Action:

Undermine guerilla cause and destroy their cohesion by demonstrating integrity and competence of government to represent and serve needs of the people - rather than exploit and impoverish them for the benefit of a greedy elite.*

Take political initiative to root out and visibly punish corruption. Select new leaders with recognized competence as well as popular appeal. Ensure that they deliver justice, eliminate grievances and connect government with grass roots.*



*If you cannot realize such a political program, you might consider changing sides.

Last year, social-media adoption by businesses with fewer than 100 employees doubled to 24% from 12%, says a survey released in January of 2,000 U.S. entrepreneurs from the University of Maryland's Smith School of Business and Network Solutions LLC, a Web-services provider in Herndon, Va.

Meanwhile, a separate survey of 500 U.S. small-business owners from the same sponsors found that just 22% made a profit last year from promoting their firms on social media, while 53% said they broke even. What's more, 19% said they actually lost money due to their social-media initiatives.

Robert Niles, a former journalism instructor at USC commented on replacing the front page with ads stating, "It's a pretty dangerous road to go down for any news organization to actually sell advertising that covers up your news reporting. It really shows a lack of respect for the audience and a lack of confidence in your editorial product."

The technology site Ars Technica has a tech-savvy group of readers, of which about 40 percent have installed ad-blocking software in their web browsers. That's a plugin that allows you to avoid seeing most ads on a site. The financial consequence for Ars is "devastating", editor-in-chief Ken Fisher explained in a post. Ars sells ads based on impressions, not clickthroughs - which means it takes a big financial hit because of browsing habits of its users.

On Friday evening, Ars tried an experiment: Readers running ad blockers got a blank page instead of the story they intended to read. The move was a technical success, but caused an uproar (and confusion) among users. In hindsight, Fisher told me, the site's experiment in retribution was the "wrong approach," causing confusion among many readers.

But the experiment still generated positive returns for the site's bottom line. Fisher wrote a lengthy post on Ars (similar to many the site has run before) about its goals and why ad blocking was a big problem for the site:

My argument is simple: blocking ads can be devastating to the sites you love. I am not making an argument that blocking ads is a form of stealing, or is immoral, or unethical, or makes someone the son of the devil. It can result in people losing their jobs, it can result in less content on any given site, and it definitely can affect the quality of content. It can also put sites into a real advertising death spin.

And since Saturday, Fisher has received about 1,200 emails from users saying they had whitelisted the site - meaning they had told their ad-blocking software it was okay to show Ars' ads. Based on Ars data from IP addresses, 25,000 users whitelisted the site in a 24-hour period - evidence that the goodwill the site has built up with its audience could be converted into user acts of generosity.

On Friday, TSA spokeswoman Ann Davis said the boy never should have been told to remove his braces.

TSA policy should have allowed the parents to help the boy to a private screening area where he could have been swabbed for traces of explosive materials.

She said she wished Thomas had reported the matter to TSA immediately. "If screening is not properly done, we need to go back to that officer and offer retraining so it's corrected."

Davis also said TSA's security director at the airport, Bob Ellis, called Thomas last week to apologize. He gave Thomas the name of the agency's customer service representative, in case he has a problem at the airport in the future.

The Borland Quattro Pro(tm) for Windows (QPW) development is one of the most remarkable organizations, processes, and development cultures we have encountered in the AT&T Bell Laboratories Pasteur process research project. The project assimilated requirements, completed design and implementation of 1 million lines of code, and completed testing in 31 months. Coding was done by no more than eight people at a time, which means that individual coding productivity was higher than 1000 lines of code per staff-week. The project capitalized on its small size by centering development activities around daily meetings where architecture, design, and interface issues were socialized. Quality assurance and project management roles were central to the development sociology, in contrast to the developer-centric software production most often observed in our studies of AT&T telecommunications software. Analyses of the development process are "off the charts" relative to most other processes we have studied.

We most frequently use a natural force-based network analysis to analyze organization data collected in the Pasteur data base. This analysis produced an adjacency diagram. In these diagrams, a default repelling force is established between each pair of roles. There is also an attracting force between pairs of roles that are coupled to each other by collaboration or mutual interest; a stable placement occurs when these forces balance. Figure 2 shows the picture that results by applying this analysis to QPW. There are several things worth noting in these pictures that set them apart from most other organizational process models we've made. Here is a summary of those properties:

The QPW process has a higher communication saturation than 89% of the processes we've looked at. The adjacency diagram shows that all roles have at least two strong connections to the organization as a whole. The project's interaction grid is dense. The coupling per role is in the highest 7% of all processes we have looked at. This is a small, intensely interactive organization.

There is a more even distribution of effort across roles than in most other processes we've looked at. The roles in the adjacency diagram are shaded according to their intensity of interaction with the rest of the organization. In the QPW process, Project Manger and QA glow brightly; Coders a little less so; Architect, Product Manager, and Beta Sites are "third magnitude stars"; and Tech Support, Documentation, and VP still show some illumination. Most "traditional" processes we've studied show a much higher concentration of interaction near the center of the process. That is, most other processes comprise more roles that are loosely coupled to the process than we find in QPW. That may be because QPW is self-contained, or because it is small. It may also be because the process was "intense": a high-energy development racing to hit an acceptable point on the market share curve.

So is the Web becoming awash with low-quality content produced by content farms like Demand Media, Answers.com and now AOL? Yes it is.

From my analysis of Demand Media and similar sites, such content is very generic and lacks depth. While I wouldn't go as far as wikiHow founder Jack Herrick and say that it "lacks soul," it certainly lacks passion and often also lacks knowledge of the topic at hand. Arrington's analogy with fast food is apt - it is content produced quickly and made to order.

So what really scares me? It's the rise of fast food content that will surely, over time, destroy the mom and pop operations that hand craft their content today. It's the rise of cheap, disposable content on a mass scale, force fed to us by the portals and search engines.

On one end you have AOL and their Toyota Strategy of building thousand of niche content sites via the work of cast-offs from old media. That leads to a whole lot of really, really crappy content being highlighted right on the massive AOL home page. This article, for example, is just horrendous. One of AOL's own blogs trashes the company's spinoff, rambles for miles without any real point, and adds a huge factual error to top things off ("the company is losing money"). Hiring a bunch of people who couldn't keep their old media jobs and don't have the stomach to go out on their own and then slapping little or no editorial oversight onto these masses of sub-par journalists leads to an inevitable conclusion - cheap, crappy content. And that crappy content is given a massive audience on the AOL portal.

On the other end you have Demand Media and companies like it. See Wired's "Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model." The company is paying bottom dollar to create "4,000 videos and articles" a day, based only on what's hot on search engines. They push SEO juice to this content, which is made as quickly and cheaply as possible, and pray for traffic. It works like a charm, apparently.

It paid well because of the high payer/payee ratio. Miranda provisionally accepted the bid. One of the other host roles hadn't been filled yet, so while she waited, she bid and won a filler job. The computer morphed her into the face of an adorable young woman whose face and hair looked typical of what was current in London at the moment; she wore the uniform of a British Airways ticket agent. "Good morning, Mr. Oremland," she gushed, reading the prompter.

Every media brand in existence is working to build a community.

Most of them won't succeed.

Many won't succeed because the business organizations that are trying to implement the communities are themselves crumbling, caught in a downdraft of declining revenues, causing cuts resulting in declining quality which leads to declining audiences who pay less and are less valuable to advertisers - and so on.

And some won't succeed because they are doing community wrong - treating it as an adjunct, a bolt-on feature, or a simple expansion of "letters to the editor."

That's not community, it's not going to drive audience 'engagement,' and it's not going to lead to sustainable new business models.