“There are three ways to look at how society is informed. The first is that people are gullible and will read, listen to, or watch just about anything. The second is that most people require an informed intermediary to tell them what is good, important or meaningful. The third is that people are pretty smart; given the means, they can sort things out for themselves, find their own version of the truth.

The means have arrived. The truth is out there.

Throughout history, access to news and information has been a privilege accorded to powerful institutions with the authority or wealth to dominate distribution. For the past two centuries, an independent press has served as advocate for society and its right to know — an essential role during an era of democratic enlightenment.

It feels like a new era has been thrust upon us — an era of enlightened anxiety. We now know more than ever before, but our knowledge creates anxiety over harsh truths and puzzling paradoxes.”

Still rings true. The moment and the movement have overtaken the forecast, but We Media (300,000+ downloads) continues to serve “as the reference point for any serious discussions of this topic …” David Weinberger, the visionary technologist-commentator-author wrote back then.

Didier Editions asked to republish the intro in a collection of English textbooks called Password Terminale for French students 17-18 years old.

We said oui.

Steven Rosenbaum

I love the smell of old records. The cardboard sleeves, the vinyl and the memories. I like the sound and the feeling of a rotary phone. And I like thinking back to a time when the web was something we ’surfed.’

Remember that?

Surfing the Web. Ah, back when the waves lapped against the shores and then pulled back. With a rhythm and a volume that was at human scale. Today, no one surfs the Web, we survive it. We tolerate it. We try not to be enveloped by it. Because, the Web no longer operates at human scale. It’s Moore’s Law applied to information.

Which is why I was both charmed and surprised to hear Google’s Dan Russell being interviewed by Leo Laporte on “This Week in Google”. Russell is in charge of “User Happiness” at Google. “Well, you know, people are pretty happy when they’re searching,” Russell said, in describing his role. “That’s one of the reasons Google is where it is. Happiness comes from a lot of things. One thing it comes from is whether or not you get that sense of delight.”

Okay, reality check here. How many of you remember when the Web, and in particular Google, was delightful? I do. I remember Mosaic. I remember when Google was amazing. The Web was seemingly growing volumes of quality content, and Google helped me find it fast. Awesome.

But recently, I find that Google isn’t my first stop when I’m looking for what Jeff Jarvis calls the serendipity of “unexpected relevance.” There are just so many choices, and so many of them that seem to know me better than Google does.

Russell seems to understand this. “If we could read your mind, and help to presage what’s coming next,” he says, “that would be great!”

But you have to understand where he’s coming from – where Google’s coming from – to understand how he defines delight.

Russell has been at Google for more than five years. Before that, he worked at Apple for 5 years, and before that, Xerox PARC for 12 years, and before that, IBM. And while Laporte gently suggests that what Google needs is less computer scientists and more social scientists, Russell laughs and admits he has a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence.

So while Google is defining ‘delight’ as popping a weather graphic on your screen, users are drowning in a flood of tweets, blog posts, check-ins, and other real-time data that overwhelm comprehension and exhaust users. And it’s clear that Google understands this – with new CEO Larry Page making sweeping changes in the goals and management of the company.

Page is hyper-focused on competing with Facebook in the social sector, recently sending out a memo to employees that ties 25 percent of their annual bonus will be tied to the success of Google’s social strategy in 2011. But after just one week on the job, critics like Computerworld’s Mike Elgan say Google still doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about over at Facebook. ”Google doesn’t seem to understand that Facebook is a party,” says Elgan. ”People prefer Facebook to Google because Facebook is a place they can go to be social. With Google there is no ‘place.’ There is no party. Google’s approach to social isn’t fun.”

Steven Rosenbaum, CEO of Magnify.net, is the author of Curation Nation: How To Win in a World Where Consumers are Creators.

Among other things, Mr. Gomez is a leading practitioner of what media scholar Henry Jenkins calls transmedia – that’s fiction and entertainment spread across many different platforms.

