The Web always promised to bring people together. But just as simply, it can drive people apart, as geographical barriers or partial or full anonymity empowers people to say things or behave in ways they wouldn't in a direct setting.

Accelerated by the new reality of realtime streams where everyone has a megaphone and seemingly everyone is working to "go viral" and make the biggest noise leads to a constant cacophony of shouting on the issues of the day. And of late, as I outlined in my last post about Trump's looming $100 billion productivity crisis, just about every stream and news source is dominated by politics and the impact to people by political decisions.

For those opposed to the Trump team's way of thinking, the daily barrage of news and rumors can be fatiguing. Each morning can bring new horrors of gut-churning policy and more needing to escalate to fight back. This weekend's sparked crisis stemming from an ill thought out and very likely racist and illegal refugee travel ban saw rallies across the country and millions of dollars raised to flow into the coffers of charities aiming to help, like the ACLU. (I too donated, and my company has promised to set aside millions to help.)


As colleague Yonatan Zunger warns (and you absolutely must read his post), we will likely hit a wall of outrage fatigue. If there is a steady stream of controversial news that impacts us, or people we know, or people we are tangentially fond of, we will run into capacity limits to be angry and to be heard, as the calamities run into each other. But even if that occurs, that doesn't mean we can act as if nothing is happening at all.

I've already seen people yearn for the good old days when we could debate data portability, site aggregation, text editors, or even which mobile OS is the best. But at a time when people's lives are at risk, and foundations we expected to be stable are proving themselves unstable, having a row about the latest geek gadget seems out of place.

It's not that we didn't see this coming. Back in 2006, an ancient eleven years ago, I knew we would see the web accelerate people's disagreements. People want to flock to their tribes, where others agree with them, and the opposite side can seem evil, foolish or subhuman. Most of the time, they're not - even as their words are alarming and frightful. We knew when people had an opportunity to polarize one another and their beliefs, they would. And every study shows this - including our unprecedented divisions in government, globally, nationally and locally.

We can use the Web to rally together and raise funds and awareness for our causes, and we will. But while I'm excited to see the deep pocketed among us excitedly match donations, a great chunk of society is living paycheck to paycheck, and the access to discretionary funds to hold back the government, an institution that is designed to help them, is simply going to run out.

Until we reach some level of stability and understanding with one another, and are out of a crisis mode, you can expect the 'all politics all the time' streams to continue. Mild apologies.

By Ken Stewart of ChangeForge (Twitter/FriendFeed)

Is LinkedIn making the leap beyond an online resume service into a socially-rich, community-driven platform? Last year LinkedIn announced its new application platform in an effort to stimulate the interactivity of its members, and also announced enhanced groups as part of this bold initiative to seed itself as the proverbial Facebook for professionals.

Many of you enjoy LinkedIn as an online holster for your professional accolades as well for keeping in touch with your professional network. One often used mechanism is that of groups. Perhaps you participate in some groups based upon your geography, your personal and professional interests, or maybe you simply want to network.

I began experimenting with a group to share more industry specific content with my network in the hopes of generating some interesting conversations. I took my time to pipe in several industry specific news feeds to keep content fresh, sent personal notes to each group member as they joined, and even posted regular discussion topics hoping to elicit opinions.

I watched the daily e-mail updates roll through, and was disappointed in the results of my social experiment; Discussion topics and news items alike consistently showed "0 comments", denoting the simple fact the discussions simply weren't happening. I quickly realized it was time to take a step back and taken inventory of the situation.

I started paying attention more closely to how I interacted with the default, daily e-mail digests I would receive from other industry-groups I had joined. Below are some samples of what I began to consistently see:

While the first group has over 5,100 members and the second has almost 900 members (after forming just a few months ago), amazingly, day after day I would see little to no activity outside of the posted discussions or news items themselves.

While my little social experiment is hardly comprehensive, discussions with other professionals in my network have offered much of the same qualitative analysis: Only a small percentage of groups see any significant conversation threads. So it would seem that in the minds of many I network with, LinkedIn groups are on the outs.

What are your experiences with LinkedIn groups? Are they helping you extend the conversation and do they yield benefits you would care to express?

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By Corvida Raven of SheGeeks.net (FriendFeed/Twitter)

Rob Diana, a friend, Grand Effect Network member, and fellow author on louisgray.com, recently discussed: With All This Openness Where Is The Destination?

