How often have you thought our country needs to change? That something is fundamentally and systemically wrong that needs fixing? And that things could be fixed if we leveraged social media to find the best ideas to agree on?

In the world of technology, we’re used to upheaval. In fact, we rely on it to drive innovation and improvements. So why can’t we use technology to solve some of the underlying problems we all agree need to change?

Technology innovations have often been able to fill gaps - even leapfrog them in many cases - between our “old world" habits and the demands of the "new world.”

How Technology Plugs Gaps

Apple is a classic example of what I’m talking about. We used to live in a world where music lived on compact discs. Then came MP3 files, which made music infinitely more accessible - too accessible some might say.

But it took Apple to make buying music and transferring it to a portable player easy, putting your entertainment microcosm in the palm of your hand. Today, the iTunes Store is the world’s largest music retailer.

Another revolution is taking place in retailing, where the use of “big data” - the technology of parsing huge amounts of customer information to help companies like Target, for example, identify whether a female shopper is pregnant and offer her appropriate products - is significantly reshaping marketing.

This type of insight has privacy advocates up in arms. Technology’s benefits often cut both ways, yet it’s evident that this type of arrangement holds the potential to benefit both marketers and consumers - letting Target offer shoppers useful and timely promotions without consumers having to lift a finger.

In our high-speed world ruled by Time Compression, nothing has roiled financial markets more than the art of high-frequency trading, which combines sophisticated algorithms with millisecond performance to give equity traders a distinct advantage.

And in education, perhaps the thorniest challenge of all, Khan Academy has made giant strides using a primitive set of YouTube videos that can be watched for free. This is a remarkable achievement considering U.S. spending on education has jumped 17-fold since 1970 without a lot to show for it.

Change Everyone Can Believe In

These examples vividly illustrate how technology has brought beneficial change to entertainment, retailing and education, so the question is why can’t we use technology to change the body politic?

As the founder of Social Revolution, I am trying to do just that. Social Revolution aims to harness innovative ideas through crowdsourcing, and distill them into a “Business Plan for U.S.A.” to help propel the country forward.

We’re going to crowdsource ideas in five key areas - education, healthcare, business, finance and government. All these sectors are clearly ripe for a major disruption.

To manage the idea stream, we’re relying on an innovative crowdsourcing platform from Pleasanton, Calif.-based Spigit. If you’re a company or individual that wants real change, and have a cogent idea about how to implement it, we want to hear from you. If you’re using technology to make things better, we need to hear from you.

At Social Revolution, we believe that applying the new technologies offered by social media will unleash the power of ideas and turn the status quo on its head. Crowdsourcing has already shown its disruptive power in a number of fields.

Wikipedia is perhaps the best-known example of a crowdsourcing success story, leading Encyclopedia Britannica to give up on its print edition earlier this year.

Yelp has similarly reinvented the restaurant review business, while TripAdvisor has upended the travel industry with its incisive crowdsourced reviews.

The time is certainly right. A surging interest in “clicktivism” has enabled Change.org to sign up 13 million clicktivists, proving that our population wants to get more engaged and involved.

As President John F. Kennedy once said, “A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.” To put a sharper point on it, allow me to paraphrase Steve Jobs' pitch to hire Pepsi's John Sculley, “Do you want to read sugar water the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?” 

Bill Gates is wiping out deadly diseases and Nicholas Negroponte is bringing technology to remote corners of the globe. That’s great, but when was the last time either of those guys wound up on TMZ?

No, the uber nerds we really want to emulate are the guys with awesome technical chops and even more awesome lifestyles. The goal is to work hard and play even harder - to create great stuff and make big bucks while driving a Ferrari to work and dating supermodels in the evening.

Think it can’t be done? These 10 super geeks are doing the things we wish we were doing instead!

I'm certainly not suggesting that you throw away your existing subscriptions, particularly if you're a vendor or solution provider. Put some effort into those relationships, and they'll pay themselves back several times over. But there's something to be said for the little guy, and there are hundreds of smaller analysis firms that can provide you with the kind of service and support you need to make informed decisions on a daily basis.

There's no way to provide a comprehensive list of analysts or coverage areas in small firms, but I've chosen five analysts who exemplify the kind of breadth in business model, coverage areas and perspective you can find when you look beyond the Big Three. Full disclosure: I've worked with some of these people before, but don't hold that against them.

Billy Pidgeon
M2 Research
Coverage Area: Gaming

The gaming industry is a tough nut to crack. It's an art, a business and a unique exercise in supply-chain economics. Plenty of analysts cover financials ("300,000 units shipped!") and tech ("11 million polygons!"), but most leave the games themselves to the press.

M2's Billy Pidgeon understands all three worlds. While he's spent the last dozen years at various research houses, Pidgeon will always be a gamer at heart. He's produced more than 20 games, including major releases such as 1997's Turok: Dinosaur Hunter. This street cred gives him access to insights and talent that more buttoned-up analysts might miss. If you're looking for one-on-one practical advice about the gaming market from someone who's been there but also gets the big picture, check him out.

The Guys at RedMonk
RedMonk
Coverage Area: Multiple (Tech-Related)

If you're a Firefly fan, think of RedMonk as the BrownCoats of the analyst world. If you're not, their motto should tell you what you need to know. "Analysis by the people, for the people" says it all. I would have chosen just one of their four analysts, but that would have violated their whole "community" vibe.

RedMonk tips its hat to the open-source world it covers by giving away its research, believing that an open discussion provides the greatest benefit to everyone, including their paying customers. They make their money from consulting services that start at a flat $5,000 per year, increasing with the size of your company or your consulting demands. For your money, you get access to very astute technical minds focused on helping vendors produce tools that developers will actually want to use. As the business model might suggest, it's a very populist approach in which the end user, IT manager, or systems analyst is a lot more important than the CIO, which is dramatically different than the coverage aims of most larger firms. If you're a software developer, $5,000 a year is a very small price to pay for a contrarian perspective.

David Schatsky
Green Research
Coverage Area: Sustainability

Sustainability is no longer just hip; it's an essential (and sometimes mandated) part of doing business, sitting on a growing pile of hard science. It's a big industry, so hundreds of consultancies have bolted on an "eco-" to get your business. It's tough to weed out the pretenders.

