In 1982 when the world heard that somebody had laced Tylenol products with potassium cyanide, many people were terrified to take a Tylenol for their headache for fear it would kill them. Some caution was in order, for certain. I remember my mother dumping out any Tylenol we had in the house after watching the reports on television. Was it realistic to believe we actually had laced Tylenol in our own home? Probably not, but similar types of unrealistic caution and chaos are still happening every day in social media. Can you imagine how many more people would have been [...]

I have been thinking about the power and truth of live Internet. The power in the numbers is staggering. Today, we can all be journalists, and many of us clearly have a story to report. In fact, before I finish this article I will demonstrate the potential of social journalism with a live video stream from my cell phone, and have it posted to my Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, and others as it happens … in real time. Speed of information delivery is a huge trend these days, as I pointed out in a recent article about social feeds in Google [...]