In his excellent book The Meaning of the 21st Century , James Martin asks when in human history you would most like to be alive. For me there is no question that it is now. The coming decade will be the most exciting in human history. Now, technological and social change are poised to accelerate far beyond what we have become accustomed to. MORE >>

Community Managers by Luc Legay. I’ve watched the demand for online community managers (CM) build tempo this past year. Perhaps it follows last year’s frequent request from clients and others for “facebook in a box&# for their organization. Now they need someone to make it work. Online communities don’t seem to stabilize. MORE >>

Forrester recently released a report on What’s Holding Back Your Intranet? by Tim Waters with Matthew Brown and Sara Burnes. They were kind to share a copy with me. They found that 93% of employee respondents said they use an intranet or company portal (Forrester uses the terms interchangeably) at least weekly, and more than half reported daily use. MORE >>

One of my “vacation&# projects was to do some Twitter housecleaning. needed to unfollow a lot of people who weren’t following me on one of my accounts. Twitter, as you know, provides no built-in options for filtering followers, mass unfollowing, or mass reciprocating (following people who follow you). Selective Unfollowing. Safelisting. MORE >>

Will crowdsourcing create more headaches than it was intended to solve? new project sponsored by a prominent scientific association seeks to overcome this challenge. We’re starting to see the possibilities from applying crowdsourcing to tough questions. That brings us to the largest organization in the world, the US government. MORE >>