David Schatsky has a background in technology, policy and finance. He also spent nearly 10 years at JupiterResearch as a Research Director and President (yet more disclosure: He was also my boss there for a while), so he understands the analyst gig. But what sets him apart from the rest of the eco-kids is his understanding that he shouldn't do it alone. When he founded Green Research, Schatsky brought in David Meyers, an environmental heavyweight, to build out the company's real-world expertise and complement his research experience, and they've further rounded out their expertise with associated content providers. The result is a small, personalized shop that should be able to address most of your environmental concerns directly, but has the connections to pull in other experts where needed.

Tony Byrne
Real Story Group
Coverage Area: Content Management

Real Story Group doesn't work with vendors they cover. At all. No consultations, white papers, or appearances at vendor events - nothing that could possibly influence their coverage. This independence irritates the industry and helps their clients (anyone working with content or knowledge management) trust what they read. While RSG has a number of top-notch analysts (Theresa Regli deserves a shout-out, particularly regarding international content management issues), the man behind the business model is Tony Byrne, the company's founder.

RSG's Evaluation Reports are their most popular deliverable, largely because of their Consumer Reports-style comparison charts. They aren't cheap (running around $2,500 per report), but they can save you tens or hundreds of thousands during your evaluation process and give you the answers you need to ask the right questions of your vendors. Byrne is convinced that RSG's objectivity and laser focus will convince most one-off purchasers to stick around as clients for further research, as well as advisory services to help manage the tools and content with the software you've bought. So far, so good.

Laurie Orlov
Aging in Place Technology Watch
Coverage Area: Seniors, Health Technology

Seniors are our fastest-growing demographic segment, and the technology required to help them age is of tremendous social and financial importance. So it's strange that until fairly recently, most major research firms treated the category like an afterthought. Laurie Orlov is one of the few experts in that space, and the foremost authority in the study of using technology to remain in the home as you age. In fact, she kind of created it.

Jeff Makowka, AARP's Senior Strategic Advisor, Thought Leadership, explains her impact: "She's a real visionary. She took her past life (as a Forrester analyst) and overlapped it with a caregiving experience and basically thought up the category. Solutions already existed, but she defined and legitimized Aging in Place Technology."

Like every boutique analyst, Orlov's journey is unique, and probably impossible at one of the largest firms. Small firms will never give you the coverage of the Big Three, and can't shout your voice as loudly to the world, but they do a great job of filling the gaps if you're willing to do some searching.

Have you had experiences with small research firms? Let us know who you've used and how it worked.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

When a new CEO takes over the seat of an ailing major technology question, the first thing to look for is talk that the old ways, the ways that got a company in trouble in the first place, are going out the window. It was refreshing to hear new Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson say, "we'll be back to innovation." It gave people the sense that Yahoo might actually be OK in the future with a CEO that understands the data driven landscape of technological evolution these days.

On the other hand, there is Heins. Here is what he said in his introductory video upon taking up his new role this morning.

• "I don't think there is some drastic change needed. We are evolving, but this is not a seismic change."
• "We are a great innovative company, but sometimes we innovate too much while we're building a product."
• "What we need to get a bit better at here is to have a little bit more of an ear toward the consumer. I want to strengthen this by bringing really good marketing expertise in."

Wait, wait ... stop me if you heard this before. "RIM is fine. We are innovating all the time. All we need is good marketing." Most of these statements were made in the video released by RIM last night introducing Heins.

What company releases a pre-scripted video of their new CEO? I am sure it happens from time to time but it seems like RIM wanted to control the message before it hit the streets this morning.

I will lay even money that Balsillie and Lazaridis teamed up with RIM's media relations department to put out that video, knowing full well what their new puppet was going to say. It would not surprise me if they were standing behind the camera, nodding along as Heins hit the bullet points.

Ever seen The Hudsucker Proxy? If you have not, go stream it on Netflix. The basic premise is that a clueless kid from the mailroom gets promoted to be the president of a large company so the board can ruin the stock and buy it all up themselves. Tim Robbins plays Norville Barnes, the "proxy," a clueless guy out of business school in backwater Muncie, Indiana. Barnes is the patsy to the board, the guy taking the fall.

While Heins is not some foolish backwater kid out of the mailroom (he is an accomplished engineer who has been with RIM for four years and was the COO before his promotion), but the same principle exists. Balsillie and Lazaridis are still likely to be pulling the strings. There are distinct differences like the fact that Balsillie and Lazaridis already own most of RIM's stock and the stock is lower than ever.

At Hudsucker, Barnes surprises the board. He comes out with a new product (the Hula Hoop) that is immensely popular and profitable. Does Heins have a Hula Hoop in him? He better hope so. Otherwise, he is going to get more than his fair share of blame for the eventual collapse of RIM. Balsillie and Lazaridis can point to Heins and say to the board, "you wanted us out but look what happened when we handed the company to this guy."

You have to feel sorry for Heins. His job is not going to be easy. It is going to take more than marketing, more than "flawless execution." He is right in the video, BlackBerry 10 absolutely needs to ship on time. Whenever that time is supposed to be, we do not know.

RIM is not in danger of bankruptcy ... yet. The company probably has several years before it burns through its profitable operating margins and reserved piles of cash. Heins has a chance. Part of that will be thinking outside the box. The big question will if Balsillie and Lazaridis will let him.

Who is Thorsten Heins? He is a product designer and engineer that rose to be the COO under Balsillie and Lazaridis. Most people outside of the smartphone industry may not know of him for precisely that reason. RIM's co-CEOs have never been known to share the spotlight. Heins has said that he is willing to license RIM's QNX-based smartphone operating system and perform with "rigour and flawless execution." Execution of what, exactly?

RIM's Assets

Flawless execution. It is hard to get over that particular statement. To execute flawlessly upon something, there must be something worthwhile to execute. What does RIM have that is worth anything to anybody?

Let's break down the top products and property that RIM maintains.

BlackBerry OS 7

The BlackBerry OS is basically what got RIM into all this trouble in the first place. Five years ago, Apple made RIM's smartphone operating system more or less obsolete with the advent of the iPhone. Later came the notion of a smartphone operating system as a platform that can be built upon. Apple turned this in to it content marketing machine, with more than 500,000 apps in its App Store. Android would eventually follow suit. RIM saw the writing and released BlackBerry App World but the app store has floundered as developers shied away from the platform that was notoriously hard to develop for and only made money with expensive apps targeted towards business executives. App World has remained stagnant for the last three years.

