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This weekend I’ll pack my daughter off to college, so as a little celebration, I took her and a friend to a Six Flags amusement park this week. As we drove west on the Massachusetts Turnpike, I took the opportunity to eavesdrop on the conversation in the back seat, affording me one of my too-rare glimpses into the world of Millennials.

During the 75-minute drive, I listened to the girls talk excitedly about the people they would soon meet in person for the first time. They already knew many of them, of course. Thanks to Facebook, they had been building connections with future classmates since the late spring. When today’s students arrive on campus, they already know dozens of others.

My daughter, Alice, had already “spoken” to her future roommate several times. I use the term figuratively because Alice hates to talk on the telephone, as do most of her friends. By “speak”, she means text messages, instant messaging sessions, wall posts and maybe a few webcam interactions. For today’s teens, interaction with friends is multi-channel and multimedia.

Media Everywhere

I actually shouldn’t say Alice hates talking on the phone. She just can’t fathom doing nothing but talking. Her favorite context for conversation these days is a massively multi-player game, where friends can slay dragons and battle wizards while chatting about the same things their parents talked about: music, school and romance.

Much has changed there as well. Thanks to MySpace pages and BitTorrent, Millennials have constant and immediate access to the latest music and video. They like the top artists, of course, but along with Lady Gaga (left) they favor an assortment of bands I’ve never heard of that cater to eclectic tastes. When I was their age, I learned of new artists from cassette tapes passed back and forth between friends. Today, a link in an instant message does the same thing, and Apple’s Genius and Pandora make the process programmatic.

Relationships? Well, after listening to two teenagers talk for an hour, it dawned on me that there were people they felt very strongly about whom they had actually never met. One of Alice’s best friends lives in Texas. Their relationship was already well established last year long before they met each other for the first time.

It’s not unusual to hear terms like “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” applied to virtual relationships. Nor is it surprising to hear of relationships ending in novel ways. Two years ago, I listened in as a group of Alice’s classmates spoke of a friend who had just ended a romance. Everyone in the group knew the news except the guy who had been dumped. He hadn’t read the message yet.

Sound strange? A survey of teens this year by textPlus found that 30% percent said they’ve broken up with someone or been dumped via text message. Call it passive aggressive or wimpy or whatever you want; it’s the way things are.

Coming To Your Town

And so they head off to college, and in four years they will enter a workplace that understands little about their values and systems. They will encounter managers who believe that Facebook is a productivity drain and who would rather  employees spend an hour in traffic jams each day than get work done from home.

They will have their first brush with cover-your-ass thinking and will sit in meetings that waste hours of time so that everyone in the room can be “in the loop.”

They will encounter rigid, top-down hierarchies in which risk is avoided and decisions are unchallenged. They will find mid-level managers who hoard information out of fear that sharing will threaten their job security.

They will wonder how anything gets done in environments like these and they will gravitate toward those companies that discard tradition. They’re young, confident and coming to your town. Are you ready?

All of a sudden, “curation” is one of the hottest words in the Web 2.0 world. That’s because it’s an idea that addresses a problem humans have never confronted before: too much information. In the process, it’s creating some compelling new ways to derive value from content.

Content curation is about filtering the stuff that people really need from out of all the noise around it. In the same way that museum curators choose which items from a collection to put on display, content curators select and publish information that’s of interest to a particular audience.

The problem with curation is that it’s labor-intensive. Someone has to sift through all that source information to decide what to keep. This task has never been easy to automate. Keyword filtering has all kinds of shortcoming and RSS feeds are little better than headline services.

I’ve recently been working with a startup that’s developed an innovative technology that vastly improves the speed and quality of content curation. CIThread has spent the last 15 months building an inference engine that uses artificial intelligence principles to give curators a kind of intelligent assistant. The company is attacking the labor problem by making curators more productive rather than trying to replace them.

Full disclosure: I have received a small equity stake and a referral incentive from CIThread as compensation for my advice. Other than that, my pay has amounted to a couple of free lunches. I just think these guys are onto something great.

