• Social Networking
• Blogrolls
• RSS feeds
• email

It helps to think conceptually of the commonalities in these items. Primarily, I’m concerned about how we manage information flow. In the future, sociologists will look at our nascent digital culture as a clumsy initial attempt to acquire and manage useful information and relationships. Our current clumsiness is resulting in information overload. Our feeble attempts at keeping up with information flow is leading to new symptoms of “digital addiction” for which we have few remedies short of disconnecting and turning it all off.

Social networking is obviously a big idea with big problems. If I can muster some good thought and eloquence, I might visit this topic at a future time. The problem set is so huge and daunting that I’m honestly intimidated by it. I’m not one of these amateurish, self-styled “social networking gurus” or “social app gurus” who think they have the answers while spouting nonsense and demanding ill-deserved retainer fees.

Blogrolls used to be novel and useful. Good bloggers often included other great writers in their blogrolls. Blogrolls were great places to discover more great content back when blogging was new and we had tolerance and time for discovery. Blogrolls now are bloated and less helpful. The problem boils down to one word: Awareness. We are unaware of what is going on behind our blogrolls. I don’t have a blogroll because of the ineffectiveness of blogrolls. Maybe its time we scrap the blogroll.

A related problem is RSS feeds. RSS feeds are a great solution to the aforementioned blogroll problem. Instead of clicking through blogrolls to find content or information, RSS feeds bring content back to you anytime your “subscriptions” publish new content. Generally, you would subscribe to individual bloggers or news content sites. However, we’ve all seen our RSS subscriptions grow to gargantuan proportions because we’re reluctant to miss out on anything our favorite bloggers are writing about.

The problem is, even our favorite bloggers seldom write about things we care about. That’s why the most popular blogs are focused on very specific verticals. TechCrunch covers the technology startup space. The Huffington Post covers politics, and even more specifically, politics from a liberal or progressive point of view. Engadget is a blog about gizmos and electronic gadgets. The Official Google Blog is about all things Google (GOOG). Curiously, ProBlogger is focused on blogging and making money with blogs.

This blog, Incoherence, will never get popular because it is scattered all over the place. It is literally a latticework of incoherent topics that appeal to me personally. I have some major areas of focus but even these are disparate enough that few people will derive consistent value from subscribing to my RSS feed.

Indeed, RSS feeds need to be rethought. Managing this channel of information flow needs to be rethought. Perhaps the very method or paradigm of information acquisition needs to be completely redesigned.

Email is the big hairy monster. I don’t pretend to know how to fix email, but I do have ideas of what I’d like to see so please bear with me as I brain dump. Everyone knows about the hazards of email including spam and phishing so I won’t get into that here. It goes without saying that security is a chief concern.

Email has changed the least of all the foundational technologies of the Internet. We now have sophisticated filters that help us fight spam and phishing, but aside from that, the basic functionality of email hasn’t improved much over the years. It is still a “solid-state” piece of information that doesn’t change or react dynamically to customized user needs. The dynamism that does occur must occur over a thread of conversation that changes from a delayed back and forth between conversation participants.

Another problem is the outdated link concept within email. With current technology, we’re mostly limited to the ability to type out Web addresses as links within email. When my bank or car dealer sends me an email, they must provide a link to an external website that will take me where they want me to go. This opens up a whole set of vulnerabilities that spammers and phishers try to exploit. A dynamic approach to email might solve this problem.

New ideas abound so I will explore some companies addressing these problems in future posts. I believe that fresh thinking and action in these areas will result in next generation innovations that will indeed create great value.

Advertising Age is reporting that U.S. media employment fell to a 15-year low in December 2007. The major driver behind this slump is the struggling newspaper industry. This is not surprising because nearly everyone is spending more time getting their news on the Internet and less with broadsheets. Exacerbating the losses is the disappearing classifieds business as online alternatives like craigslist, partially owned by eBay (EBAY) offer cheaper and more immediate classifieds solutions. The New York Times (NYT), also known as the Gray Lady to the cognoscenti, recently announced another 100 job cuts as a result of diminishing revenues and profits.

Suffering to a lesser degree are the broadcast and cable television companies. Still, recent studies show that consumers are spending far less time surfing the boob tube and much more time online for entertainment on websites like YouTube which is owned by Google (GOOG). Employment numbers are falling here too but to a lesser degree than in newspapers.

Rounding out the traditional big three in media is the similarly suffering radio industry. Blame Steve Jobs and his Apple (AAPL) iTunes-powered iPods for the vanishing radio listener. The Billboard Music Charts just don’t have the same clout and influence they used to as music fans take control of their own playlists by getting farther out on the long tail. Who needs a disc jockey to tell you what’s hot when you can discover that perfectly obscure independent band on the Internet?

All is not doom and gloom. While traditional U.S. media is quickly shrinking, the U.S. advertising/marketing services industry is growing at a healthy clip. Advertising agencies, marketing-consulting services, graphic design, public relations agencies, and media-buying agencies are all segments witnessing expanding payrolls. This flies a little in the face of the argument that content is king. At least with job counts, it seems that those who subsidize the creation of content is king. Or perhaps content is still king but influence is moving away from professionally produced content controlled by a handful of conglomerates and towards massive amounts of user-generated content by amateurs and independent bloggers. Top bloggers are making a great living and their “jobs” aren’t being counted.

The growth in advertising/marketing services jobs bodes well for the startup that I am just beginning to build. SocialOptimize, my social media development and consulting agency that I co-founded, was started to answer a huge need in the marketplace. My partner and I found that huge corporations, members of the Fortune 2000, were in dire need of help addressing the burgeoning social networking and social media space. Huge user-generated content sites like Myspace, owned by News Corporation (NWS-A), and Facebook, partially owned by Microsoft (MSFT) are capturing the majority of consumers’ time spent online. Advertising dollars will flow to these platforms as agencies like SocialOptimize steer corporate marketing dollars to where the eyeballs and wallets are congregating.

Going forward, it will be interesting to see how Advertising Age will count the jobs and advertising dollars associated with social networking web applications and widgets. Software developers are finding ways to serve advertising through their apps and widgets. At SocialOptimize, we have had big marketers propose advertising on our own proprietary widgets because our apps offer marketers much more value than traditional advertising channels like newspapers and radio. This value comes from the ability to target deeper audience segments while offering demographic data and evidence of return-on-investment (ROI) at a more granular level. Well-designed apps are also much more engaging than traditional media, causing consumers to spend enormous amounts of time interacting with the apps and the social networks attached to those web applications and widgets.

The big negative about this report is that I’ll have to compete even harder to attract top talent to SocialOptimize. Good talent is so difficult to find!