BlackBerry OS is the culprit. Pick up a "new" BlackBerry device and see how much different it is than a BlackBerry from 2008, when BB OS 5 came out. Outside for a few design tweaks, there is really not much else that is leaps from the small screen and large keyboard that makes you say, "damn, I have to have this phone." The main BlackBerry OS has been dead in the water for years.

BlackBerry 10 (QNX)

In my mind, I keep on thinking of BlackBerry 10 (formerly known as BBX and QNX) as Obi-Wan Kenobi. Think of the message that Leia left with R2-D2 for Kenobi in Stars Episode IV: A New Hope.

"Help me Obi-Wan, you are my only hope."

We will now see if QNX is ready to step to the ranks of Jedi. Its apprenticeship, as seen through the ill-fated first version of the BlackBerry PlayBook, has been difficult. QNX now needs to be ported to smartphones and that is reportedly not happening until at least the third quarter of 2012. When Heins says "flawless execution," really what he means is that QNX-based smartphones coming from RIM later this year need to be spectacular. Not only that, they need to be unique enough to set the line apart from Apple, Windows Phone and Android.

Heins has already said that he is willing to license QNX under the right circumstances. If BlackBerry 10 turns out to be a winner, that could be a big boost for RIM and the entire smartphone manufacturing industry that is looking for a way to hedge its bets against over-reliance on Android devices.

BlackBerry Enterprise Server & Mobile Fusion

The BES is actually one of the biggest chips that RIM has these days. There are still many large corporations in the world that prefer to issue BlackBerry smartphones to employees rather than embrace the "bring-your-own-device" culture mostly because of an existing infrastructure of BES. Offshoots of BES also support PBX qualities and enable a modicum of decent unified communications offerings. With Mobile Fusion, RIM has expanded this functionality to other devices, such as the iPhone and various Android devices.

As one ReadWriteWeb commenter said when RIM announced Mobile Fusion, "just like IBM, [RIM] lost the device war." The comparison to IBM is perhaps more apt than comparing RIM to Nokia, the other cellphone device manufacturer that has come on hard times grappling with the smartphone revolution. RIM still has value in its services, like BES. Could the future of RIM be in enterprise-grade hardware and software?

BlackBerry Messenger, Email & Communications

BlackBerry over the years has come to define itself not as a line of killer smartphones but rather as a dynamic communications platform. The strongest aspect of BlackBerry OS is Messenger. If there is one thing that other OEMs would love to get their hands on, it is Messenger and its legions of users across the world. Messenger is the biggest chip in RIM's stockpile right now and Heins could leverage it in negotiations when licensing BlackBerry 10.

There is also the fact that BlackBerry's email system is still considered to be tops in the game. It is fast, safe and secure, especially from an enterprise perspective when teamed with BES. Heins should realize what he has between Messenger and email: a suite of BlackBerry powered communication tools that many users have come to rely upon for day-to-day use. Will Heins realize this fact and spin out the communications suite as its own stand-alone product that could be integrated into other smartphone operating systems?

The fact of the matter is that Heins has a tough battle in front of him. The question will be whether or not he is just a lackey of Balsillie and Lazaridis following their roadmap for the sake of continuity or whether is willing to make some difficult decisions that can completely turn around the nosedive of the Research In Motion and its properties. The next six months before the release of BlackBerry 10 devices will be challenging. Can Heins guide the ship with "rigour and flawless execution" through these turbulent times?

Perhaps unintentionally, the presentation comes off like a political statement, maybe as phrased by a Microsoft shareholder.

The caption, "No More Mr. Monkey Boy," refers to tomorrow's cover story, "Steve Ballmer Reboots" by Ashlee Vance. The story appears on businesweek.com now, and appears to be part of Microsoft's attempt to reset its CEO's image to that of an easy-going, smart, sensible fellow - one you'd like to share lunch with sometime, and not by means of a slot beneath the cage door. All the points that Microsoft's marketing would have wanted to touch upon are touched upon, as though recited from a PowerPoint presentation, including the company's effort to make up ground in the cloud.

In his story, Vance recaps Microsoft's cloud strategy mostly from a consumer perspective, making sure to include Zune, Xbox, SkyDrive, and even the recent Skype acquisition in the mix, although the latter may be somewhat of a stretch. "The fullest expression of Ballmer's ambition is Microsoft's cloud computing strategy," Vance writes. That statement soon appears to be contradicted by a quote from startup analytics firm Kaggle, whose chief scientist says, "When you talk to other entrepreneurs and tell them you're using Microsoft's cloud services, they look at you like you have leprosy."

It's the negative image, and specifically the one attributed to Ballmer himself, that Microsoft is working to escape. If the Businessweek story counts as its latest move in that direction, then that's at least three that could be considered as having backfired. Last November's company shareholders meeting, according to all reports, was less than one hour in length, and cut short the Q&A session while grumbling shareholders waited at the microphone. Then the Monday keynote at CES 2012, said to be Ballmer's and Microsoft's last, was roundly excoriated by critics who expected the CEO to present a bolder, clearer strategy, as opposed to a list of underdeveloped brand names.

Truth of the matter is, compared to the fellow we saw on stage Monday, Microsoft and its customers could use a bit of the old "Monkey Boy" right about now.

LinkedIn says it is "Sequencing the Startup DNA." Unsurprisingly, the top three schools that startup founders come from are Stanford, Harvard and MIT Sloan. Yet, LinkedIn goes on to dispel a myth of startup founders that concoct their ideas to change the world from their dorm rooms.

LinkedIn's data shows that 65% of startup founders are over the age of 30. Their average position length before their first startup is 2.5 years and they come from the some of the biggest tech companies in the land including Apple, Adobe, Electronic Arts, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

From a social perspective, founders are disproportionately connected to venture capitalists, bloggers and recruiters. This makes sense as those are the types of connections that founders will need to get money, get the word out and get the top talent to work at their companies. It show the value of the LinkedIn network in a specific industry. It is likely the same for other industries.