CIThread (the name stands for “Collective Intelligence Threading” and yeah, they know they have to change it) essentially learns from choices that an editor or curator makes and applies that learning to delivering better source material. More wheat, less chaff.

The curator starts by presenting the engine with a basic set of keywords. CIThread scours the Web for relevant content, much like a search engine does. Then the curator combs through the results to make decisions about what to publish, what to promote and what to throw away.

As those decisions are made, the engine analyzes the content to identify patterns. It then applies that learning to delivering a better quality of source content. Connections to popular content management systems make it possible to automatically publish content to a website and even syndicate it to Twitter and Facebook without leaving the CIThread dashboard.

There’s intelligence on the front end, too. CIThread can also tie in to Web analytics engines to fold audience behavior into its decision-making. For example, it can analyze content that generates a lot of views or clicks and deliver more source material just like it to the curator. All of these factors can be weighted and varied via a dashboard.

Shhhhh!

CIThread is still pretty early stage. It has some early test customers, but none can be identified just yet. I’ll describe generally what one of them is doing, though.

This company owns a portfolio of properties throughout the US and uses localized websites as both a marketing and customer service tool. Each site contains frequently updated news about the region, but the portfolio is administered centrally for cost and quality reasons.

Using CIThread, individual editors can now maintain literally dozens of these websites at once. The more the engine learns about their preferences, the more websites they can support. That’s one of the coolest features of inference engines: they get better the more you use them.

The technical brain behind CIThread is Mike Matchett, an MIT-educated developer with a background in computational linguistics and machine learning. The CEO is Tom Riddle (no relation to Lord Voldemort), a serial entrepreneur with a background in data communications, storage and enterprise software.

The two founders started out targeting professional editors, but I think the opportunity is much bigger. Nearly any company today can develop unique value for its constituents by delivering curated content. Using tools like CIThread, they can get very smart very fast.

If you want to hear more, e-mail curious@cithread.com or visit the website.

My definition of a good speech is one in which the speaker tells you something you already know in a way that you’ve never considered before. That’s why David Weinberger is one of my favorite speakers.

Here are my notes from David’s presentation this morning to the Mass. Tech Leadership Council’s Social Media Summit. These are adapted from my tweets from the event, but hopefully are self-explanatory. They’ve been cleaned up and expanded for clarity:

• The Web has always been social. The only difference with Web 2.0 is that it’s easier to build a presence.
• The page-centered Web paradigm has yielded to a people-centered one.
• Apple is about art. Google is about scale. We don’t know yet what Facebook is about. That’s unsettling, because Facebook is to the social Web what Google is to the Web.
• Media is frequently mis-characterized as publishing. The definition of media is that which  mediates between parties. Media isn’t content.
• We are the media. We recommend knowledge to each other. New media transforms as it moves, unlike traditional fixed media like TV. Telegraphs are a fixed medium for sending messages. The Internet sends messages but it isn’t fixed. It changes every second.
• We take on properties of our media and our behavior comes to reflect the media we use. For example: The phone is intermittent, interuptive communications driven by a reason to make a call. The Web is rolling sets of instantaneous, always changing fragmented networks. These networks may be transient or last a lifetime. This is a completely different model than traditional media.
• Network sociality is more like a party than a phone call. Telephones are interruptive; the Internet is distractive. People interact with the medium differently.
• In the days of broadcast, markets were abstractions created by advertising. Now they are real and social.
• Transparency is now an imperative. For example, on Wikipedia you can always find out why an item of information is there. The entire process is open. More businesses will operate like this.
• We are getting comfortable with fallibility. The most popular stuff on YouTube is about humans screwing up. This doesn’t embarrass us as much as it used to. This acceptance of our own weaknesses will change the way organizations operate.
• People don’t buy drills or holes. They buy a nice place to hang towels to impress their relatives. Abstract to the level of basic human needs in order to understand behavior. This also works in marketing, BTW.
• There are four types of transparency critical to Social Media: sources, self, humanity, interest.
• Newspapers traditionally provided a curated mix of content reflecting a professionally derived combination of what we wanted to know and what we needed to know. News about Sudan is an “eat your broccoli” story. We don’t like it, but we need to know it. It’s not clear where we will get that kind of information in the future.
• The social media generation now expects important information to find them. That’s a dangerous attitude.
• Diversity is important but uncomfortable. Without shared interests, it’s hard to converse. When you have a truly diverse group, you get smalltalk because people don’t have a common platform for conversation. Nevertheless, diversity is important. We must fight the tendency to stick with people like us. Diversity requires conscious discomfort. We want to interact with like-minded people.
• Media is increasingly an echo chamber in which we choose to listen to people who share our views. Echo chambers are bad for democracy and culture, but marketers like them because they say what marketers want to hear. Echo chambers aren’t necessarily bad, but if that’s the only place you ever talk, you’ll never hear other points of view.

