| Follow @chrismorse05
Raleigh, NC
I'm an Account Manager for the Brand Communications + Design team at Red Hat. I also work on exciting projects for opensource.com as the Marketing Manager for email and webcasts. My voice is the one you hear at the beginning of each Open Your World webcast and I'm the one that gets nervous about how many emails we send out to you all. I live and work in Raleigh, NC, but I was born and raised between Boston and Cape Cod in Massachusetts. (Go Red Sox!)
Hearing stories about how radical transparency, collaboration, and other open source principles can transform organizations and challenge conventional thought is pretty exciting to me. And it's a little addicting.
Authored Comments
And definitely be sure to listen to the OGG when it's posted-- you'll hear how I was eaten by a tiger!
(Now that I've got the attention of all you LOTR lovers, read on.)
Chris: great post. I've often been told that social media is all about joining conversations and participating in dialogue rather than creating new, segmented places for people to share their thoughts and opinions. (“Hey, you, come over here and say what you just said to these people!”) So I'm 100% with you on that train of thought. In fact, my old boss wrote a book that talked about some of this as well (oh, the irony). It's called “Social Media is a Cocktail Party” and talks about just that (maybe I'll see if Mr. Tobin wants to comment too).
The question/comment I pose to you (and anyone else reading this) is whether or not we think there could ever be a platform or community-based site that could some day accommodate all schools of thought and all special interest groups/subgroups accordingly. Obviously the Internet itself was a catalyst for this, but what’s the next step from a community or sharing standpoint? Many sites are trying-- I see Facebook promoting their groups option for example. They’ve even aggregated groups based on interest entered within a user profile in order to possibly spur conversations despite otherwise common social barriers. (WARNING: This is just an example, I definitely don't think Facebook has the answer.) But what if we had one community resource to rule them all? And user-submitted content could be entered and directly routed appropriately to interested parties. ("Interesting. Let's Google it!") Then maybe these silo-ed communities could become more fluid and beneficial to each other because there would no longer be an entity at the center. It could be more of a common-use, free market exchange that had less silos and no domain names to jump between. Just users and thoughts.
Trippy, I know. Just something to noodle on though.