Professional credentials and bona fides aren’t the point here. Jeff’s personal story, told at TedxTransmedia in 2010, is about the power of story itself. The price of admission is 22 minutes of your time.

We have to provide an architecture that allows for people to lift themselves from darkness and mundanity.

Google’s answer to Microsoft’s Windows operating system is the ChromeOS. Google Docs aims to take the place of Microsoft Word and Excel; Google’s Gmail handles email while Calendar takes care of schedules.

So here we are, mid-2011, well on our way to a mobile, social, network culture built around wireless networks and web apps powered by unseen servers in the metaphorical “cloud.” We’re shrouded in news, ideas, opinions and data that find us, in ever greater volume, through our assorted digital links with friends, family and friends-of-friends. The cloud feels more like fog.

We’re mobile. Google, with its Android operating system for phones and tablets, competes against Apple’s iOS for domination of smartphones and mobile advertising, apps, books and services.

Yet it turns one of the battles for our computing hearts and minds isn’t over mobile or networked anything. It’s over something so prosaic, so ordinary, so retro, it feels like a faded clipping from a family scrapbook: the offline world.

Offline – remember that? It means disconnected from the web. It’s what happens when a computer is not plugged into wifi, broadband, 3G, 4G or anything. It’s when a computer and its operator is isolated from the rest of the networked world. It’s what used to be the norm for computers and software designed to run in isolation, when they could neither ingest nor output anything on or through the Internet.

At its developer conference this week, Google announced plans to release versions of its productivity apps that will work well when a host computer is offline.

The next question, of course, is a challenge to the great tech war itself. What if there is no host computer – if we disconnect completely? Walk away. Use a pen. Scribble a note. Have a meeting. What if the next frontier of digital culture isn’t digital, isn’t technology at all. What if it’s us?

As traditional computers give way to iPads, iPhones and other mobile devices, Google’s attention on the offline world is a refreshing reminder that we don’t live in the cloud but on earth. If we’re lucky, we’ve got a roof over our heads, a toilet and access to clean water. We may know, connect and share data with people everywhere – but sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we are alone.

Photo credit: sk12

Tahrir Square, Cairo, Feb. 4, 2011

But there’s much more going on than business, consumption or greed. We’re in the midst of something extraordinary. Dictatorships are crumbling, microblogs are taking off in China, hackers are fiddling with credit cards, banks and stock markets, communities of all flavors are scheduling Meetups everywhere, and Groupon, Living Social and other social deals distributors have shown local merchants how to move goods and bring in customers without buying ads.

Is all this simply the rebound from economic collapse coupled with internet and mobile phone proliferation? Or the impact and triumph of Facebook, Twitter or mobile networks? Or the consequence of shifting trust? Somehow, the digital universe expanded to embrace and shroud the earth. Or we embraced the universe.

Of course all this has been unfolding slowly. But it feels like in a matter of weeks we’ve experienced a supernova, or cosmic inflation – like the networked culture that had been slowly maturing for nearly two decades metamorphosed into another form. A new lifestage? Toddler? Juvenile? Adolescent? Subadult? A new generation? Whatever we call it, digital life has eclipsed theory, metaphor, aspiration and the realm of digerati. In 2011, it became massively, incomprehensibly real. It became now. We’re all digerati now. For reasons that historians may one day ferret out, in 2011 the cosmic laws and atomic particles of the connected society took shape and diffused to define the world as it would forever after be known.

So We Media, this grand idea that Dale Peskin and I have been exploring for nearly a decade, is now simply the way things are. “We” are driving the culture. We’re networked. We’re a system. Developer-scholar-blogging godfather Dave Winer says news is an environment. I’ve called it a fog – the cloud that surrounds us. We produce, share and acquire information, ideas and insights through a diffuse mist of connections linked through digital and personal networks. We are media, whether we tweet, blog, make or share videos, check in somewhere, like something on Facebook, follow someone, email a link to Posterous, report for a local or global news service, design an app for Rupert Murdoch or for one of his arch enemies, or passively surf, consume, read or answer a Craigsist ad. Or join a crowd to protest the government. Working alone or in collaboration with others, we create, curate and connect to knowledge that spans the globe, moves markets and changes governments.