Here is a note from LinkedIn on how it identifies founders:

Startup Founders are LinkedIn professionals who identify themselves as founders (or co-founders) of U.S. companies created after 2000, with a LinkedIn company profile, and that currently have between 2 - 200 employees. We have excluded small law, consulting and real estate firms, as well as LLCs (limited liability companies) - and assembled a pool of over 13,000 entrepreneurs. We then compared them with the average LinkedIn member and highlight characteristics that disproportionately appear among startup founders.

Check out the infographic below. Entrepreneurs and founders: how closely does LinkedIn's data mirror your own experience?

Time Inc. is the publisher of CNN Money, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, Money and, of course, Time Magazine. He is perhaps best known in tech circles for an article he wrote in the early 1990s for Wired titled "Billions Registered: Right now, there are no rules to keep you from owning a bitchin' corporate name as your own Internet address." In the article, Quittner had bought the domain name mcdonalds.com and tried to give it to the fast food giant, which was clueless about the Internet at the time.

Some choice lines from the "Billions Registered" article:

"My fingers trembled, as if ripping open a Big Mac. I checked:

"$whois mcdonalds.com Domain Name: MCDONALDS.COM Administrative Contact: Quittner, Josh quit@newsday.com

"Oh, that's McCool. I feel like McPrometheus. I have stolen McFire."

Quittner was the editor of Business 2.0 from 2002 to 2007 before the magazine folded. Business 2.0 was a mix of forward-looking tech news and advice on how to conduct business in the Internet environment with issues like "How to build a bulletproof startup" and "The man who owns the Internet."

Quittner has been with Time Inc. in some capacity since 1996. He started with Time Magazine as a tech editor, writer and columnist for Time.com before moving to Business 2.0. He spent nine months as the executive editor of Fortune before becoming a Time Inc. editor at large, helping to develop digital magazines on tablets for Time Inc. properties. He left that position in February of this year and has been the director of digital editorial development for news, sports and business until announcing his departure.

Flipboard is excited to bring a publishing industry veteran into the fold. According to the company, he will be a part of helping Flipboard grow their publishing partnerships, which have extended to publications like Oprah's magazine and National Geographic in recent months.

"We're really excited to have Josh joining Flipboard. As you know partnering with publishers is a central to Flipboard's future and Josh is going to be a fantastic part of growing Flipboard's publisher partnerships," Flipboard's Marci McCue said via email. "By hiring Josh we are adding a seasoned publishing executive to the team, creating an important new position at Flipboard to further our publisher partnerships, drive collaborative product plans and explore new opportunities to make publisher content even more discoverable on Flipboard. His broad editorial background, deep understanding of the flow of content and his publisher business perspective are going to be a fantastic addition to the team."

It is notable that Quittner is now in a leadership position at what's essentially one of the world's leading Twitter clients, yet he himself has only posted to Twitter five times over the past six months.

The move is reminiscent of last Summer's departure of Newsweek Editor Mark Coatney to join red-hot blogging platform Tumblr to run publisher partnerships. You'd think media was being disrupted.

Roberts celebrates 10 years in venture capital this month. He began as part of Salt Lake City's Wasatch Venture Fund (now Epic Ventures), an affiliate of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, in March of 2001. We thought readers might like to know more about this interesting player in the tech community.

Roberts recently offered some interesting advice to would-be fund raisers who've not yet launched their companies.  "If you're looking for funding for a prelaunch product or service, you'll need a to be a very interesting person [or someone] with deep expertise in your field," Roberts wrote in a guest post on Mashable. "Amplifying that expertise through blogs, Twitter, live streams will get you the attention of VCs, too. If you don't qualify as either, all the right intros in the world won't get you VC funding."

You can follow Roberts on Twitter (where he's most active), his personal blog Bryce.vc, on Facebook or on Quora.

In 2005, tech.memeorandum mostly tracked blogs. In 2010, Techmeme tracks all types of media web sites. Everything from news wires, newspapers, professional blogs, corporate blogs and personal blogs. That's been a natural evolution, as blogs have become more like newspapers and magazines - and vice versa. What's been more surprising is Techmeme's shift from full automation to a mix of algorithms and human curation. In this interview with Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera, we talk about these and other changes over the past 5 years.

RWW: Like me, you started your site Memeorandum as a one-man band and not knowing if there would be a decent business model. But of course it has become a success story. How many people do you have working for you now?

GR: We're six in total. Same staff as last November.

RWW: Back when you started, there weren't very many products where a person could discover the latest news from blogs and media web sites. Nowadays there's Google News, Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, et al. How do you position Techmeme now in terms of the increased competition?

GR: For sure, the world has changed, and as you point out, there are more places to find collections of news links other than Techmeme. But some of those same changes favor a site like Techmeme even more. Following even a modest set of users on Twitter, for instance, you're overwhelmed with tweets and links after spending just a few hours away from your stream. There's really no substitute for a news synopsis that shows you what's most important at the top.

RWW: Back in 2005 I mused that "mainstream news media organizations will be beating a path to Gabe's door to either invest in it or license the software." Has any of that happened or come close to happening?

GR: It didn't play out quite like that. We've received overtures from most of the larger tech companies over the years, but media companies have approached us mainly about distribution deals, and only a couple of companies at that. I'd say this this is understandable though: we haven't demonstrated that what we've accomplished at Techmeme can be done over lots of verticals and localities.

Tech.memeorandum, October 2005 (via Internet Archive)

RWW: The biggest change in the product over the years seems to be that it's moved from being entirely automated to being a mix of automated and manual editing. Can you tell us how the mix works in practice, and what benefits you've seen from that.

GR: Philosophically, I believe human editing plus automation have always been and will always be needed for top-notch aggregation. Pure automation sufficed for a few years for us, and got us to the point where we could hire more editors. But until editors arrived, Techmeme would often make questionable choices - like spotlighting too many redundant stories, keeping obsolete stories on the page, and overemphasizing odd topics only introspective bloggers care about. Also, obviously significant stories would often take much too long to appear.

In the age of Twitter and hyper competitive news bloggers, even a 15 minute delay on big news is inexcusable. Our editing helps on all these fronts: we can block the automation from posting stuff to the site, and instantly post stuff if need be.

Techmeme, September 2010

RWW: Is your new product model, mix of automated and manual editing, scalable? I guess that companies like Demand Media show that such a model can be scaled (not that I'm comparing your company to theirs in other ways). But I'm curious to know your thoughts.

