One of my favorite aggregation sites is Business Week Exchange. To me BX represents a knowledge inventory. Everyone who posts to this site is a media maven, social influencer, and trust agent. Each one represents a galaxy of relationships, experiences, and followers. All the categories are sourced by these users. All of the articles are sourced and often written by these users. All the trending data are produced by the users. By far, my highest QUALITY followers come from BX; not Twitter, not Facebook, and not Friendfeed.

The site is massive and I’ll spend a great deal of time skimming categories and reading titles to get a good idea of what people are thinking, what they fear, what they want, and what they are optimistic about. Most articles represent real-time main street issues.

Now, when you compare what’s trending on BX and you compare what is “editorialized” in the mainstream media…and they are different, an important conclusion can be made. What people care about and what is passed off as “news” are too often quite different from the other. Herein lies the apex of the social media divide. News that increases my daily productivity nourishes me. “News” for which I am powerless to influence is nothing more than sugar calories. For Example:

The top 10 topics from BX on Monday, November 16:

Social Media
U.S. Economy
Social Media Strategy
Business Innovation
Entrepreneurship
Global Economy
Business Technology
Career Change
Leadership
Google

The Breaking News on Bloomberg the same day at any given time:

U.S. Stocks…
U.S. retail…
3Com Options…
EMI Debt Burden…
USB Debt Trading…
AMBACS Bond Insurance…
NY Pension Fund…
Obama/China Trade…
Iranian Nukes…
Bernanke says…

I tried this experiment with many different combination of categorization from the Bloomberg site and not once was I able to produce a set of priorities that represents what other people like me actually care about. It’s great entertainment, but is it my News?

Bloomberg has an incredible opportunity ahead of them and the question is whether they will develop BX to the highest standard of transparency and promote it to the highest level of editorialized influence – if not the outright taxonomy for their editors to classify so called “news” – or will they squander an astonishing resource of business intelligence.

At the end of the day, the people who created BX and those who support the BX process got something very right in an environment when so much is going wrong for journalism. They had the guts and the humility to listen to me and people like me. They gave me their respect and their trust; more tangibly, they gave me their name which empowers my SEO rankings among the mainstream. In return, we give them a look deep into our humanity – this is who we are, this is our human nature.

The creators of BX are precisely the astonishing resource to whom so many people owe a debt of gratitude. I call it Journalism at it’s 21st Century best. Let’s hope that Bloomberg sees things our way – at the bottom line.

There are lots of questions about what constitutes news. Powerful editors decide what people read and what they don’t.  Journalists decide what is worthy of investigation and what is not.  Advertisers, special interests, lawyers and lobbyists defend the boundaries of inquiry against themselves or their industry.  All this plays out in a delicate dance of “crowd sourced censorship”  Whatever survives this gauntlet of execution becomes THE NEWS.

So, I took a snapshot of today’s news and ran it through the “History Test”:

• Lawyer for Accused Fort Hood Shooter to Raise ‘Mental Responsibility’ Issue

• Berlin 1989: The world remembers

• Modern Warfare game ’set for record’

• Virginia set to execute ‘Beltway sniper’

• FDI cleared Fort Hood Shooter one year ago

The History Test:

Now step back a few hundred years when people got their news at the central market place.  Of course they would talk about the bad guys in town, the end of past regimes, the state of a “games” simulating warfare.  And, they would have a very good reason to do so.

News is an integral part of the markets.

People go to the market to trade conversation in the same proportion as they go to the market to trade goods and services.  It is perfectly natural for the marketplace to be the news place, the advertising place, and the monetary transaction place.  It’s all so perfectly normal that we take it for granted.

The question is what happens outside of the marketplace?  People need to produce stuff to bring to the marketplace.  The NEWS reflects the trials and challenges of producing stuff.  Therefore, according to the history test, anything that does not increase human productivity is not news.

The shrink got shrunk:

How does the exact definition of mental state of the shooter increase my personal productivity? Wacko is wacko. The Berlin Wall memorial reminds me of the promise of liberty over oppression as I strain to pay the bills.  I suppose that a game about war is more productive than actual war and less productive than the Olympics.   The real trick would have been to predict the future execution of the victims, not the beltway sniper – which brings us back to the FBI and the wacko psychiatrist.  Again, how does this News help me pay the mortgage?

The disconnect

There is a big difference between least worthy news and most worthy news. If editors, marketers, journalists, and publishers are not consciously and strategically helping people to build their communities and to increase their personal and professional productivity, they will find themselves talking to an empty market place.  And they are.

The real trick is to predict the future execution of a market.

The following commentary was posted last week  in  Wall Street Journal Op Ed. This is an opportunity to consider the term “Conversational Currency” at it’s most literal meaning. People pay money to talk to each other. Other people want to control how when and how much people can talk to each other. The battlefront is technology, like rockem-sockem robots, technologies duke it out in this trillion dollar struggle to control our conversations.

Who benefits … shareholders?

The irony is that each and every titan is the beneficiary of conversation. The 135 year old Alexander Graham Bell era is about to End. Will patricide or scionism prevail? Will unified voice systems integrate all mediums and devices into a single channel? Will the elimination of conversation “frictions” also eliminate innovation “frictions” (you know, all those things that make innovation impossible to capitalize by regular people; Patents, risk, velocity, market intel, 1000% VC, etc.).

It’s about the data, stupid

Mr. Kessler proposes a National Data policy – after all, voice, text, video, etc., are simply different forms of data and should be treated as such.  Any device should work on any network and data should flow freely.  What’s with owning airwaves? Who came up with that idea ? – it creates more interference than it is touted to solve. Ditto for exclusivity contracts – who needs them, except those who stifle innovation.  And finally, the mother of all frictions, restricting speed and bandwidth.  Sure, I like driving with the emergency brake on – it improves my eligibility for “cash for clunkers”.

