As you can well imagine, the future of documents is more than a curiosity for a company famous for its Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox Parc) and world-changing computing innovations such as the graphical user interface and computer mouse – but still synonymous with copying machines. Today Xerox is a major provider of consulting and outsourced printing for big companies that churn out boatloads of paper.

Among other things, Francois and I discussed how social media and the changing nature of the document enable a new kind of workplace powered by real-time knowledge sharing and perpetual creativity. We’re already seeing the rise of the networked work experience. Legions of loosely organized, cloud-powered solo entrepreneurs, contractors and free agents work at home, in coffee shops and in co-working collaboration hubs like our own WeSpace in Reston, Virginia.

What does all that have to do with documents?

Here’s a starting point: Our culture is built around documents. Whether it’s contracts, invoices, magazines, Microsoft Word or Google docs, legal records, blog posts, cave paintings, paychecks or even cash, it’s hard to imagine organized society without something that looks or acts or at least represents a collection of words, numbers, pictures and ideas fashioned into a human-readable format that we call a document.

I can imagine paperless news and a paperless workplace. I can’t imagine a society without documents.

What’s worse, the more I think about it, the less sure I am of exactly what I mean by the term “document.”

As the information required to organize our lives becomes more distributed, atomized, personalized and streamed, like magic, from unseen computers in the invisible digital cloud, the distinctions between disorganized data, loosely organized content, curated documents and full-fledged media experiences – or products – becomes fuzzier. Is a Tweetdeck dashboard, which displays a realtime stream of Twitter updates, a document? How about a screenshot of it? What about a Google Docs spreadsheet shared and updated continuously by a distributed work group, or a personalized newsletter delivered to your email inbox and posted to your Facebook wall – where friends “like” it and add comments?

What, exactly, is a “document” in a world of apps, screens and perpetually changing representations of information? Storify, a new web service, helps people create documents of documents – it’s a drag-and-drop tool to collect content from whatever online sources they like (Or, so it appears from what I’ve seen of it – I’m still awaiting access to the private beta so I can give it a try).

We know intuitively what we mean by a physical document, but what about information, knowledge and ideas that are not fixed in space and time? They’re revised, redacted, retracted, redesigned and refreshed continuously – like the advertisements and futuristic edition of USAToday from the 2002 movie Minority Report.

Of course, a digital newspaper, even on fabulous e-ink that’s vastly more capable than what you get now with a Kindle, is a modest mental leap forward from a world already hooked on the web, mobile apps, iPads and the like. But packaged news is just one kind of document, it’s already digital, ephemeral and hardly the most important document in our lives. How about your medical records, photo collections or online banking records?

What happens when realtime touches everything?

Have a listen, then please add your thoughts.

The podcast is broken into four parts, or click here to listen to the entire conversation.

Part One
What is a document in the age of social media? Is it time to update your definition?
Listen

Part Two
How will “social documents” impact organizations and knowledge workers?
Listen

Part Three
What are the social implications of virtual work?
Is there a clear vision for a cloud-based, app-driven workplace?
Listen

Part Four
What will become of security and privacy in an information overloaded world?
Listen
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Photo Credit: By Ludovic Bertron

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.

Maybe it was the Suicide Machine video demonstrating how to kill your social networking presence,
Or singer John Mayer asking his 2.8 million followers to undergo a digital cleansing.
Or digital pioneer Jaron Lanier’s stunning manifesto against hive-thinking and digital Maoism.

Maybe I was just wary of thin networks, shallow relationships that have become “friends,” the shameless self-promotion of celebrities, opportunistic brands suddenly going social, and a collective culture that celebrates the trivial above the meaningful through the madness of crowds.

I was having second thoughts about collective awareness and the promise of unifying knowledge through We Media. Then this happened: #Haiti at 90999.

More than $35 million has been raised, including $10 million directly from texting, and another $10 million raised through tweets.

There’s Yele Haiti, Wyclif Jean’s humanitarian site that has long been devoted to Haiti’s plight.

There’s the Twitter feeds of the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, and dozens of other organizations.

There’s the page on the iTunes Store that raises money for relief supplies, mobilizing relief workers, or providing financial resources.

There’s Google’s Crisis Response page that centralizes disaster relief, donation campaigns, news and information as well as providing a central place to track missing people that simplifies searches and makes reunions more likely.

There are the 13,000 eyewitnesses videos on You Tube, amateur and professional, that capture the moment and the aftermath.