All of this fills me with a mix of wonder, dread and certainty that we’ve entered an age of astonishing creativity, invention and chaos. I’m feeling woozier than usual. At the end of 2010, Wikileaks embarrassed the U.S. government and put every nation, every business and every citizen on alert that secrets matter, whether your intent is to keep them or to reveal them. Consider what’s already unfolded in the first weeks of 2011:

• The world watched as thousands of people organized online and on streets to overthrow dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt. U.S. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, both of whom have expressed contempt for Wikileaks, cited the role of Facebook, Twitter, mobile and social media as a force for change and critical conduits for free expression. In the New Yorker, author Malcom Gladwell dismissed the significance of social media in social movements – and all sorts of A-list pundits and thinkers dismissed Gladwell.
• Goldman Sachs orchestrated a $1 billion investment in Facebook – and kept U.S. investors out of the deal for fear of running afoul of U.S. securities laws.
• Demand Media, a company we identified last year as a game-changer for its algorithm-driven approach to creating and optimizing the value of web content, and which others detest as a “content mill,” raised $85 million and was valued at $1.7 billion in an initial public stock offering.
• Path, a one-year-old mobile/photo sharing service with no discernible competitive advantage over any other photo/mobile/social service, except that its CEO was an early member of the Facebook team, reportedly turned down a $100 million acquisition offer from Google.
• Reddit, a link sharing service that exploded after users abandoned the similar and formerly bigger Digg, recorded more than 1 billion pageviews in January .
• NewsCorp., with help from Apple, launched an iPad-only, once-a-day, crash-prone subscription national news brand for the U.S., called The Daily.
• Al Jazeera revealed more secrets: the Palestine Papers included details of the long and fruitless Israeli-Palestinanian peace negotiations. Soon after, Al Jazeera shared with the world live video from the anti-Mubarek protests in Egypt.
• AOL purchased Huffington Post for $315 million. Since its launch in 2005, HuffPo had grown to nearly 24 million monthly readers – within spitting distance of the 30 million who visit The New York Times web sites each month.
• Blogher founder Lisa Stone was featured in a spoof Superbowl ad with Oscar winning actress Cloris Leachman.

Any one of these items might be noted with admiration for the individuals involved, dismissed as isolated, insignificant developments, or both.

But considered together, along with everything we know about how technology has liberated information, empowered individuals, reshaped trust networks and disrupted systems of power and control, these We Media flash points and data blips hint at something truly awesome unfolding rapidly before our eyes.

For the first time since the web itself was created by Tim Berners-Lee at a Swiss research lab in 1993, business, markets, governments and society as a whole are aligning around the networked culture.

Alignment does not mean agreement. But it means widespread adoption of the technical, cultural and social relationships that define our digital experiences and link them to our human experiences.

As early adopters make room for everyone else, what follows will be even more chaotic than what came before. Old empires – news, entertainment, business, government – will continue to crumble, fade, collapse, expire. But even in the afterglow of a global economic collapse, new empires are on the rise and new methods of informing, connecting, sharing and influencing each other are taking root. For brands, marketers, causes and political campaigns the business of influence has been quantified and refined into repeatable processes and detailed metrics.

What happens next in China? Myanmar? North Korea? Iraq? Iran? Afghanistan? Israel, Gaza and The West Bank? How about our schools and neighborhoods?

The entire planet is up for grabs.

Photo credit: monasosh

When we look back, I hope the BP Oilspill will be part of the story – and I hope we’ll call it that, rather than the Gulf Oilspill. The story will be dark, kinda like the 70s. Malaise. Lots of young people out of work – and they want better. I do too.