Resistance is futile

The truth cannot be hidden by economic tyranny.  Noble institutions like journalism, education, and entrepreneurship are being sacrificed in the name of shareholder value. People communicate freely and freely they shall communicate.  These are the profound questions of our era that play out every day in the news. Please read this and our other posts at CC with great optimism that a new paradigm is arising where an innovation economy will be built on a social media platform outside the construct of corporations:

The Social Media Production System

Social Media has demonstrated in many ways capable of meeting or exceeding the deliverable output of many traditional industries such as advertising, marketing, journalism, human resources, design, community organizing, education, and social vetting.

We have also seen social media form communities that increase productivity in manufacturing processes, software development, and project management.  We have seen people self manage in social media to segregate and elevate good information away from bad information.  We have seen communities act with logic, tact, and precision previously thought to be the province of top management guidance.

In short, we have seen social media replace or duplicate almost every structural element of the traditional corporation outside of the construct of corporations.  Can social media provide a corporate structure in and among itself?

General Accounting Practices:

Corporations have an internal accounting system, internal processes, internal procedures, and often their own lexicon and unique job descriptions relative to their product.  This is how a corporation stores knowledge and trades value internally and defends itself from external influence.  The common thread is that each department is accounted, assessed, and compared in terms of money.  Standard balance sheets are compared by banks and investors.

Social media uses the exchange of information, knowledge and new ideas to store value.  Processes, procedures, job descriptions, and accounting are done in a public lexicon that everyone develops collectively.  People share, trade, and exchange information, knowledge, and new ideas like tangible property; and they trade options on futures in the same.  Increasingly, access to the community knowledge inventory is becoming a means be which people can convert productivity to money.

Standard Balance Sheet for Social Media

Most elements of a corporation can be duplicated in social media.  For those parts that cannot, the entrepreneur will soon figure out how they can.   The entrepreneur does not worry about money, they worry about productivity and the money always follows.  The next paradigm of economic development will reside almost entirely on a statistical game of managing risk and return, matching surplus to deficit, and increasing human productivity in the operating system of Social Media.  Every Newspaper that falls to Social Media is simply transferring its value to the new paradigm.  That value is still in play.  This trend will continue until a new currency representing that value is introduced.

Business Plans of the Future:

As you witness the progression of Social Media unfold, look for innovations that contain incentives for people to reorganize themselves.  Look for similarities between new social media developments and traditional corporate departments.  Look for businesses and institutions that support social vetting mechanisms, knowledge exchanges, and groups bringing together strategic combination of diverse knowledge assets, not just similar knowledge assets.  Most importantly; look for the “Last Mile of Social Media”; diverse groups of 5-10 people living within a few miles of each other forming new enterprise.

Threats:

Finally, look for the threats that can corrupt an innovation economy.  Social Media is currently responsible for trillions of dollars of productivity gains – all this money is still on the table for social entrepreneurs to monetize once the integration reaches a tipping point.  Be watchful for attempts at censorship, attempts to monopolize information nodes, and the corporatizations of social networks.   Wall Street was corrupted when the value of the currency became divorced from human productivity.  Don’t let the same happen to Social Media.

Back atcha!

Everything is Connected:

The economic models and theories that prevailed through the 20th century are rapidly falling apart. Economists scramble to offer explanations and solutions. However, much of what has gone wrong was anticipated years ago by E. F. Schumacher (1911-1977), an Oxford economist and protégé of John Maynard Keynes who proposed a theory of “Buddhist Economics” following his interest and studies in Asian philosophies.

Schumacher was among the first to argue that economic production was too wasteful of the environment and non-renewable resources. But even more than that, he saw decades ago that ever-increasing production and consumption — the foundation of the modern economy — is unsustainable.

Never see what has been done; only see what remains to be done.

Schumacher wrote that western economics measures “standard of living” by “consumption” and assumes a person who consumes more is better off than one who consumes less. He also discusses the fact that employers consider their workers to be an “expense” to be reduced as much as possible.  He questioned the theory that some amount of unemployment might be better “for the economy.”

What we think, we become.

Schumacher argued that an economy should exist to serve the needs of people. But in a “materialist” economy, people exist to serve the economy.  Notably, he argued that labor should be about more than production because a person’s work has psychological and spiritual value that must be respected.

Instead we consider goods as more important than people and consumption as more important than creative activity. It means shifting the emphasis from the worker to the product of work, that is, “from the human to the subhuman.”  We have outsourced our soul.

Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.

Today, many enterprises – some entire industries – are failing and they cannot understand why.  Over time, they have crossed that philosophical line and now serve advertisers, not their customers.

Traditional media and journalism are an example; they scare people, feed on their anxieties, promote insecurities, and stoke desire.  Demographers trespass into people’s homes, collect statistics, run numbers, and design messages that steal the things people love about their self and sell it back for the price of the product.

We end up with no end of entertaining consumer products that soon end up in landfills, but we fail to provide for some basic human needs, like health care for everyone.

A jug fills drop by drop:

Top News in Business Week Print Edition v. Growth Rate for print media:

•    Pending Home Sales Rise for Third Straight Month
•    GM: A View from the Back Seat
•    U.S. Corporations Size Up Their Carbon Footprints
•    Move Over, Amazon? Google Aims to Sell e-Books

Top News in Business Week Exchange – Reader Chosen Topics vs. Growth rate.

•    Social Networking

•    Global Economy
•    US Economy
•    Green Energy

The Editor selected topics in the top chart are aligned with corporations, consumption, and large bailout efforts.  Meanwhile, the reader selected topics in the second category screams: “Hey, where are we and where are we going?”

It would seem that mainstream media should be asking the same question.

(ed note: special thanks Barbara O’Brian at about.com)