There are a couple of events coming up in the Boston area this week that I hope you’ll attend.

On Thursday, June 3, the Mass. Technology Leadership Council is hosting its second annual Social Media Summit. We’re bringing together a lot of smart practitioners from the area who are putting social marketing to work in real business scenarios.

David Weinberger (right) kicks it all off as our keynote speaker. If you’ve never heard David speak, don’t miss this opportunity. He’s sharp-witted, insightful, and about five years ahead of the rest of the world. I can’t wait to hear about his next book.

Alan Belniak of PTC will be there showing the great suite of tools he uses to listen to conversations;

David Crosbie and Amy Black will talk about overcoming resistance, which is still a huge topic;

Novell’s Frank Days and others will look ahead to what we do next now that everybody is on Facebook;

I’m pairing up with Kip Bodnar to cover lead generation;

If you’re in financial services, health care or another regulated industry, you’ll want to hear what David Harlow and Michael Weissmann have to say about using social media there.

Sign up here.

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The evening before MassTLC is the 7^th Annual MITX Technology Awards. This worthwhile program spotlights technology innovators in New England and gets them the visibility they need to acquire capital and customers. Here’s a list of past winners.

New England’s high-tech community is a perpetual also-ran to Silicon Valley despite our concentration of great educational institutions and a record of IT innovation that stretches back to Jay Forrester. MITX has done a lot to nurture New England technology talent and get entrepreneurs the recognition they deserve. Supporting the MITX awards is casting a vote for this region.

Sign up here.

When I was a kid I collected baseball cards rabidly for about four years. Then I grew up, discovered girls and lost interest in the hobby. Years later I found out that some of the cards sitting in boxes in my basement were worth several hundred dollars and, thanks to eBay, was able to recoup most of my costs (including the bubble gum).

Evan Carmichael has got an even better idea. The entrepreneurship guru whose Evancharmichael.com website claims more than a half million monthly visitors has created collectible trading cards featuring prominent entrepreneurs. There are 33 business greats featured, including Vince McMahon, Michael Arrington, Herb Keller and Jeff Bezos. He’s selling these cards and donating all the profits to Kiva, an organization that loans small amounts of money to business owners in Third World countries.

If you’re not familiar with microloans, see this Wikipedia article. The concept has been phenomenally successful in stimulating new business development in some very poor places. Kiva has helped finance over 825 new businesses in Africa with a repayment rate of over 98%.

I’ve been asked to help spread the word on this novel and worthy cause and been given 10 limited edition trading cards to distribute. The two entrepreneurs I selected are Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Only 1,000 copies of each of these cards will be made and the specimens I have are preserved in a Lucite case with a holographic signature. Maybe they won’t be worth hundreds of dollars one day, but they’re pretty cool just to have and display. They celebrate your inner geek.

I want to get these cards out of my hands and into yours, but here’s the catch: in order to win, you must be a marketer or business owner and must fill out my survey on multiplatform social media practices. The survey takes about 10 minutes to complete and the results will be used in a research report on best practices in multiplatform deployment. The next 10 people to complete the survey will receive one of these handsome collectibles. Just leave your address in the comments field at the bottom of the survey. Happy collecting!

