What do you think of when you think of the term ‘currency’ ? Dictionary.com offers these definitions of currency:

cur·ren·cy [kur-uhn-see, kuhr-] –noun, plural -cies.

1.	something that is used as a medium of exchange; money.

2.	general acceptance; prevalence; vogue.

3.	a time or period during which something is widely accepted and circulated.

4.	the fact or quality of being widely accepted and circulated from person to person.

It is interesting to notice that while money is certainly mentioned, first and foremost, currency is a medium of exchange, indicating value does not lie within the value of the coin or dollar intrinsically. So then, who decides what manner of exchange is to be employed and what value is to be placed upon the denominations used?

As they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

In social media terms, Twitter has followers, FriendFeed has subscribers, and Plurk has Karma… they are all status symbols signifying importance or authority… Who places value on them? The participants of those communities, of course. If you are not fond of social media, or have not been exposed to it, then you might ask why such trivial things matter?

Let’s broaden our analogy: For those in web-based marketing, often termed search engine optimization (SEO), maybe it’s unique visitors (uniques) or conversation rates. For those in brick-and-mortar businesses maybe it’s customer retention rates, revenue per employee, or sales per square foot.

All in all, we all seek to assign value to our transactions and why? Quite simply, to survive.

We live in a world where everything has a price, and in assigning value to your product or service you attempt to broadcast your worth to your clients, to the world, and most importantly - to you, yourself.

Ah, now there is the rub. Up until this point, this is all basic economics, right? Well, have you ever considered the reason you are so caught up in trying to inflate your value is to take a place of superiority for yourself - above others?

Let me give you a more personal example:

I started this blog several months ago for a reason, I would even call it a cause. My goal was two-fold:

1. I wanted people to know who I was.
2. I wanted to share my thoughts with others, and encourage debate and discussion.

I dug in, and learned more and more about blogging tools, tricks, and sought any advice I could get. I worked long hours building this site, and had quite a few frustrations. Then somewhere along the way, I discovered I was spending more time pumping my blog - pumping myself up - and less time creating content. I found I was spending less time enjoying myself.

My currency had become me… pushing me, pumping me up, talking about me… Does that sound as self-centered as it looks while I’m writing this?

Now here is my adjusted goal:

1. I wanted people to know who I was.
2. I want to share my thoughts with others, and encourage debate and discussion.

Now that I am focused on connecting with people, I am much more focused on creating content and having fun. I have rediscovered the joy of interacting with others simply for that - not with ulterior motive in mind. Where the currency I had traded in used to be a currency of “me”, I have learned that trading in a currency of “you” actually betters my experience, and comes back to me ten fold.

So as you travel through your life, ask yourself, “What currency do I trade in?” If it is a currency of “me”, you may find that you are feeding your ego and starving your soul.

Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. Ken is also the Director of Technology at Kearns Business Solutions.

This weekend, the weekend before our celebrations begin in honor of our independence here in America, I found a lost feeling I had somewhat forgotten.

This weekend started on Friday much like any other, but instead of coming home to a rushed spouse and quick peck on the lips as she darted off to class, instead I came home to a wife and child eagerly welcoming me to the dinner table.  You see, this has not be the norm in my household for over a year now, and it seems odd to see this type of event now that I have grown accustomed to the distance.

We proceed to finish our dinner. After dinner we, as a family, lounged all over each other on our over-sized leather sofa while watching a wonderfully fantastic adventure, nibbling on popcorn and sipping a drink of our choice. The movie offered some scares and wows, each offering my wife and I opportunities to smile a smile of knowing love at each other only parents might know.

Friday soon passed, and Saturday morning came as usual: My wife running off to school and my daughter running into to use me as her ad hoc jungle gym. After lounging for a bit, my daughter and I managed to find our way to a friend’s wedding where my we enjoyed many smiles and excellent food. We came home to find our cozy beds and sweet dreams, to awake the next morning.

I was greeted by the banging of my daughter on our bedroom door; this has become the norm in lieu of a doorbell, I suppose. The family readied for church and had a wonderful time taking in a great lesson on patience. After service we found ourselves in the typical rush, ironically as it would seem. One might wonder if we actually paid attention.

After lunch, we parted ways as my wife made the 2 hour round trip to pick-up our monster-, aahumm, mother-in-law. I tidied up the house a bit.

At around 6 pm, we toddled on over to something our church was putting on called the “County Fair”, filled with carnival rides, great music, and free hot dogs! Several thousand people were there enjoying the festivities, and parents and teenagers alike were braving the lengthy lines in order to step onto a ride or two.

