Friday lunch with Ross Dawson attracted about 40 people from KMLF and VPSCIN. Ross was in fine form and lead the audience through a persuasive argument for why social media was important today. The crux of the argument went like this:
- information and knowledge is expanding at a rate that for all intents and purposes it’s now an infinite resource
- the renaissance man is a thing of the past and today we are all forced to specialise
- specialists need to collaborate to get things done
- social media is all about how people connect and communicate
I’m relying on Ross to make a comment if I have things totally off base 
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Ross then introduce us to a range of social media tools such as blogs, wikis, RSS. There were a couple of examples that grabbed my attention.
Macromedia has developed a blog community consisting of internal and external bloggers.
Netflix has offered a prize of $1 million to anyone who can build a collaborative filtering engine that is 10% better than the one they currently use.
Swiki from Eurekster helps a community by providing a “community powered search engine, tailored to produce only the targeted search results that you and your community want.” “The search results from the swicki you create are much more focused than a general search engine and they will continue to learn and adapt, anonymously and automatically, based on the search behavior of your community.”