Shannon Lehotsky (SLehotsky) is a 2009 graduate of Emerson College, where I often speak to marketing and communications students. Last fall she contacted me to ask about ideas a new graduate could use to find a job. I gave her a few, but she went much farther that my advice. I got an e-mail from her last week about how she’s been leveraging Twitter to build a network and find work. The new crop of graduates who are set to hit the bricks in a couple of months could learn something from Shannon. The sentence in bold below is my own emphasis.

I’d like to share with you how Twitter has been helping me build my professional network (thanks to your advice!). I started when I moved to New York City after graduating in December, knowing no more than 5 people. I only had one or two job leads, so I pretty much had to start from the ground up:

- I created a new Twitter account and starting following industry professionals, job listings (@nyprjobs, @InternQueen), and industry publications (@Mashable).

- I started tweeting things relevant to my career to attract followers in the industry and make me develop a a brand as a thought leader.

- I avoided inappropriate or annoying tweets. On a few of my interviews, the interviewer mentioned that they looked at my Twitter account to learn more about me. (It seemed like a similar situation to Facebook, where a social platform is visible to professionals which can be detrimental to your career.)

- I joined the conversation! My goal was to get noticed, so I tried to keep all of my tweets thoughtful and relevant and directed to people so they weren’t just floating aimlessly in the Twitterverse. For example I’m following @EmersonAlumni, and they retweeted me once. I gained a few followers from that, including one fellow alum in New York City who put me in contact with another alum who was a job recruiter.

- A few people who I worked with previously would retweet job postings to me. Since it’s microblogging, a quick tweet isn’t too intrusive and it is less time-consuming than an e-mail.

- It is easier to find out people’s Twitter names rather than their e-mails. A quick tweet to a company to show that I was interested in them was sometimes the best way to contact people, especially smaller companies. It also shows that you are media savvy.

- Checking out Twitter accounts is also a good way to find out about company culture. When I applied for jobs, I would look them up on LinkedIn, Google, and then Twitter to see what topics they were talking about.

So those are just a few ways that Twitter has helped me to brand myself. I’ve found that sending out a resume is not enough to get a job in this market – networking is a necessity in the process and Twitter has definitely been helpful.

Job hunting has been a long process but I’ve accepted a job at a website (Lifebooker.com) and I’m excited to continue to work online.

More about Shanon.

I’ve recently been writing about tools that syndicate content from a single author to multiple destinations on the Web, making it possible for one person to spread a message far and wide with minimal effort. One of the new entrants in this market is dlvr.it, which is currently in a controlled beta.

On first look, I didn’t see much that was new about this tool, but I got a demonstration from founder Bill Flitter last week that showed some impressive utility. Flitter is the founder of Pheedo, a company that has a track record of success in the RSS advertising business. The service’s roots are in RSS feeds but it has plenty to offer the Twitter-only user as well.

Dlvr.it’s  most basic function is to distribute information to Twitter, Facebook and a number of other forthcoming services without user intervention. The default service grabs the contents of an RSS feed and syndicates it to other sources, which is pretty cool in itself. You don’t have to create a specific tweet; dlvr.it  does it for you.

The real power of the service, however, is on the back end. For each syndicated item, whether it be an article or a single tweet, you can see who retweeted the item, how many times it was distributed and how many clicks it received. There’s a metric called “direct reach” that measures the follower count of people who re-post an item. There’s also a calculated metric called “extended reach” that figures out how many people have tweeted your content using a URL shortening service other than dlvr.it.  That’s pretty cool. In effect, dlvr.it can tracks citations of your content that don’t result from retweets. You may have no other way of knowing about this activity other than through by looking at server logs for referring URLs.

This is where the service’s Pheedo roots are evident. Most Twitter services track Twitter activity exclusively, but dlvr.it can grab content from a blog or website, syndicate it and track activity automatically without any user intervention. I’m going to add the RSS feeds of all my blogs to dlvr.it and seeing what insights I gain. Sign up for an invitation at give it a try.