The global economy was limping along, wars still simmered in Afghanistan and Iraq, not much seemed to be improving for anyone. In the US, the Tea Party in Iowa compared Obama to Hitler in a billboard. Republicans frothed at the prospect of saying hell no to everything, a basketball player’s move from Cleveland to Miami briefly eclipsed all news and about anything; a dozen Russian “sleeper” spies accused of blending in and doing nothing in the US were deported; it was hotter than hell in Virginia and we even had a small earthquake to remind us that the earth itself really can slip from beneath our feet. I felt it. First in my life.

The Oldspice guy was there too.

Then again, maybe we’ll forget all that. Maybe when we look back, this is what we’ll see:

Oh!magination, a new app from our friends at KvJ & Company, let’s people capture, share, discover and delight in ideas. You can get a free download by attending TRDC at Gannett-USA TODAY headquarters from 1 to 4:30 pm on Monday, June 14.

Oh!magination joins us as the official app for ideation at TRDC. A playful, interactive application for ideas, you’ll get a chance to use it as you’re inspired. Rich Brandisi, the COO of KvJ & Company will be on hand to talk about opportunities for innovation in mobile-social computing, as well as show off Oh! during the app throwdown at TRDC.

Check out the program, watch the video, and by all means register today.

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As usual, Apple’s marketing has been masterful, right down to putting the iPad into the hands of eight influential reviewers. The fortunate few seem to like it, which is good for them (it is hard not to like cool gifts) and very good for Apple. If you care, Gizmodo has a good take, a comparison chart and links to the Elite Eight.

The rest of the world readies for a gold rush. What company doesn’t have a alchemist developing an iPad app that transforms their content into gold? Or a developer claiming to be Merlin?

The iPad may be the next, great gadget you can’t afford to ignore, but it would be a mistake to think it has the chemistry that changes the qualities of base metals, that it contains the magic elixir of longevity, or that it imparts some infinite and ultimate wisdom to those who hold it in their hands. Drop the sucker and the glass case will break.

Time to get real.

We won’t make the mistake of considering the iPad simply as a gizmo to be loved or loathed by gadgeteers, techies, cool-seekers, opportunists and pundits. We see mass adoption as the next wave of sophisticated, mobile computing platforms and advanced social networks. As mobile phones fundamentally changed the way people communicate, this year’s burst of tablet computing leads to the Internet of Everything Everywhere by the end of this decade, the Device Decade.

tabula rasa [ tab-yuh-luh rah-suh ] lat., clean slate.
The mind before it receives impressions gained from experience

WE’RE CONVENING TABULA RASA to stir innovation and entrepreneurship, as well as to make sense of significant forces that are converging on an informed, alway-on society. We’ve identified a few: the aforementioned Digital Decade, which spreads mobile computing and 10 billion devices throughout the world; and the tablet “burst,” which will likely last a year or two.

Here are some other issues on our agenda:

– Design-driven innovation. DIY and WYSIWYG innovation. The emergence of a new, visual language for seeing the world and communicating among its citizens.
– Publishing and broadcasting imperatives. Can devices fill traditional media’s looming and expanding revenue gap?
– Social entrepreneurship. Apps for companies, nonprofits, NGOs, community organizations and everyday citizens to engage.
– The Mobile-Social Society. How will continuing improvements in mobile communications platforms impact the social structures supporting commerce, finance, governance, health, the environment, transportation, entertainment, science, media and technology.
– Cool-seeking experiences. Techno Laggards and Massive Passives want to share the cool. Meet the huge, new world of connected customers.
– Boys with toys. The tech revolution and app development is skewed by the boys. What that means.
– The future of context. Is there one? Devices, apps and algorythms continue to atomize news and information, separating them from context.
– Channels, controls and trust. Who owns and controls content in all forms, on all devices? Does old wine taste better in new bottles? Should we trust the new gods of media?

With your help, we’ll start to address these issues and report on them. Our colleague Brian Reich, who’s conceived our collaborative “We Think” innovation agenda, will coordinate the initiative for reports and discussion at Tabula Rasa NYC. Contact Brian at brian@littlemmedia.com to get involved

Almost forgot: At Tabula Rasa, you’ll see amazing work and get to meet the creative geniuses who are pioneering the content, design, technology and business of tablet computing. So join the fun on Thursday, April 29 in New York. Register here.