GR: I believe it's scalable, at least for major news topics. New news vertical can start out with just one human editor, so we only need revenue to support one person. But it isn't scalable to hundreds or thousands of news topics. An aggregator on, say, mountain bikes probably wouldn't be all that good (due to a dearth of content and linking) - meaning it wouldn't attract readers that could support an editor.

RWW: Finally, what's next for Techmeme and its sister sites?

GR: More ways for tweets to show up on Techmeme. And hopefully more verticals.

Photo credit: Frank Gruber

Marshall Kirkpatrick recently asked some of our readers that very question. We then picked 10 responses most worth sharing. Congratulations to those who made the list. And if you'd like to add more ideas to this ongoing discussion, please do so in the comments section below.

1. Filtering is The Future

"I feel the next great advancements in the Web will not be centered around publishing, but filtering all the information so you can find more relevant content and people." - Eric Wortman

2. A Way to Have a Voice That Matters

"For non-techies like myself, the Internet is empowering. I can have a voice and it matters to some. I can consume, create, share, participate, lurk, connect with others, etc. It's up to me, and I love that." - Robin Ashford

3. Democracy

"The Internet's most profound effect on democracy has been the creation of user expectation of inclusion in mass media. The Internet is now building itself out as a bridge between the People and the Power, a bridge that necessarily begins in your home or office, and ends in the TV studios where pundits and politicians road-test policy. As people further organize themselves to wield this new power, consumers become participants, participants become digital citizens, and an expansion of democracy will be inevitable." - Evelyn Messinger

4. Replacing Pages With Real-Time Streams

"The early Internet contained links, which represented pages, which contained information. The new Internet is replacing pages with real-time streams, which represent people, who contain social knowledge. Early Internet = the Information Age. New Internet = the Age of Human Engagement." - nozzlsteve

5. Ultimate Chronicler of Our World's Existence

"The Web is fast evolving as the ultimate chronicler of our world's existence. It has and will continue to serve as the environment for all available data to be logged, mined, aggregated, visualized, extrapolated, etc., and force the hand of humanity to constantly question, re-evaluate and transform (a) traditional schools of thought, (b) established mores, and (c) longstanding theories and models as well as consensually pre-conceived and accepted modes of behavior." - autom8

6. Will Our Best Ideas Really Work Out as Planned?

"While machines are being made to directly serve the Internet and replace current computing norms, there are still some fundamental questions whose answers will show how far this can go: Will the semantic Web take hold, will everything move into the cloud, and/or will viral go HD? In the meantime, no net neutrality is established, the biggest driver of innovation is a completely closed loop, and the federal government is debating a "kill switch"... growing old sucks!" - ChrisKos

7. Breaking The Stranglehold on Knowledge

"The Internet is more like an extension to the revolution created by the Gutenberg press, carrying INFORMATION that can be used and abused in a myriad ways. Just as Gutenberg broke the stranglehold on knowledge that had favored the church and the elite, so Tim Berners-Lee has unlocked raw information from the bias and distortions of politicians (and their puppets in news media)." - NuGoth

8. Meaningful Connections

"When we meet somebody, we don't just want to sit across from them and exchange ideas or theories or what we did in the day. We may start like that, but ultimately we want to get deeper and closer; we want to open up, we want to be more intimate in where we are, what we believe, what we feel, what drives us, what our passions are. We want to make connection. And I think that's where the Internet is going. It's allowing us to make connection one-to-one or one-to-many, or many-to-many - that heart-to-heart connection where we feel compassion, empathy, understanding and that's what nourishes us." - Peter Russell

9. The Internet is:

"A massive increase in the frequency and diversity of communication, which is giving rise to an unprecedented time of creativity, collaboration and conflict. As cultures become increasingly entangled, a new social order will emerge, which has the potential to be the first massively scaled culture to value consent over exploitation - an event unlike anything seen in human history." - Justin Kistner

10. Round Without a Center

"The edge points of society have found a connective umbrella within the social Web. We are all edge points as individuals. We have found we no longer need the center spoke to move forward. Centralized control systems have been revealed as vestigial hindrances. As a result we are critically examining historical value systems." - Mark Essel

Photo courtesy of Mark Bellucci

According to the release, Blair and his team "will leverage his advocacy for environmental issues and his global relationships to help Khosla's broad portfolio of clean technology companies maximize their effectiveness in achieving their environmental goals." During his time as prime minister, Blair led efforts to address the climate and energy crisis. Today he heads the Breaking the Climate Deadlock initiative, which is aimed at uniting world leaders for global climate policy.

"Solving the climate crisis is more than just a political agenda item - it's an urgent priority that requires innovation, creativity, and ambition," said Blair. "I share a clear vision with Vinod, one of the earliest leaders in cleantech investment, that entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and beyond will have a tremendous impact on our environmental future."

Based on his continuing work with international climate-control policies, it is likely that Blair will offer Khosla Ventures and its portfolio of green-tech companies both policy advice and connections to government officials who support these efforts. Blair will also likely provide the firm with advice on new investments, though there was no mention whether he will provide any funding himself as an angel.

The partnership was announced before a private audience of portfolio companies and limited parters and other Khosla funders, including Bill Gates. Aside from its green-tech investments, Khosla Ventures has helped fund IT startups like Square, Hunch and Xobni.

This announcement is great news for green-tech companies, which saw a significant dip in venture funding last year. Khosla's partnership with Blair is a large step forward in their dedication to environmental tech investments - a field in which they are clearly determined to become the hands-down leader. Overall, other VC funding figures have been lackluster so far in 2010, but Khosla's clean tech initiatives could help these numbers rebound as the year continues.

Photos courtesy of The World Economic Forum on Flickr.

As a lead-up to the upcoming event in New York City with Chinese digital activist Ai Weiwei, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and yours truly, I interviewed Mary Joyce about the strategies and success stories of digital activism.

RWW: You recently moved on from DigiActive in order to create a new organization for digital activism. Can you tell us more about what that will be?