Posterous is a new service that radiates a person’s social media activity out to a network of community sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr and Delicious. Posterous is one of a host of new services that automate the once-tedious manual process of cross-posting information to multiple websites and social networks. Other pure-play entrants in this category include Ping.fm, Dlvr.it and the WordPress plugin Supr, but the basic capability to cross-post information across multiple social media is rapidly becoming a part of nearly every Web application. Google Buzz, which was announced just this week, has some of the same functionality.

These are the first ripples in a wave of new technology that will make the Internet effectively site-less. By that I mean that the metaphor of the Web as we’ve known it for the last 15 years is breaking down. The Internet is increasingly not about sites but about content and people. As technology makes it possible for our online scribblings to appear wherever we may choose, the task of assessing influence will become considerably more complex.

The big change in the landscape is that information no longer needs to have a homepage in order to reach an audience. Facebook kicked off this trend when it created a service that was so popular that some brands found it was more desirable to use Facebook as a homepage than their branded websites. Honda is a notable example of this. The auto maker has started listing a Facebook fan page as the destination URL in its TV ads. The tactic is a bit of a gimmick, but it’s also indicative of a shift in marketer perceptions. As Coca-Cola’s Digital Communications Director Adam Brown told me recently, “Our philosophy is to fish where the fish are.”

Only it’s becoming more difficult to figure out where the fish are. As social networks integrate their content, the contributions of individuals will become detached from discrete websites. On Twitter, for example, conversations exist in a stateless form that finds a home on Twitter.com, TweetDeck, Seesmic, blog widgets or any other listening device that catches them. How do we assess influence in this environment?

In the early days of social media (and by that I mean 2006!), online influencers used their blogs as a home base and relied upon word-of-mouth, inbound links and search engines to deliver an audience. Today, the blog is almost irrelevant. With Posterous, a blog entry can be created as an e-mail message and posted automatically to a couple of dozen social outposts, formatted for the unique capabilities of each destination. Some of these services publish fan and follower counts but others don’t. Determining an influencer’s “share of market” is a matter of picking through search results and the metrics provided by various channels to measure a person’s total footprint.

In time, services will emerge that make sense of this chaos, but for now this is a classic case of technology outpacing people’s ability to understand it. For marketers, the key point is that the website as we have known it is diminishing in importance, influencers are magnifying their voices and the rules of engagement are being reset. The good news is that everyone can use these tools, so if you’re currently limiting your publishing activities to a blog or Twitter, consider expanding your scope. The bad news is that the influencer you thought you had identified and corralled is now blasting messages to a whole lot of different audiences. Only time will tell what the impact of that new reality will be.

As we head into the second decade of the new millennium (okay, it technically doesn’t begin for another year, but stick with me), it’s worth remembering where media stood just 10 years ago.

In December, 1999, few people had heard of Google. Online advertising was banners and e-mails. Big media brands dominated the Web.  US newspaper ad revenue would hit record levels in 2000. Newsroom employment would peak in 2001 as newsstand sales of the top 100 magazines approached 30 million. No one had heard of blogs. People used mobile phones to talk.

Fast forward to 2009. This year, people spent six billion minutes on Facebook, downloaded one billion YouTube videos and logged over 1.4 million blog entries every day. The iPhone became the first mobile phone to be used more for data than for voice. The Internet became the second most popular news medium behind television. Wikipedia posted its three millionth article.

Meanwhile, US newsroom employment fell to a 25-year low and magazine newsstand sales dropped to 63% of their 2001 peaks. Reader’s Digest declared bankruptcy. Comcast said it would buy NBC.

The statistics go on and on. In just 10 years, our century-old mass-market media model has given way to a new structure dominated by the economics of one. Customers now take their opinions directly to the market.  Woe to organizations that don’t listen.