I am excited to announce the launch of a new project that we are calling WeThink.

What is it? WeThink is a conversation about innovation and the future — an effort to explore new ideas and promote solutions to the challenges that our society is facing.

What’s the big deal? If you follow our work here at all, you’ll know that We Media is a movement – a concept – that helps explain how we know what we know, who we trust, and how we learn. It’s about power of the community. We Media is part of the infinite quest to harness the power of media, communication and human ingenuity for common good. And, well, We Media changes everything.  We Media changes the way we innovate.  We Media changes how we create, sustain, and grow successful ventures. We Media enhances the structures, models and economies that support human communication, interaction and achievement.  And through that, We Media challenges us to review our existing ways of operating, break apart our established structures, and re-build our approach to the future.  These changes impact all of us, and they are forcing each of us to find new ways of thinking about… well, everything.

What are you talking about? I have this crazy idea that we need to re-think the way we create, support, and sustain ventures.  We need to re-think how we innovate.  What we are doing isn’t working anymore – not as well as it should – and we need to try something different.  That means re-considering what kinds of companies and organizations are needed today, in response to the massive changes we are seeing in our society as a result of the influence that technology and the internet are having on our culture.  That means re-structuring how ventures, both for-profit and social in nature, are funded and managed.  That means re-assessing what success looks like for new companies and organizations, as well as re-considering how we measure progress of existing organizations against our needs in society.  And that means re-building the whole infrastructure of innovation… from how we teach it, promote it, cover it in the media, what skills we value, who gets to serve as gatekeepers, and more.

How will it work? Over the next year we will collect and share new ideas, highlight different approaches, ask tough questions, and propose solutions. We will lead a new and different kind of discussion about innovation. Everywhere we go we will be looking for new issues to discuss and new ideas to consider.  Everyone we talk to or encounter is invited to contribute their experience or perspective to help power this effort.  And all those ideas and suggestions, approaches and solutions will be shared.  They’ll be posted online.  They’ll be open to feedback.  They’ll be mashed up with other thoughts.  At the end of a year, our plan is to pull together a ‘solutions book’ that helps to support, and sustain, a vibrant and game-changing discussion going forward.  The rest we will figure out as we go.

The first few ideas and questions will be posted in the next several days.  So, stay tuned — the fun is just beginning.

A new survey is certain to stir the Clash of the Myths.

An overwhelming majority of reporters and editors now depend on social media to research stories, according to a new study by The George Washington University and Cision intelligence services. Among the journalists surveyed, 89% said they turn to blogs for story research, 65% to social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, and 52% to microblogging services such as Twitter. The survey also found that 61% use Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia. Most journalists said that social media were important or somewhat important for reporting and producing the stories they wrote.

From where do stories come? You.

That journalists would utilize all available resources seems obvious were it not for the fractious debate over hallowed ground. It goes like this: Blogs and social media are merely an echo chamber for what is reported by professionals.

Wired’s editor Chris Anderson calls that the “Derivative Myth.” He describes it this way: “Blogs which are mostly written by amateurs, couldn’t possibly do what We Do. Instead, they mostly just comment on what we do, supplying low-value-add chatter about our stories that must not be confused with Proper Journalism or other Quality Content from us Professionals.”

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism made a lot of ProJoes (proper journalists) feel better recently when it found in an examination of local news in Baltimore that while the news landscape has rapidly expanded, most of what the public learns is still overwhelmingly driven by traditional media—particularly newspapers. “These stories tended to set the narrative agenda for most other media outlets,” PEJ concluded.

Which may be true for local news in one city, but probably not so true in the breadth of news coverage that occurs outside narrow, geographic boundaries — news that may be more consequential for the much larger audiences comprising the communities of interest that bring most people and their news together.