Rob picks up where Alexander Van Elsas left off a few weeks ago with Questions. To summarize both articles, they both push out key questions that pertain to the evolution of not only social media, but the Web as a community.

One of the questions that Alexander posed was: "If everything becomes open and connected, what will happen to the big destinations?"

Rob's Response:

For the Web 2.0 and social media crowd, the current destinations are not really destinations. Destination may also be an old term for what is currently happening. Destinations were the keys to the castle in the old Web, but the new Web is more about communication and conversations that are happening now.

Most Web sites are still thinking in terms of the destination.

The Destination Exists In Your Connections
I have to say that in this case, the Web sites aren't the only ones thinking in terms of the destination. Mainstream users do too and they only want their destination to be one stop away. Now, what's one stop away from your real destination? A connection maybe? Let's say so for arguments sake.

First, let me state that I think early adopters may be the only people pondering this question. The big destination sites will always exist, because they're the biggest, the most popular, and most of people's connections already exist there. All they need to do is find them. That process is simplified by the following theory: find one, find them all! If I find one person I know on Facebook or MySpace, I'm bound to find a few more mutual friends too.

Whatever, So Where's The Real Destination?

So what will happen to the big destinations later on down the line? I'm betting that they'll adapt to the landscape and integrate what needs to be integrated. Facebook is already doing this with Digg and StumbleUpon integration.

They aren't alone.

I'd bet you $100 that just about every site you've signed up for in the past month had some type of integration with another site that is connected to your connections and conversations.

Not to argue with Rob's opinion, but I think that the Web has always been about communication, conversations, and where they're happening. Those are reasons why I signed up for AOL IM and not Yahoo IM during my middle school years. Those are reasons why Yahoo was my first search engine and not Google (or even AOL for that matter). I stuck with where the conversations were happening and that's where my friends were too. The real destination is in the conversation.

People aren't just trying to get to these sites, they're trying to get to the conversations as easily as possible. If they could eliminate the site, they probably would. Why do you think instant messaging is so popular? The conversation is where all the good stuff is.

As The Web Evolves
Improved? Yes. New? Hell no. The Web has become more interesting, more glamorous, and more entertaining (personally), with all these new ways to connect with people. However, the destination has always been somewhere in the conversation. You know what that means? There isn't just one destination and never will be in all of this open and well connected space!

Read more by Corvida Raven at SheGeeks.net.

By Rob Diana of Regular Geek (Twitter/FriendFeed)

With the growing popularity of Twitter, people are looking at ways to use Twitter-like applications for different purposes. There are the corporate Twitters, like Yammer. There are open source Twitters, like Laconica. Now, Dave Winer is trying to find a way to "shrink wrap" a Twitter install. He is basing his efforts on the open source Laconica, and he is documenting things as he makes progress. Dave feels that it is time we break out of Twitter. It is not that there are problems with Twitter, but he has an interesting idea:

"It might mean lots of little Twitters. I'm starting one here on scripting.com, and in the first few hours of use it's already interesting. It wouldn't in any way be a replacement for Twitter. But it offers an alternative. Sort of like the difference between a blog and a big website, when blogs were just booting up in 1999 or so."

Why is this an interesting idea? Mainly because there is minimal discussion on most blogs and websites. In some cases, a website expands by creating forums or message boards. People can ask questions, get advice and respond to some of these same questions. So, does it make sense to have a local Laconica installation for a website? And what do we call these things? Dave has wondered whether Twitter will become the term for what techies are calling microblogging. That is not the real question. If we call it a Twitter install like we used to with Xerox and copiers, who really cares. That is a simplification of the question.

The real question is one of benefits. Forums are really useful in large communities due to the number of people that can ask and answer questions. However, there is a critical mass of members that must be reached before there is enough traffic in a forum for it to be useful. With a microblogging installation, you can interact directly with your readers and keep the conversation local to the blog. The sense of community could increase greatly. Events could be based on the use of the microblogging stream. Live blogging for events like SXSW could be covered through the microblogging stream.

The big issue with using microblogging is the ease of installation, maintenance and use. If Dave could accomplish his goal of a shrink-wrap Laconica installation, this would be significantly easier. Forums have significantly more overhead in terms of maintenance and use. Microblogging could be a simple baby step in forming more of a community around a blog.

If you really want to name this idea, you can call it a micro-community. Or to be simple, let's just call it a community, because that is what it really is.

Read more by Rob Diana at RegularGeek.com.