The contraction of mass-market media has brought plenty of pain. Tens of thousands of media professionals have lost their jobs in the past two years, crowdsourcing has sent some professional fees into a tailspin and veteran marketers are under threat if they don’t “get” social media. But this pain is necessary, even beneficial in the long run.

New Efficiency

That’s because media has historically been one of the least efficient disciplines on the planet. It’s a profession that declares success if only 97% of its audience ignores an ad or tosses the mailer into the trash. It gains one customer at the expense of annoying 50 bystanders. When department store magnate John Wanamaker said half his ad dollars were wasted, but “I don’t know which half,” he was being generous.

The new Internet has flipped the economics. As media control has passed from institutions to individuals, waste has begun to be worked out of the system. The cost of reaching a targeted customer will only decline in the years to come. Sadly, efficiency will also devastate those industries and professions that thrived on media’s historical inefficiency.

While mourning the loss of comfort and security that old media once provided, we shouldn’t get caught up looking backward. More competitive markets will bring new options for reaching customers. The marketers who survive will be those who put the past behind and move quickly to take advantage of these new efficiencies.

Let’s start the year not by mourning the losses of the last decade but by learning the skills we’ll need to survive the next.

What changes will we be looking back upon a decade from now? Post your predictions as comments.

Last week, Google changed the rules of Web search with a relatively low-key innovation that I expect will permeate the search engine giant’s future strategy.

Google Social Search is an experimental program that integrates content from a user’s social network into search results. When enabled, the first page of Google search results includes a few links at the bottom to related content from a member’s social network. Google derives this information from the profiles people build when creating a Google account. It also taps into other Google tools to make assumptions about what’s important to a member.

For example, if you subscribe to blogs in Google Reader, the search engine now presumes that that content is important to you and elevates it in search results.

Social Search continues Google’s efforts – which began with a year ago with SearchWiki – to customize the search process. SearchWiki enables logged-in users to shuffle their own search results, promoting some and demoting or eliminating others. Users can also annotate their search results. Social Search goes one step further, and it’s a big step. The search engine now makes assumptions about your interests based upon your friends network.

This has tremendous utility. If I want to find a steakhouse in Dallas, I can now see recommendations from my friends directly in my search results. Google already annotates some commercial results with reviews it gathers from online review sites. It’s a small step to expect that I’ll soon be able to promote my friends’ reviews to the top of the heap.

Social Web

Last week, I had the chance to discuss these developments with Mike Moran, whose book, Search Engine Marketing, Inc., remains one of my favorite texts for understanding the Internet. I proposed to Mike that Google’s ambition was to make the entire Internet a social network. His response was that they’re already mostly there.

In his analysis, Google is extending the customization features of SearchWiki to now include input from trusted third parties. We’re already at the point where no two registered Google users see the same results for most of their queries. And this is just the beginning. For better or for worse, Google knows a lot more about our online behavior than it uses.

For people like myself who regularly use Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Documents, the company is now in a position to capture a great deal of information about what I do online because it can peek inside most of the written content I create. The obvious privacy issues aside (and I’m not a believer in Big Brother), this puts Google in a position to evolve its search strategy in a much more customized direction. Google can only go so far before the “creepiness” factor sets in, but there’s still plenty of runway to experiment in making the search experience more personal.

Search Party

For marketers, this has interesting implications. Many of us are now comfortable with the basics of search engine optimization (SEO) but what will we do when every user’s search results are unique? We could be looking at a future in which search engine performance is determined as much by opinions from people online as it is by page titles and domain names. Although inbound links already factor into Google’s search results, the relationship of the people doing the linking to the person doing the searching will be a new variable. SEO itself may become a social pursuit.

Don’t underestimate the value of social search. Compete.com estimates that search.twitter.com attracted nearly 3,000,000 unique visitors in September. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to Google, but it’s up 550% year-over-year. Now that Twitter has a deal with Microsoft to deliver its search results over Bing (and speculation is that a deal with Google will follow) we are likely to see more creative efforts to integrate social content.Three years from now, the SEO tactics we’ve work so hard to learn may seem quaint indeed.