My personal favorite was from Mr. Hart’s AP English class: Describe your view through an imaginary window. I am still slightly aggravated with myself to this day, or I should say, perplexed, that I didn’t just think to look out of an actual window in my house and describe what I saw. Instead I sat at my desk with the worst writer’s block, tapping my pencil against the desk, painfully trying to force an imagined view into my head. What’s funny is I think back now to the trauma of it all and really can’t remember what I wrote; I think it had something to do with icicles.

So it is with that in mind that I often think about how much the web changed the written landscape. Think about how many writers and content producers beyond traditional media (you know, the people who loved writing and creating the stuff even back in high school).  Many of them are a direct result of the advent of the digital pen. Much of the content produced may not be Poe, Emerson, Rand or Shakespeare but it doesn’t need to be.  Clive Thompson has an essay called The New Literacy in the September issue of Wired that focuses on this phenomenon and also reflects on whether the “digital pen” is hurting the overall quality if writing.

People are creating some of the best content on the web today. Blogging enables thousands to produce incredible content across genres. Think about a well-thought blog post that you’ve read recently. Descriptive title, subject statement, number of paragraphs backing up an argument and some type of conclusion perhaps. That sure sounds a heck of a lot like the type of assignment many of us ran from.  And that doesn’t scratch the surface.  There is the micro-content world that Thompson touches on such as Twitter and Facebook.  Look at the extent of content, solid writing at that, taking place in the enterprise in the form of business plans, emails and PowerPoint presentations.

Content creation takes place us around us all the time.  Writing is getting churned out like crazy. The digital pen has enabled us to publish our thoughts in an easy way.  Even those of us who dreaded writing our view through an imaginary window could rail something out in 20 minutes without thinking twice. I find this truly amazing.

And guess what, how’s this for an essay?  519 words.  Knocked it out the iPhone on the train ride into the city this morning.  Wonder if Mr. Hart would approve?

DALMATIAN : DOG ::

(A) oriole : bird

(B) horse : pony

(C) shark : great white

(D) ant : insect

(E) stock : savings

It seems with growing frequency, I’m pulled into conversations regarding Twitter with many who are just now learning about it.  Great Time article on Twitter by the way.  Yes, I get the often “I just don’t get Twitter.”  I used to think that too when I first heard about the service.  I quickly no longer thought that.  But, recently, I get “Why use Twitter when you can just update your status on Facebook?”  And this throws me right back into the 90′s:  “Do you use the internet?” “Oh yes, I use AOL all the time.”  So back to my SAT analogy:

web : AOL :: Twitter status : Facebook status

Remember the walled garden of AOL, how many users would think that was the web, never venturing out into the wild world of the wide web.  Times change but I see history repeating itself.  The struggle and growing awareness of open and closed systems.  There is a tremendous amount of value being generated off the openness of Twitter than is available within Facebook, where your status network can only be as big who you are willing to have in your personal friends’ list.  The same goes for status in LinkedIn and who you are willing to have in your professional connections’ list.  The situation is certainly more complex than AOL of the 90s but strikingly similar.

What struck me is something quite simple: It takes practice. If you are trying to build a serious social media oriented brand, personal or business, it doesn’t happen overnight. I’ve spoken to a number of people who have thought of starting their own blogs or even video blogging themselves. I’ve even thought about doing a few video posts myself. Often (I assume like people early in TV careers but who knows), there is apprehension of getting in front of and speaking into the camera. Writing for me was just easier to jump into, it feels more protected. But video blogging is very interesting and adds a whole different dynamic. It certainly makes it more personal.

Anyway, whether you are writing or using video as your medium, it takes practice. Just like everything else. Because the web makes everything easier, I think we fall into the trap that everything on the web is easy. Starting a blog, building a business, writing an iPhone application. If you want to be good (and gain a comfort) doing something, you have to practice and put in a good deal of effort. And for some, it comes naturally easy and they need less practice. For others, they need more. Just like everything else in life.

IntenseDebate is one of the major blog commenting platforms out there.  The other is Disqus, the one I use on this blog and one I tend to favor based on overall reliability and feature set.  Both companies clearly get the value of commenting, user-generated content and the real power of conversation aggregation.  But if I were to put the two on a score card on execution, Disqus demonstrates real innovative thinking on how to put an overall platform together and paint their vision of what conversation aggregation can do and how to do it.  This was evidenced by their very early integration into WordPress and Daniel Ha’s continued work to integrate into FriendFeed once they emerged a critical aggregation player as well.

But, what is also clear is WordPress understands the value and importance of the comments on blogs (not that they didn’t before).  And as the major blog platform, WordPress has the value chain power to use this strategic acquisition to emerge as the leader in blogging as well as commenting.  And it is for this simple but important reason, that they acquisition is a huge coup for IntenseDebate in prepping for the future to potentially become the ultimate winner in this segment.  There is a sheer numbers game here and by WordPress rolling Intense’s toolkit out as part of their builds, it will instantaneously deploy Intense’s technology to blogs everywhere.  That removes one key obstacle for Intense that Disqus will continue to have to overcome in order to gain market share:  convincing blog owners to install.  Now, for IntenseDebate, it happens automatically.

Let’s hope that WordPress remains agnostic in their approach to continue to allow third party developers to build, promote and florish inside the WordPress platform.  I would like to continue to remain a Disqus user and expect to see fantastic things from them.  I will be keen to see how Disqus responds because we could be witnessing a business case of value chain integration that will be very tough to withstand.

