Browsing the current Fast Company (September 2007), I am taken with Robert Scoble’s column, The Next Email. He points to "a coming communications revolution…services [that] mix contacts, instant messaging, blogging, and texting," which are "poised to make e-mail feel as antiquated as the mimeograph." (p.72).

He says the revolution is best represented by Twitter, "a microblog service in which you tell people what you are doing or thinking at any given moment." The fast-growing app is being joined by Facebook and Jaiku.

Scoble predicts this fast fusion of technologies will have a dramatic effect on business: "If we revisit this conversation again in three years, I suspect that we’ll have found all sorts of little uses for these services and they’ll simply become what e-mail is today: something we must do to participate in the heartbeat of business."

On the B2C front, Scoble is right. There is simply too much information being pumped into our profiles for it not to be mined. But for those who toil within an organization and, in the business-to-business field, between organizations, I wonder if it can be too much, too fast?

No Luddite here, but my antenna are up. How much can we handle? I agree with sentiments in a 2006 post on the blog called Creating Passionate Users:

"We’ve all been at the brain bandwidth breaking point for the last five years. Email is out of control. IM’ing sucks up half the day. And how can we not read our RSS feeds, post to our blogs, and check our stats? If my Cingular cell phone sends me a MySpace alert and I’m not there to get it, do I exist? But email, IM’s, social networking, and blogs are nothing compared to the thing that may finally cause time as we know it to cease. I’m talking, of course, about Twitter."

The writers go on. All this communications is keeping us from being in flow, doing what makes us happiest. Flow is the time we need to just be, to "load our knowledge and skills into our brain RAM."

Even more, it keeps us from achieving expertise, from "getting really good at something."

Achieving expertise, in turn, is limited by the ability to focus.

You must check out the "Twitter Curve" on this blog! It shows an asymptotic progression to a point where we’ve moved from two hours for interruptions to having no break between them. It suggests these interruptions are no longer reactive and responsive — like answering the phone or responding to e-mail — but rather self inflected. We have become "addicted to staying in the loop."

Twittering may well be good for Colgate Palmolive with its consumers. But what impact will Twitter-like, hyper-IM have on productivity within any organization in the future? Gads, what effect will it have on me?

Robert Scoble http://scobleizer.com/

Fast Company http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/

Twitter http://twitter.com

Creating Passionate Users http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/12/httpwww37signal.html

I’m taking a break from The New Rules of Marketing & PR, a book by consultant David Meerman Scott. Looking at the implications of new media, Web 2.0, integrated digital communications, he nails "it."

The book has two major thrusts. One is a sound, practical explanation of the strategic and tactical PR and marketing procedures with these media. The second is his assertion that content is what really matters.

He speaks about populating a mix of Web site copy, blogs, podcasts, viral marketing and other tools with content that means something to the people. Well, as Meerman says in a recent blog, maybe what he’s calling new is really very old and well established. The technologies are new, but a long time ago as a cub reporter I learned the newspaper had to meet the interests of the readers.

I found the discussion of content most interesting in CSPAN broadcast of the August 10, 2007 conference, Newspaper Ownership Impact on Media. Panelist Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at the Poynter Institute, pointed to the serious erosion of profit margins at the major metropolitan dailies — down in three years from 25 percent, to 16 percent, to 9 percent.

The role of content was pointed to as important to newspapers by, if I heard correctly, Marilyn Thompson, a national investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Times and one of the panelists.

• discussing moves to place ads on the front pages, it was pointed out that advertising is content — information that readers need and want
• at Knight Ridder, she said the news staff was encouraged to see themselves as "content providers" for online editions — where newspapers are turning to find their future

There you have it. Traditional media also see content — information that people want and need — as key success factors. The media, and those of us in marketing, are working on the same challenge: how to deliver this content. For both, new rules are being written. Exciting.

New Rules of Marketing & PR http://www.davidmeermanscott.com/

C-SPAN http://inside.c-spanarchives.org:8080/cspan/cspan.csp?command=dprogram&record=555834552

Forum: Newspaper Ownership Changes, Association for Educ. in Journalism & Mass. Comm, Washington, DC (United States) ID: 200368 - 08/10/2007 - 1:25 - $29.95

Rick Edmonds http://www.poynter.org/profile/profile.asp?user=40897

Marilyn Thompson http://www.latimes.com/services/newspaper/mediacenter/releases/la-mediacenter-2006-0628,0,6770871.story?coll=la-mediacenter-releases

The other day in an e-mail, a colleague noted my last blog entry was in June. Implied query: what’s up? This hiatus began with a vacation in Little Compton, R.I. It’s a beautiful area on the spit of land across the Narragansett Bay, east of Newport butting against Westport, Mass., an equally lovely space. I needed the break. Besides that, there would be virtually no connectivity. Okay, our friends had a great Comcast cable hookup.

Still, the expectation was that I’d do nothing. I did, and when I returned I backslid — dealing with current priorities and making no attempt toward any interactive thought leadership. I have been reading a lot of blogs, loving it though feeling a bit guilty.

Thanks to Robert Scoble, a preeminent blogger and author of Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers (written with Shel Israel and published by John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken), I discovered it’s okay to take a blog break. Back on August 13, Scoble announced he’d be stopping for a while.

I found the many warm comments in his direction to be very encouraging. Okay, in no way have I been blogging as hard as Scoble, but I have been working too much. Getting away from blogging commitment has been good. I’m back at it, but with thanks to Robert Scoble and all his friends for making it okay!

Robert Scoble http://scobleizer.com/

Little Compton http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Compton%2C_Rhode_Island

Westport, Mass. http://www.westport-ma.com/