We managed to find our way through the crowds, and even met some friends and exchanged smiles and handshakes.

As nightfall began to close in, we found our way to a plush, grassy hilltop in preparation of the coming fireworks. And soon they started; booms and thunder ensued. We snuggled close to one another and covered our heads with blankets as the rain began to sprinkle our foreheads.

And in that instant, we found something digital mediums have subtly offered and still attempt to provide - a connection. It was a weekend full of emotion, both good and bad; a weekend of connections - of relationships.

You see, the digital divide is in truth just that. We have allowed ourselves to succumb to the lure of efficiency and mobility. And yes response-time, or up-time, or whatever “-time” you may want might be markedly improved. However, what I would offer is it might have come at the expense of plain ole’ quality time.

Twitter - check! FriendFeed - check!, BlackBerry - check! iPod Touch - check!, GPS navigation system - check! overly-connected - check!

Tonight I traded the noise on the net for the screams of excitement in the crowd of fair-goers; Tonight I traded the dim glow of my computer screen for the explosion of fireworks against the night sky; Tonight I found out that being disconnected is where true connectivity begins.

In the quick pauses between thunderous explosions and nibbles of cotton candy an experience is reborn anew, the human connection.

So what’s so great about all of these social media platforms like FriendFeed, Twitter, etc.? Back at the beginning of April, I signed up for a FriendFeed account (ChangeForge). I decided to join the experiment first hand to see what’s it’s all about.

Well, to be truthful, it seems like I’ve been subscribed much longer than just 2 months.

Scoble wrote a post about news v. noise (link). The premise was a simple question of whether you enjoy information from 1 of 2 sources: 

1) news, an organized stream of information from “reputable sources”, or

2) noise, the chatter in the blogosphere.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I enjoy the former more than the latter, BUT I have come to learn that social media sites and meta-aggregators are wonderful ways to find new content that I would never have found otherwise.

Think of it… you are 1 person trying to find things interesting through traditional media outlets, various e-mails, or you might even be using some sights like MySpace or FaceBook already.

So what would something like FriendFeed or Twitter bring to the table?

Think of this… you now have dozens or hundreds of individuals combing the Internet for things you enjoy and posting links back to their source. This is the beautiful thing I have come to love about FriendFeed or Twitter.

These sites do not give you that 1-on-1 feel like an Instant Messaging client might, but you can gain some wonderful links to new information, and that branch can take you to many other sources of information. It’s almost as if you are becoming part of the root system of a large tree seeking more and more sources of minerals and water.

Social Media is not without its issues; it does tend to be a little “high school” in that users tend to become incensed at the drop of the hat, it seems. It is also my opinion you need a program like AlertThingy, TWhirl, or Feedalizer to keep a little more interactive feel.

Nonetheless, it is a bold new frontier I have not regretted becoming part of. I am still refining who I follow, but this practice is, and should be, part of any evolution. Give it a try, and dive in.

Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. Ken is also the Director of Technology at Kearns Business Solutions.

This is a great message by Robert Scoble on his blog.

…If you define yourself by who is following you you’ll always feel inadequate. After all, you can’t control your followers and any idiot can follow people. But, define yourself by who you are following and you can really build something of high value.

People still aren’t getting this. They didn’t get how I was using Twitter and still don’t. I follow the world’s best early adopters, business executives, and entrepreneurs. I really don’t care if I have a single follower. If I defined myself by my followers I’d always feel inadequate. If I define myself by the people who I follow, well, I follow the smartest, richest, coolest, funniest people in the world. That makes me smarter, richer, cooler, and funnier.

Read the entire post on Robert’s blog here.

Do you find yourself wondering if you have too many sites to go to in order to keep up with what’s going on? RSS readers, Twitter, Flickr, MySpace, FaceBook, and the list goes on and on (and on)…

As a continuation of yesterday’s post Are we too connected to social media? I asked some fairly open ended questions. This all started when I read a post over at Dan’s blog (BizTechTalk) regarding meta-meta-aggregators. For those of you just tuning in, that’s a tool that crawls all of your social media sites and pulls them back together in a single portal or allows you to atleast create vectors of usable information rather than trying to sift through the static of the Internet.

As fate would have it, Scoble strikes again… and talks on FriendFeed.com. As it turns out, someone already had this bright idea (and they evidently use to work at Google - why am I not surprised?).

I have subscribed to FriendFeed (http://friendfeed.com/changeforge), and I’ll keep you all posted on how it goes. With all of these social media channels in this land grab for subscribers there has to be some players in the space to help orchestrate the static. Let’s see if FriendFeed can do it.