I cannot add anything to the second Tissue, others have blogged about the technology and architectural framework issues that Twitter is experiencing. Ironically, Tim O’Reilly messaged his interest in blog post detailing some hypothesis about Twitter’s issues via a tweet itself. I definitely recommend reading it. Anyway, technology is one major Tissue, let’s leave it at that.

Secondly, micro-blogging has taken hold. This is also a major Tissue. Quite simply, there are so many things in the world you can convey in 140 characters (the character limit that Twitter allows in a single message). Anything you can think of, even notifying others of earthquakes, can fly in seconds over Twitter.  Because of this dynamic, many are shooting their thoughts over Twitter instead of blogging.  I find myself tweeting much more than blogging because I find I can convey much of the thought in two sentences so why ‘go on’ about it.  So we are witnessing a change in human behavior or at least the behavior of early technology adopters, we still must admit most of the world doesn’t blog or tweet.

Anyway, one could argue this dynamic is basically causing Twitter to slowly but surely handle all of the messaging load from every blogging platform out there, a major Tissue. In fact, now even when people blog, they shoot a note out via Twitter that their blog post is posted.  When they use FriendFeed, Tweets are fired out.  When people reply, Tweets are fired out. So Twitter’s success, adoption and use cases is what is causing all of the Tissues to begin with and could lead to Twitter’s downfall, the ultimate irony.

It is this irony that I find the most fascinating of all.  I’m personally rooting for Twitter.

BTW, I could have used Twitter to convey much of this via Twitter instead of blogging. In fact, I did to make a point.  And don’t forget to find my tweet notifying you all that I published this blog post .

My view before getting to the solution, we must get back to purpose of blogging or participating in social media in any way. Is it to become a destination yourself? Or is it, as Gary Vaynerchuk likes to say, to “execute on being you” and building your personal legacy. I’ve always thought of it in terms of the latter, to participate and being part of the conversation, but never the ultimate destination. We must put ourselves in the role of the consumer, centralizing them to go hundreds of locations to consume content. This is why RSS is so popular to distribute the content and why aggregation is so dominant to bring it back together for them.

Which brings me to my next point? Loic stressed centralization as the solution but one of his primary reasons is because the conversation is happening in all facets of his social media life and he cannot keep track of it. My hypothesis to solving this is not that each blogger become a content destination at their blog but rather a solution must developed to solve that problem. Perhaps FriendFeed and Disqus are two early solutions attacking this problem; the space certainly needs to evolve further. Brad Feld discusses the notification solution proposed by Josh Kopelman which I found very provactive.

I tent to agree where this discussion is heading. I want to be social media involved in a number of places, not have everyone come one place to get it. However, I DO want to manage it all in one place. I would love a “notification dashboard” that is perhaps built upon web services against all the APIs available. I’m imagining a social media Bloomberg of sorts but fully interactive. Here are some of the things such a dashboard could do for me:

• Tell me when I being replied to in any venue?
• Provide me an aggregated bio or links to information on who is “friending” me.
• Notify me when a friend or someone I often have discussions is actively taking part in a conversation, where and in context
• Let me reply back to conversation directly from my dashboard but in context like Disqus
• Use attention data to provide me a priority on what I should look at first versus the less important
• Use semantic techniques to provide me with relevant content and similar conversations
• Use sentiment on the conversations so I have knowledge about where there is agreement or disagreement in the conversations
• A method to “educate” or send things to my dashboard when I stumble upon something interesting so I can have things waiting in a queue for me

Anyone interested in building this, let me know. Should be simple. Just a merging of all of the latest technology trends into one central application. But let me manage centrally but participate everywhere.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xg2MukcqbdE

So, Gary is spot on. Everything can captured and those that elect to participate are even more visible obviously. Everyone can be the media. So the question is what is good, what is bad? Often times, the definition is unequivocal. I am not thinking about those scenarios, I’m more concerned about the “gray” area. Back to Jeremiah’s twitter, what is professional and what is unprofessional? Same thing, more concerned with the “gray” area. Twitter is a service to express “what are you doing?” It is not a feature of LinkedIn where you express “what are you doing professionally today?”

So how are blogs, videos, tweets that are more personal perceived? Going out for drinks with co-workers ON A TUESDAY in the middle of the week! Gray? Bad? Unprofessional? If you blog or twitter a couple of years ago that you never wanted to work in a certain industry but fate has brought you exactly there, is all hope lost? They will know. Yes, I swing the pendulum to the extreme to make the point. But it will be very interesting to see where the meme heads.

It used to be that your resume was your personal brand. Just the other day, I was having a conversation with a co-worker about why people still insist on placing “less-than-professional” home email addresses on their resume. It is so avoidable but it is still done. And this is now a such a small set of bytes on one piece of digital paper and is now the least of concerns, a small drop in the ocean of information that could be more readily available with a small amount of investigation.

So in closing, of course, do not be “bad”, do not be “unprofessional”. There are a lot of things that are clear in the views of most. But with all things, people do not define things or form opinions the same way. So now, more than ever, the divide that is closed through technology is going to play an even greater role.

Anyway, I could be as bold to say that Twitter is one of the most valuable services to emerge in the last couple of years. Is it simple? Yes. But it serves a purpose. You can keep track of friends and colleagues. You can group message. You can lurk in an acceptable way (i.e. where society will not consider you a stalker). It serves as quite a serviceable micro-blogging tool and can be utilized a personal PR and promotion engine with short-URL. (See Paul Kedrosky and Jeremiah Owiyang as two examples.)

To this day, I am still finding myself trying to convince others about the value of Twitter. In most cases, those individuals have never used it or refuse to. To them, I can only suggest to give it a try. And it is not right for everyone but it is right for me. So, Twitter, I apologize.