News organizations such as CNN have even turned to social media, incorporating user-generated stories to convey the experience of the Haitian people. Social media’s ability to bring these stories directly to us has made an impact in a way that traditional news reporting can’t.

Suddenly, We Media matters again.

The key is keeping your eye on the ball. You can’t hit what you don’t see. A lack of focus, the slight movement of the head, or a distraction from flow alters the physics of the swing. In a blink, the slightest error of execution will send the ball flying to a place of unintended circumstance.

In the third week of coverage about Tiger Woods came a story from the White House: the Obama Administration directed all federal agencies to break down barriers to transparency, participation, and collaboration between the federal government and its citizens. The Open Government Initiative opens doors and data to the public. The policy serves the public’s right to know, promotes accountability, fosters participatory governance, encourages citizen involvement in the affairs of their government. The promise of open government is a big deal.

For reasons that are obvious, you’d think newspapers, broadcasters and news sites would be all over the story. I picked up a few – the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal – and didn’t find a word. I checked their web sites as well as those of dozens of other news sites. Nada.

But I did find a few stories about a golf icon and product shill who ruined his privileged existence through serial adultery and bad behavior. There were more than 56 million of them indexed on Google today.

It’s not as if nothing else was going on between the holidays. Congress wrestled with health care legislation. World leaders gathered in Copenhagen to address climate change. The president extended the economic stimulus package and introduced new programs to create jobs. The U.S. sent 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan to ensure security at home. But when the Tiger Woods scandal broke, it was if the world stood down from multiple crises that threatened civilization. Perhaps we needed a juicy story about the fall of an American folk hero to distract us. Or to drive revenue.

“God bless Tiger,” Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz told audiences at this week’s UBS Media Conference. When asked if the coverage would help the Internet company make the quarter, she said, “Oh, absolutely,” and added that he’s fueling more visits than Michael Jackson’s death.

You can almost hear mainstream publishers and broadcasters harrumpf in indignation: That damn Internet. That is until you consider the endless cover stories and page one teasers in print, the continuous broadcast streams on network and cable television, and the news sites overwhelmed by coverage of Mr. Woods’ woes – all of which fed the Net. The story that broke on the Net became excessive in the mainstream, entirely at the expense of stories of importance and meaning during a fragile and turbulent time.

If mainstream media want to argue that a sex scandal involving a popular pro golfer warrants more attention than stories that lead us out of crises, they need to discover the true values of journalism and storytelling in the digital age.

If mainstream media want to get paid for their content online, they should weigh the value of 56 million stories as bad as theirs.

If mainstream media want to ignore a national policy directive that gives citizens more access to the way government works, then they deserve to be replaced by something that’s better.

I learned about the Open Government directive in an email alert from the White House. I assume that millions of others got the email, which was anticipated for months, including mainstream media and the White House press corps.

Only one news outlet, the online Huffington Post, ran with the story. A blog post by edemocracy expert Peter Shane lead the home page of the site for a few hours yesterday. “This is exciting stuff, but it only heightens the need for what communication scholars call “trusted intermediaries” to help everyday citizens make the maximum use of new information resource,” he wrote.

I take the point, as should all journalists. Mr. Shane gets it right (corrected, per comments below). Citizens are now better prepared than traditional intermediaries to truly affect policy, mobilize public interest, contribute and share ideas, and contextualize the meaning of transparent governance. Networks and movements such as the Personal Democracy Network, Tech President and NextGov are already way ahead of mainstream media.

Visualize this: What if we could redirect the energy and resources behind 56 million stories to some clarity about health care, jobs, the economy, Afghanistan or climate change? What if we as citizens could mobilize around intelligence that is now available to everyone? What if we could work as partners with experts and those who govern?

We could move from the general to the specific is just a few moves. It’s all about keeping our eye on he ball.

But even the most dedicated admirer can see that craigslist is a fine mess of informational spaghetti that can cause design indigestion. Wired magazine has prescribed an Extreme Makeover for craigslist and asked top designers as well as readers to give it a user-interface facelift.

Earlier this year, our friends at the Society for News Design created craigslist alternatives, formerly known as classifieds, for newspapers.

You can make the argument that ugly is aesthetic if it is successful and that the craigslist look-and-feel is part of its charm.

But I’d rather not look at plumbing. Here’s my attempt to make craigslist better to use and easier on the eyes. Design is a business model.

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Radio: With online sites streaming music for free they do not bother, as services such as last.fm do this advert free and users can choose the songs they want instead of listening to what the radio presenter/DJ chooses.