Do you ever feel like you are too wired in? Do you find yourself using a password manager to keep up with your passwords to your other password managers? Dan Keldsen just posted a very interesting piece that really got me thinking on linking all of these various social media types together to form multi-dimensional and very personal POP’s (point-of-presences) for every individual.

They are a meta-meta-aggregator in the sense that they are aggregating (collecting) information from multiple sources, and that their underlying data sources can also be aggregating information from multiple sources (such as ZoomInfo). This extends the reach and richness of the information that they are able to pull back on behalf of users of their system, in a similar fashion to the functionality of federated search or universal search in more traditional enterprise search.

In an ideal world, or at least with the smarter salespeople and marketers, such information will help to weed out who the appropriate people are to engage in more targeted discussions, and to engage in informed conversations of the “2.0 age” rather than in continuing to hammer out cold-calls and blanket, un-personalized (or badly personalized) mass-marketing.

Though Dan’s article is referring specifically to a product called SalesView by InsideView, I can’t help but notice we are drowning in a sea of social media outlets. For instance, Twitter is interesting, and a social medium to which many people subscribe. It begs a question though, in the context of its underlying purpose,

What is the end-game for this type of social experiment?

[Dan contends] social networking is not purely about person-to-person connections, or in providing a virtual watercooler (or virtual voyeur perhaps) view into your “friends” (peers, co-workers, etc.) but also for the ability of participants IN the network to use the data within that network to become smarter in the ways that they interact with the people in that network.

Bluntly put, information about people abounds through many different channels, all of which were never before captured outside of family photo albums or epitaphs. Now that all of this information exists in a connected world, it is becoming a very relevant question to ask,

What can be done with all of this information about you? Is your information usable in its new formats?

All of this latent “social information” is buried in the heap of individual silos both inside and outside of the control of any one [corporation], even deeper … than “normal” electronic information is.

InsideView has a few ideas, according to Dan, albeit a bit Minority Report-ish. However, let’s assume we all have the best intentions of using this information to the benefit of mankind; it makes me wonder whether this medium will connect us in ways never before dreamed or allow us to conduct plastic surgery at-will to our public persona? And just who decides someone, or some organization, should be granted access to a given network of POP’s?

For now, everyone is having fun, and rightly so. By all accounts, this is a golden age of connectedness not seen in centuries past. Even as we marvel at our own magnificence, I can’t help but step back, take a breath and ask if we are all too connected?

Today we wrap up our review of John Mancini’s article in ImageSource titled Top 10 Industry Trends, authored by John Mancini, the President of AIIM, outlines what he believes to be the top 10 drivers within the DMS space… Let’s continue our discussion with the number 10 influencer in the DMS space this year and evaluate social technology trends today:

10. A need to connect in new ways. End users need to find each other and learn from each other more than ever.

‘A need to connect in new ways,” Mancini writes… a fairly open-ended comment, but one that has some profound implications, and a statement that would indicated end-users aren’t exchanging information as readily as before…

This brings up a wonderful question of whether the up and coming generation is more apt to share information amongst themselves because of exposure to such an abundant growth of information and social media in general?

I’m sure there are studies and reports, but look around. The Corporate America of yesterday is getting turned on its ear. Big business still rules the roost, and the almighty dollar is high on the priority list of just about everyone, in the corporate sectors of America at least. However, I see an amazing and growing prevalence to gleefully share discoveries, much like scientists would revel in the discovery of some new star.

Newsgroups and message boards of the past offered no glitz or glam to attract users, and it was often hard to comb through what information was there. It finally seems that technology has actually become usable in the mainstream to improve the quality of life in general.

Add to this the simple fact people are more easily able to connect across larger geographies. First things like travel became easier with the additions of automobiles and trains; now we find ourselves in a brave new world where travel isn’t even as necessary; a time where mobile phones worldwide are close (or already) out numbers traditional land based lines, global positioning systems (GPS) are available in consumer-based handheld devices, and social media tools such as Twitter allows you to literally track what someone’s every move is.

I dare not dream of what tomorrow may hold for us, but the sunrise upon today offers a glimmer of what is to come: A world of open dialogue and information sharing which has Corporate America’s ears perked to be sure. We used to talk about globalization when I was in college, a few short years ago; well my friends - it is here.

John states people must find new ways to connect. Those ‘new ways’ are here so Corporate America must find applications for use of these tools to improve the business, increase efficiencies, and most of all increase mind-share from the grass roots to ivory tower.