MJ: The new organization is called the Meta-Activism Project (MAP) and its goal is to build the field of digital activism by catalyzing a body of strategic knowledge unique to the field.  Today's digital activist is in an untenable position: caught between the 100-ton rock of pre-digital strategy and the thousand slippery pebbles of highly-contextual tactical knowledge that focuses on a seemingly endless stream of new social media applications.  We want to build a new body of activism strategy that recognizes the radically different communications infrastructure of the digitally networked world.

I am really excited to announce the official launch of the Meta-Activism Project on ReadWriteWeb! The site - http://meta-activism.org - went live at the end of last week and, though it is pretty bare now, we'd like it to be a central location for people interested in building a body of knowledge about the fundamental mechanics of digital activism.

RWW: We've heard a lot about Twitter being used in Iran last year, and the subsequent blocking of social media services like Twitter and Facebook in China. What other countries have social media tools had a big impact in, for digital activism?

MJ: Judging impact is quite tricky in the field of digital activism, as few cases of digital activism are actual successes.  Usually we judge the success of an activism campaign by whether the activists achieved their campaign goal.  However, in almost all of the famous cases of digital activism "success" - the post-election mobilizations in Iran and Moldova in 2009 or the 2008 general strike in Egypt - while activists did successfully mobilize using social media, they did not achieve their campaign goal, be it to overturn an allegedly fraudulent election result or the wide range of social and political reforms demanded by the strike organizers. 

Mary doing digital activism training at Video Camp Goa

The measuring of impact thus becomes extremely subjective.  Digital activism proponents want to count mobilization as success even when the goal is not achieved, while skeptics and pessimists point out that, by traditional measures, most digital activism campaigns are failures.  Though I am certainly a proponent of digital activism, I would actually side with the skeptics here.  In order to really push the field forward, we need to set high standards for digital activism success and not be satisfied with half-measures. 

RWW: Facebook and Twitter are the two most high profile social media tools being used for digital activism. Are there any other Internet tools that have had success, that perhaps people aren't as aware of?

MJ: I could tell you, but that tool would probably become outdated in a few months, or would prove useless out of its original context.  That's the problem with tactical knowledge: tools change, contexts change, and activists are forever playing catch-up. 

Probably the greatest factor which determines the utility of an application to activists is scale and "use neutrality."  Scale means that the tool needs to reach a certain critical mass of users before you will have the network effects that will either make it likely that activists will become aware of it (in the case of something like Tor or proxy servers) or, in the case of social platforms, that enough people will be on the platform to constitute a meaningful audience for an activist message. "Use neutrality" means that it can be easily co opted, that its architecture can facilitate a wide variety of interactions and does not dictate the content of hosted files.  YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Blogger are use neutral, LastFM and Bloglines are not. 

Mary at the Women's Leadership and Technology Conference, Sharjah, UAE

RWW: Over the past year or so, can you describe a couple of success stories for digital activism using web tools.

MJ: Ha! More about measuring success. With the lack of true success, it is no wonder that people are so eager for these stories.  I think the traditionally-defined successes in this field (i.e. when the campaign goal is achieved) are much smaller and less dramatic - NGO meets fundraising goal through online donations (multiple cases), bloggers get a corporation to withdraw an offensive advertisement (e.g. Motrin), a social network lifts a questionable national block (e.g. LinkedIn in Syria). 

In the high-stakes activism campaigns that intend to make dramatic changes at the national and international level, I would say that we have cases of successful mobilization - Iran, Moldova, Egypt - without successful campaigns.

RWW: In terms of China, a lot has been written about the censorship there - both the Great Firewall that blocks certain sites and domains, and the self-censorship that many companies have to do in order to survive. Currently Google is trying to challenge censorship, but we're not sure how successful even a hugely influential company like Google will be. So what, if anything, can ordinary people do in terms of digital activism to support the freeing up of the Chinese Internet? 

MJ: I am not an expert on China, but it seems like the best strategy for defeating the Great Firewall is to make it obsolete: create so many ways of getting around it that it no longer successfully censors Chinese Internet users.  This means both creating new circumvention tools - more Psiphons, proxies, Tors, FreeGates - and finding new and innovative ways to get those tools to Chinese users.

RWW: Thanks Mary for this illuminating interview. We at ReadWriteWeb wish you the best with the newly launched Meta-Activism Project!

Since her unplanned departure from an L.A.-based startup in 2008, Berrent has traveled through eight countries, documenting and publicizing the struggles of those in developing areas through her blog posts, tweets, images, videos, and her own presence at events at home and abroad. From post-Katrina New Orleans to a trash dump in Manila to a monastery in Burma, read on for her story of trying to achieve social good through social media.

RWW: "Social media for social good" has become the catchphrase du jour, it seems. What does it actually mean; how much can social media users affect social change, and how?

I am a strong believer in the idea that the things you do online are meant to facilitate your offline interactions. People are so fast to click a button, and that can be great. Retweeting, forwarding, and Facebook walls are great engagements. But what's more difficult is the donate button. That's the big hurdle and disconnect. I'm trying to provide these inspirational opportunities in timeboxed campaigns. Social media is slowly catching on, but there's a lot of noise. Standing out is hard; it's important to have an offline component.

Berrent was visibly disturbed by what she witnessed at this Manila trash dump, where she saw shoeless children running through piles of debris.

RWW: Tell me about your experiences with Kiva borrowers. What kinds of people and enterprises have you seen? In your opinion, does microlending have a measurable impact on struggling local economies?

Kiva is really unique. It has a lot of power users - more than any nonprofit I've ever seen. One man has made a thousand loans. It's individual stories, and people really connect. You get updates on that person, and people say it's their favorite email of the month. As a microlending company, Kiva is one spoke in the larger wheel of microfinance. On a global scale, it has a very big impact.

Typically, when you go to a village or province, certain industries are prevalent. In a fishing community, maybe the borrower bought a fishnet or a fishing boat. In an area with a lot of bamboo, it's going to be crafts. I worked in eleven branch offices. I met over 40 different female borrowers individually and over 250 in my time there.

I can see that the money Kiva provides makes a difference. Microfinance is a very slow process, and there are gems and sparks of people who break through the poverty cycle. When you see villages changing, it's really something. It's like watching grass grow, but it's really beautiful grass.

This woman is a pig farmer and a recipient of funds from a Kiva-affiliated organization.

