool. The features keep coming, the utility continues to accelerate and its ability to convert a general idea into a full-blown, multi-tier publishing service that can make one amazingly productive. I think that Reid and I saw the same market gaps for social media and he's gone a great distance in just a couple of years in closing them.

I found that out not too long ago when I whipped up a demo for my church of a new version of its aging and neglected Web site. Tweaked a Near-Time template graphics to create a custom banner, cut and pasted in some content from the existing site - with hardly any mods required, a miracle right there - plugged in RSS feeds from stored queries for specific types of content into the front page, including events listings, built a few public and private categories, set some permissions and within a few hours the whole thing was done. Here is a site that can be updated by any number of members, serve both the members and the public with both public and members-only content and navigation, drive events and projects, help people to discuss key topics and to share links with other nearby institutions, makes setting up sophisticated permissioning a breeze and comes with built-in navigation and search tools that are really great for bridging that gap between "our collaboration portal" and "our Web portal." Near-Time is a great and highly usable tool for publishing that combines the best of blog and wiki technology with the best of collaborative tools suitable for membership-driven organizations that need to have a strong public and private presence with as little in-house technical know-how as possible.

As with any young technology sometimes things get a bit of a bump on the head when a new version comes out, but the Near-Time team turns fixes around pretty quickly and is always improving usability. I've been waiting for that time to tell you "Yeah, it's ready now," and I think that it's just about there, finally. About the only things that I'd really like to see from it now are better placement of social bookmarking tools, some flexibility in pre-setting the order of user-adjustable sidebar content and a way to enable a membership layer on their premium-model platform that does not require premium signup. That's a pretty short list, I think. Once these things are in place, it will be pretty unbeatable for membership-based/subscription-based collaborative publishing on a services model platform. I am looking at using Near-Time for a number of upcoming projects in addition to its current use for driving Content Nation, so my hope is that this can be a platform that's capable of driving both revenue and traffic. I'll keep you posted, but for now I'd suggest signing up for a trial site and mucking around with it a bit. I think that you'll be duly impressed. Yes, it's a plug, but a very well-deserved one.

CNET social media blogger Caroline McCarthy covers the speech of Digg founder Kevin Rose at the Future of Web Apps conference  in London, where he focused on Digg's efforts to widen its audience appeal. While Rose confirmed that 30 million fans of Digg showing up on your doorstep each month was a great thing, he is starting to focus on how to broaden Digg's audience and to improve is relevance to specific audiences. Digg's registered users total about three million according to Rose, which is a sizeable number of people to drive active content bookmarking and discussions, but Kevin is still looking for ways to harvest more usable meaning from the data that Digg accumulates. Already Digg is using data from members who are apparent "trend setters" to power its beta-feature "Upcoming" view of content categories, but he intends to make it easier for people to find content with people who have the same affinities automatically. I assume that this means something like "Amazoning" Digg content (people who liked this also liked...), which is a good step in the right direction, but a fairly small step given Digg's overall impact on the Web.

Digg has done a lot over the past year to improve its usability and readability, but the potential for social bookmarking still outweighs its realized value in many instances. Here are a few thoughts as to how Digg and other social bookmarking services (and the media outlets that benefit from them) can work better:

• Invest big in "Diggable ads." Right now advertising in social media is suffering from a dearth of endorsement power as people concentrate more on content that's been endorsed by their peers via services such as Digg. Digg is looking at how to make ads "Dugg," which is likely to be a key factor in returning greater value from online display advertising. Currently the only feedback that advertisers have that an ad is working are click-throughs of one kind or another. Being able to get feedback from audiences that are viewing ads but not necessarily in a context where they want or need to click through can be invaluable feedback for marketers - especially when this behavior can be correlated with demographics and tastes. When audiences see that their like-minded peers are tuned into a marketing campaign it is bound to increase the power of an ad's endorsement - and drive up the revenues from those ads. This is likely also to accelerate the use of ad networks to place sponsored content in a Digg-centric ad network as well.
• Build communities around comments. Although social bookmarking service Newsvine is a mere blip compared to Digg's overall traffic, it has done a good job of creating interest groups focused on key topics and enabling both private and public discussions of those topics. People can read and comment on a group's bookmarks and original articles or they can join a group to contribute their own pieces of content. This enables more focused groups of interest to contribute content that would otherwise get lost in the noise. Digg is probably the best bookmarking service overall in managing the relevance of widely popular topics and does a great job of keeping comments clean, but in general Diggnation's comment threads don't seem to have much topic-specific sense of community around them. Diggers find great content, to be sure, and their system of managing comments is actually quite good - definitely superior to Newsvine's overall - but it lacks a sense of real relationships between the commenters in many instances.
• Focus more on being a publication - and enabling publications. While Digg is a powerful tool to aggregate content, its presentation of content in readable form falls far short of its potential to be an automatically assembled publication for its target audiences. People who have been following along as I have been writing the Content Nation book know how in Chapter 10 's futuristic scenario a person in the future is enjoying his "Diggpaper" that's been assembled automatically for his enjoyment. Digg and services like it should think more carefully about how their front page, topic specific pages and stored searches can be formatted to look more like a publication that people are going to browse as an integrated source. This would mean the application of taxonomies and other tools that are readily available, and it may not be feasible in all topic areas if the content is not deep enough, but if people really are editing content as powerfully as many professionals do then it should think about giving its content more of a "stay a while" look to it.
• Finish the Google deal. The rumbles about pairing Digg with Google have subsided as of late, but thinking of this last point - making more of an editorial presence - most of what Digg needs to do that can be found in Google's news bits, which would certainly benefit from integrated Digg content ratings as well. Digg's potential is expanding far more quickly than its ability to exploit it, especially when it comes to partnering effectively with potential distributors, so a Google deal would mean that it would have far more broad access to partners and channels that would help to turn it into a premier source for news on more fronts and to consolidate its position as the leader in social bookmarking.
  

Digg continues to grow like a weed, but just as Kevin Rose opted for a cleaner haircut lately it's time for Digg to focus on reaping its potential more effectively. I'd say a doubling of its uniques in a year would be a realistic target - with the right partners. It's time for Digg to be not only brilliant but also to play well with others on the next level of its capabilities.

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!