My friend and fellow disruptor, Brian Reich, has written a very important book, Shift and Reset, which is a MUST READ for anyone who wants to lead an organization in this hyper-connected age.

You can get a flavor for what his book has to offer by viewing these slides he put together outlining 12 Big Ideas for 2012.  And be sure to buy the book – it makes a great holiday gift to yourself or someone you know.

It was my birthday this weekend. Thanks everyone for your kind and warm wishes.

Turns out, it was actually my first truly Facebook-centric celebration – a social media-powered birthday if you will.

This might not necessarily be anything new to you, but I had never had a birthday were Facebook wall posts took center stage.

Be that personal calls, emails, or postcards arriving in the mail (remember those?), wall posts from Facebook friends way outnumbered any other forms of traditional greetings I received this time around.

From New York to Berlin back to LA, friends apparently pay notice to Facebook’s able birthday alert system. True to social media’s promise, incoming wall posts even made for a bit of a reunion with some of the folks I hadn’t been in touch with in years.

Old fashioned me, I did respond to each and every post. Not even sure if that’s the proper etiquette and instead a single *bulk* mille grazie reply post would have done?

Who knows? Despite its success – social media is still relatively new. So is Facebook’s personal wall concept. (Hey, my car is older than that). And as the social powerhouse continues to introduce new features and capabilities, rules around Facebook usage will likely stay equally in flux.

So, let’s see what shape and form Facebook will take in years to come, as it continues to grow into what seems to have already turned into our central e-greetings hub.

Writing from New York  a few hours before Irene is set to hit town, this seems genuinely the first broadband-generation social media-heavy hurricane coverage to strike our Northeastern states.

The New York City Mayor wrote me an email, and my Brooklyn neighborhood association sent one, too. So did my beach house community. Even my insurance company seems to worry about me these days.

What strikes me most amidst this blast of e-messages is how different public service announcement now disseminate and how they seem to have changed an entire city’s public perception about what constitutes appropriate disaster recommendations.

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I never really ‘got’ Facebook – so when someone at Google asked me yesterday to take part in the initial trial of their new Google + social media platform, I decided to read up on it a bit first to see whether it might be worth my time.

I have to say, after looking into it a bit, I was intrigued – intrigued enough to try it out over the next few weeks.

Why?  Because Google+ seems to address the one reason I’ve avoided Facebook: the list of things I would want to say socially in exactly the same way to every person I know is a pretty short list.

The folks behind the Google+ project seem to get it – Google’s new social media platform appears to be built upon the notion of groups, and it appears to be designed that way from the ground up.  This is in stark contrast to the opt-in, after-the-fact group-filtering mechanisms other social media platforms seem to have implemented reluctantly and seem to prefer you wouldn’t use.

And according to Bradley Horowitz (who along with Vic Gundotra is in charge of  the Google+ project), that’s just what’s wrong with today’s social media sites:  “In real life, we have walls and windows and I can speak to you knowing who’s in the room, but in the online world, you get to a ‘Share’ box and you share with the whole world.”

Amen, brother.   So I’ve just logged into my trial account and had a quick look around – I think I’ll give this Google+ project a try.  As a confirmed social media skeptic, it’ll be interesting to see if it feels like there’s something worthwhile there… stay tuned.

I’ve got a full work plate this morning, and my own set of feelings to process about the news of Osama bin Laden’s death (more on that will likely appear on my Tumblr later tonight), but wanted to get down a couple noteworthy bullets. If I have time, I’ll return and flesh these out into a coherent piece.

We all know that social media get the word out at lightning speed–but what struck me most about this news was not the speed of information, but the immediacy of community development. People are using Twitter and Facebook to work out what are, for many, complicated emotions. Relief, joy, anger, sadness are all appearing at once. This is in stark contrast to what we often see in traditional media soundbites (particularly video media), where broad strokes are painted when it comes to emotional content–i.e., those people are cheering, those people over there are not. Social media is creating a space where it’s acceptable, and useful, to express multiple feelings. This is also very different than, for example, the days following 9/11–when the war on Afghanistan was announced, it was largely extremely taboo in American public squares (online or off) to express concern, or disagreement. Part of that was the political climate, but part of that was that there weren’t necessary effective public spaces for people to be nuanced human beings.

I’m also struck by the speed with humor was employed as a tactic to process the news. Again, in contrast to 9/11, when we waited two weeks for the new issue of The Onion to come out–no one made any jokes before then. Not only was it taboo, but there just wasn’t a way to deal. (By the way, that issue of The Onion might be the best one ever–headlines like, “God Angrily Clarifies ‘Don’t Kill’ Rule, “Hijackers Surprised To Find Selves in Hell,” and many more gems.) Last night, some of the immediate jokes, some in good taste, some not, clearly paved a way for people to express all kinds of reactions to this global news phenomenon. My personal favorites were @marcfaletti‘s “It was that f***ing iPad location history, wasn’t it?” and the newly created @OsamaInHell account tweeting, “Wait, what?”

More as time allows today…

Our collective clock is ticking. Before year’s end, we’ll be a record 7 billion people co-habitating planet earth. One way or another this presents all of us with unprecedented challenges and opportunities.

With that in mind, the United Nations Population Fund recently started looking to Social Media, to see what this new digital platform can do to help raise both general awareness and individual actions in response to our looming population crisis.

So what exactly can digital media add to this tremendous cause?

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The Honorable Justice Clarence Thomas has been a judge on the U.S. Supreme Court since 1991. The last time his voice was heard during proceedings was five years ago. According to court manuscripts, he has since not asked any in-court questions or engaged in dialog while on the bench.

According to the Pew Research Institute, young online audiences seem to be taking a similar approach.

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