Sources make the news. They have proliferated in the connected society. They are available to most anyone, ProJoes included.

The best reporters add value to news by choosing sources wisely and by making the right kind of connections among circumstances, evidence, events, people and sources. It doesn’t matter if they blog, tweet or publish a story in print. It doesn’t matter if they work for a newspaper, an NGO or as a citizen. No institution has a monopoly on leading the public conversation. The rest is economics and moonshine. See the following:

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Francois Ragnet

As Managing Principal, Technology Innovation, within Xerox Global Services, François Ragnet leads a team charged with transferring novel technologies into mainstream Xerox solutions offerings. Current initiatives focus on text-, image-, or feature-based categorization of documents, as well as identifying deeper semantic analyses which will enable “smart document” generation from traditional legacy formats or paper. His team also focuses on enhancing current offerings within the office environment to improve the efficiency of current products and streamline support processes.

Previously, Ragnet served as program manager and senior project leader for the Xerox Research Centre in Europe where his team provided innovative technologies in support of next-generation Xerox offerings. Their goal was to provide solutions that allow users to filter, configure and extract information from documents across advanced platforms that bridge production, printing and scanning. François was also a project leader in wireless technologies—specifically mobility and wireless (Bluetooth), content management, security, print and infrastructure management.

While at the Research Centre of Europe in Grenoble, France, Ragnet was a founding member of the Technology Showroom—a showcase of experimental technologies that hosts international events with customers from all over Europe.

Prior to joining Xerox, Ragnet was a researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technologies, in Gaithersburg, MD, where he focused on creation of a demonstration platform for state-of-the-art collaborative work technologies. He holds a master’s degree in telecommunications, from the Institut National des Telecommunications, Paris, France.

Learn more about François’ work here.

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Near the end of PBS’s Digital Nation, we’re taken to a military facility in the desert an hour outside of Las Vegas where a soldier sits in a cushy chair and pilots an unmanned drone over Afghanistan. The drone’s cameras send images from a war zone to a screen at the soldier’s work station. As he maneuvers the craft with his joystick, he identifies his target and fires a missile: a kill from 7500 miles away. When his shift ends, the soldier hops in his SUV and drives home to a Spielberg suburb where’s greeted by his two kids. Just another day at the office; from the Taliban to family hour in just a few frames.

Cut to the $13 million “Army Experience Center” in Philadelphia, a mall-like setting where teens play war games on rows of gaming stations resembling the drone pilot stations. As they play video games like World of Warcraft, a recruiter chats up the gamers, inviting them to think about signing up when they’re old enough. The Army, which last year trained a crop of drone pilots who’d never actually flown airplanes, calls it a “sampling experience.” Fully immersed in a virtual world, the kids play on, controlling an avatar not unlike a drone. They earn “experience points” from killing monsters on a quest that pits them against real-time enemies — other players participating online — in open combat.

War used to be hell. Now its a game that looks like Hell, only more exciting. You don’t have to leave your seat and you can go home when mom or wife beckons.

Filmmaker Rachel Dretzin juxtaposes scenes like these so matter-of-factly that Digital Nation never slips into the overheated argument about the impact of digital culture. Dretzin’s correspondent, the enthusiastic digerati and insightful culture-watcher Doug Rushkoff, plays the laid-back, inquisitive geek on a social quest. “How are we changing what it really means to be a human being by using all this stuff?’’ Rushkoff asks.

The documentary’s unifying question takes us to familiar guideposts — generational divides between digital natives and digital immigrants, disagreements over multi-tasking and focused study, wired classrooms and high-tech labs, advocates and critics of life in the digital age — but never into cliche. It embraces both enthusiasm for, and skepticism about, the digital revolution. With a considered tone it asks us to think for ourselves about what we take, and what we might lose, from the journey.

You can watch the full 90-minute show, which aired on Frontline this week, on the web. You can view video segments, share your story, download the audiocast and podcast, or follow a closed roundtable moderated by Rushkoff on the program’s website.