RWW: Now you're working on a seven-day, seven-city tour to raise awareness and funds for malaria prevention through bed nets. Where did this idea come from?

It's a city-by-city competition on who can raise the most money for malaria nets, but also an opportunity for anyone to donate who wants to get involved. The tour starts this Saturday night in New York City and continues for the next seven days in Miami, New Orleans, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, and ends in Los Angeles on Friday...

I'd just finished Kiva training, and I was going to the Philippines for three months. And all I could think was, "When I come back, I'm going to be thirty." I've honed in a lot on my direction - using the Internet to help people. And what if I could use this opportunity to give back, involving people in different parts of the country - something really ambitious?

I wanted it to be about saving lives. I wanted to say, "I saved this many lives on my birthday." I've done a lot of work in HIV and AIDS; I looked into that and polio and malaria, and that's what stuck with me. The campaign has no administrative fees. One hundred percent of the funds go to malaria... in rural northern Ghana. Providing malaria nets will really be a part of saving lives there.

Berrent met this monk in Burma and spent the afternoon pagoda-hopping with him.

RWW: What needs or gaps do you see in philanthropic efforts online?

I think it's not having a strategy to begin with, not knowing the tools in your toolbox before you start. There's a lot to be said for jumping in and having fun, but nonprofits don't have the resources to play around online. They think it's about getting interns and getting followers and fans without figuring out why a medium is important and how to make it successful for them.

RWW: What's one surprise - good or bad - that you've come across since you started working with Kiva? What did you not expect from this experience, and what did you learn?

I learned that it's much more complicated than the website makes it seem. There's an entire division devoted to foreign exchange currency. The operational cost analysis, the challenges of technology in the developing world, the processes of remittance - it's incredibly complex. There are regional specialists. On the site, you can make a loan in five clicks, but a lot of machinery comes together to make it that way.

RWW: What's next for you? Is there more globe-trotting in your immediate future? How do you think the web will continue to be part of your life and career?

One of the best parts of this past year has been that I've gone through long periods where I didn't have Internet access. That's brought me a heightened and renewed sense of my purpose in the world and my authentic desire to make the world a better place. I'd like to be able to continue to support campaigns - even for-profit ventures - that I believe in, and I think social business is a wonderful intersection of the two.

I want to explore avenues with online and offline components, while continuing to blog and tell stories I'm passionate about.

Follow Berrent's next adventures on Twitter or at her blog.

And all this is just the tip of the iceburg that is Sloane Berrent's fascinating story. For a fuller look at her travels and timeline, check out this list of her nine favorite posts on her blog, The Causemopolitan, covering humanitarianism, her work in New Orleans, the phenomenon of serendipity in international travel, and much more.

Many thanks to Sloane Berrent for the use of her videos and images as well as for sharing her story with us and our readers.

After years of work and more than $20 million dollars invested, the company is finally looking at the light of the end of the tunnel: Turning a profit. In this exclusive interview with founder Tim Westergren after a town hall meetup in Richmond, Virginia, we discuss the company's close call with bankruptcy in 2007, their ad-based revenue model, their roadmap for adding new features and an open API, and their incorporation into a variety of hardware devices.

Westergren told us that in 2003, he was burdened by about $200,000 of personal debt from his efforts with the startup. Most of the employees had gone long periods of time without paychecks. When the company finally got a badly needed round of funding, about $1.5 million went immediately to recifying a payroll backlog.

Now, however, the "unwitting nonprofit" is closer than ever to growing revenues larger than their expenses, news the investors will surely be ecstatic to hear.

In addition to recording this one-on-one talk with Westergren, we also captured about 20 uncut minutes of his talk to Richmond fans and users. Watch for the fuller story of Pandora's trials, triumphs, and evolution, including an extended discussion of the utterly unscalable but nevertheless fascinating Music Genome Project.

One such expert, Howard Greenstein, has a mile-long rap sheet in social media and web work that reaches back into the mid-nineties. He is known for his unique blend of experience and enthusiam, both of which he brings to this video conversation about how businesses and brands can use social media.

Howard Greenstein on Social Media for Brands and Businesses from ReadWriteWeb on Vimeo.

"Companies in general don't value social media marketing as much as they should," said Noff. "They're afraid of it; they don't understand it; and therefore, they just don't do it. Yet it's the most cost-efficient way of marketing there is."

We also talked to Noff about the infinite measurement possibilities inherent in social media and the kinds of tools marketers should be using to optimize their online campaigns. She also spoke about the occasional difficulty of measuring specific conversion metrics for social media marketing campaigns, and she gave a good word to consultants in the social space.

In light of recent comments on video posts and out of respect for Ms. Noff, commenters are particularly requested to omit the words "hot" and "chick" and other terms of that general timbre from their musings below. Thanks for doing your part to keep ReadWriteWeb classy.

Here, we caught up with John C. Havens of BlogTalkRadio, and he shared insights from his recently released book, Tactical Transparency. Sometimes, a filter on honest sharing in social media can benefit everyone involved, particularly where brands are concerned.

The book, a collaboration with PR oldtimer Shel Holtz, involved years of work and dozens of interviews with social media leaders. All the interviews are available as audio downloads on this BlogTalkRadio page, as well.

For more real-world insights that work, check out the Internet Oldtimers Foundation site. Also, we've uploaded a few pics from the delightful event on Flickr.

Thurston started getting into this whole "Internet" thing in simpler times when the social web was called Usenet. He now carves out his niche at the overlap of the Venn diagram of comedy, politics, and tech. As an official Internet old-timer who makes it his business to stay relevant, Thurston has particularly useful insights on the business of curating applicable content with great efficiency and timeliness.

"I remember," Thurston said, "back in 1996 or 1997, when you could finish the Internet... You could stay up until two or three in the morning and go to sleep and know, 'I read the Internet today.'" Simpler times, indeed.

So, with the mind-boggling multiplicity of blogs, news sites, and social networks, how does a professional netizen maintain cultural and technological relevance? And what tools does the modern, socially cognizant webmaster use to track and optimize traffic in real time? Call us cruel, but we prefer you watch the video and hear it all firsthand.

However we have heard very few stories about Zuckerberg and the inspiration behind Facebook during the period prior to February 4th, 2004, the day he launched Facebook from his Harvard dorm room. In this post we tell that story.

