Seriously! I was surprised, too. I found some great information about this on the Jobing.com website. Hope you all find it useful.
http://phoenix.jobing.com/Community_Blog.asp

Or use it to lose one. This went down in March, but it's an important thing to think about:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29901380/

Yikes. Good point.

I've heard somethings about Twitter and I was curious about what it was exactly. So, I watched the video on Twitter.com, and found that It's really simple. You simply have a constant place to see or post with your friends the answer to one question: What are you doing? Then you have only 140 characters to use.

To me, the idea seemed too connected and it seemed like too much clutter (I don't want to walk around with a constantly buzzing iPhone just to find out that my distant friend is drinking coffee). But after watching the video, and can imagine it being useful and even fun, if I kept my messages within a close group of friends who I really do want to stay connected with.

For example, sometimes my husband goes away for business, and I would love to hear a more frequent updates from him as he has free time, and I think that he would enjoy the occasional update from home as well. Anyway, I haven't even started with facebook yet, so I suppose I should get my feet wet there and then look at twitter.

The web is completely different now than it was ten years ago, which is something that needs to be embraced rather than resisted. The fact is that we're having a revolution of user-created content for information, entertainment, communication, and other forms of media.

Now we watch TV shows in which we vote for the outcome, we watch Presidential debates based on questions submitted by normal people through facebook, and we watched the Presidential Inauguration with a live stream of user comments.
Wikipedia is completely user-generated, supervised, and edited, and it has more than 600,000 visits per day. Twitter users make news travel faster than ever before by simply watching for "trends" in people's comments.

To me, its a beautiful thing. We're continuing to break down the top-down leadership method in which a small group of leaders decides what we understand and enjoy. Now we have information created and delivered within minutes, and companies are beginning to get information so much quicker from the bottom-up and therefore making faster decisions based on our needs. (That is, the companies which embrace social media--google, for example).

Now, what if the state government caught on to this movement? How much faster could we pass budget initiatives and communicate across organizations within the government? Think of how much more efficient and democratic government would be if they took advantage of immediate communication across organizations and constituents...

Hmmm, I never really thought of those things as a way to revolutionize the world and make things more efficient. I only saw it as a way to keep in touch with friends. But I can see your point when you look at it all together. News travels faster, important (and unimportant) updates come immediately, and we are able to work quicker. We use IM at work all the time, and it's fantastic. Now that I've finished my Facebook profile, I'll need to start on Twitter. Is there anything else I need to be in touch with?

RobbieASU, I can understand the desire to communicate more quickly and across traditional borders, but there's one thing that sticks out for me on the whole Wikipedia, you-create-your-knowledge thing: Not all of that information is correct, and it's generally not deep enough.

Not all of that information is coming from qualified sources, like professional historians, researchers, doctors, and others who have spent their whole life on the topic. How on earth can someone scour the internet and claim to have sufficient knowledge on a topic to pretend to be as informed as those who've gone through extensive training?

If Wikipedia is the source of knowledge these days, what use is the university system? I've come across many situations of "self-educated" snobbery lately, where someone only had enough knowledge to sound somewhat informed on a topic, but they had no real ability to function in that area. It really limits progress on discussing important issues. It's really frustrating to see so much smoke and so little fire these days.

amysle, as far as I know, those are the most progressive (and popular) communication tools around. There is also a site called digg (http://digg.com/) which I've only just stated using, which is for basically giving news articles a thumbs up (digg) or thumbs down (bury) rating. When a lot of people "digg" and article in will show up on digg's home page as one of the big stories. So basically the news that is most interesting to the most people shows up there. You can also create a community with your friends, where the articles which you digg are put together so you can see each other's stories--I can imagine this being very useful for a group of people interested in or researching a common thing. But then again, I've only now begun, so we'll see...

And paulclca, I see your point and I've heard it many times before, especially in college. I think it's a great point. Real researchers and scholars still need to be respected. That's actually part of the beauty of wikipedia--if something is not backed by legitimate research, it is "flagged" as original content which is not backed up by sources. That's exactly how academic scholarship works--original content must be backed by a series of sources which can be traced. Now, the difference is that we are responsible for it, and its not just locked up in University Libraries. I know it's not perfect, but at least its a start at spreading mostly accurate information. And think, those people you are talking about who now sound "somewhat informed" used to be so uninformed about things that they couldn't even begin to debate important issues. Now, even though its a small step, at least they are engaged and moving forward.