The stories we hear these days about Zuckerberg in popular media tend to follow a common sensationalist pattern: "super-smart kid invents a tech phenomenon from his Harvard dorm room, drops out, and changes the world." It's a classically framed, Bill Gates-esque story of success driven by intelligence and ambition. What's most intriguing about the Zuckerberg story, however, isn't that he dropped out of Harvard and became a billionaire at 23.

The reason we hear so little about Zuckerberg's pre-launch vision for Facebook (which was originally called thefacebook.com) is likely because he has been a controversial target over the true origins of his business. In 2007, several of Zuckerberg's classmates came forward and claimed rights to the Facebook idea after reports surfaced that Yahoo had offered $900 million to purchase Facebook just two years after the founding of the company. Even though the suit against Zuckerberg was settled last year, given the nature of the proceedings, we'll likely never get an official answer from Zuckerberg himself about the true origins of his inspiration. But maybe we don't need one after all?

It turns out that Zuckerberg's academic history offers a great deal of insight into the inspiration for Facebook and why it was so wildly successful when it first launched. February 4th, 2004 may mark a major milestone in Facebook's history, but the story of Mark Zuckerberg's rise to fame in fact starts years before he stepped foot on the Harvard campus, and is much more complex and interesting than is usually portrayed.

Pre-Zuckerberg: Tracing the Roots of Facebook Culture

You may be surprised to hear that while Harvard was fertile ground for the launch of Facebook, the seed of the concept was likely planted in Zuckerberg in high school. You never hear about Zuckerberg's alma mater Phillips Exeter Academy in stories because Harvard was where the action really started (and the Harvard name, to some extent, validates Zuckerberg's smarts and makes for a more sensational story). But in fact, the time that Zuckerberg spent at the academy from 2000 to 2002 likely had more influence on the name and initial concept of Facebook than any of his classmates at Harvard.

Phillips Exeter Academy (or "Exeter") is a private boarding school for grades 9 to 12, located in Exeter, New Hampshire. The prestigious prep school is a member of the Ten Schools Admission Organization, which includes such famous boarding schools as Phillips Andover, Deerfield Academy, St. Paul's, and Choate Rosemary Hall. Like the other "Big Tens," Exeter has a tight-knit boarding community that lives on campus full time. Students refer to themselves as "Exonians" and have a strong group identity rooted in a rich culture of customs and tradition.

An Exonian for two years, Zuckerberg had plenty of time to observe and participate in the social culture and rhythms ingrained in Exeter's boarding lifestyle. Every year, the school says goodbye to a few hundred students and welcomes a few hundred more. Zuckerberg enrolled in the fall of his junior year and, like every new and returning student, received his own copy of Exeter's student directory, "The Photo Address Book," which students affectionately referred to as (you guessed it!) "The Facebook."

We interviewed several of Zuckerberg's peers this week, and they all confirmed what David W. Farrant (class of 2000) had to say:

"The front cover says "The Photo Address Book," but we all called it "The Facebook" all the time because "The Photo Address Book" was such a mouthful. Everybody called it that."

"Facebook" photo directories were (and still are) a huge part of the students' social experience and culture at prep schools such as Exeter. Every school in the Big Ten prints and distributes one for its students annually. When students arrive on campus each fall, the rhythm of their social lives is predominantly set by their dormitories, their class year (i.e. seniority), and their proximity to friends in other houses. Because students aren't allowed cell phones on campus and living accommodations are in such flux from year to year (they change houses and phone numbers annually), these "Facebooks" are a valuable resource for students.

Of course, not only do students need the directory to find and contact their peers, but the books become part of the culture of bonding between classmates and friends, as students use it to see where their peers live, who's hot and who's not, who lives with who, and who the new kids are. Sounds an awful lot like how people use Facebook online now, right? Of course, it also describes an early pre-Internet social culture, facilitated by photo directories, that students enjoyed long before Zuckerberg even made it to high school, a culture he happened upon and got to participate in by a stroke of pure luck and glorious opportunity.

But the story doesn't end there. In Zuckerberg's senior year, the student council, headed by student body president Kris Tillery, successfully lobbied the administration to have the school's IT department put the full contents of Exeter's Photo Address Book online. By the time Zuckerberg graduated, the website was put up at http://student.exeter.edu/facebook, with the URL directory (i.e. "facebook") named after the students' pet name for the physical book and effectively shortened to something useful. Tillery was unavailable for comment.

In our interviews, some of Zuckerberg's peers pointed us to this screenshot of the original website hosted on the school's .edu domain. The screenshot was posted in the public Facebook group "Exonians" in 2006 and is still there. Some of the comments about the screenshot (which date back to 2007) refer to it as "the original Facebook" and refer to the Photo Address Book as "the physical Facebook."

Of course, the school's student.exeter.edu/facebook website is no longer online, and none of our sources were able to confirm whether Zuckerberg himself was involved in, or responsible for, the student council initiative that got the directory online in the first place. All we know is that students were enthusiastic enough about an online version of the physical directory that the student council made an effort to lobby the administration, that the online directory was created during Zuckerberg's senior year, and that he was likely aware of its existence.

A More Complete Picture of the Facebook Success Story

Now that Facebook has graduated from its academic roots and been released to the world for free, its continued growth has many experts saying it will likely be the dominant social platform for the foreseeable future. At 200 million users (and counting), Facebook makes it hard to doubt that it will have considerable influence in the way we all connect and communicate in the future, both locally and across borders. While we may never know the true origins of Mark Zuckerberg's inspiration for Facebook, looking at the social culture of the prep school he attended and his experiences as a boarding student there offer us insight into where the explosion of global Facebook culture may have begun, why it was so successful when it launched at Harvard, and how luck and opportunity may have led one of the world's youngest visionaries to start coding in his college dorm room.

Steffan Antonas is a technology anthropologist, writer, and blogger who currently lives in San Diego, CA. He began studying human behavior in virtual communities as a graduate student in Georgetown University's Communication Culture and Technology (CCT) Program in 2003. He has worked in Southern California as an IT Professional for the past three years. You can contact Steffan at steffanantonas@gmail.com and on Twitter @steffanantonas.

Image credits: Phillips Exeter Academy by etnobofin. Book cover and Mark Zuckerberg photos by Alex Demas and Mark Flores.