The Empire Strikes Back - MSFT: $4.3 Billion Profit . . . GOOG: $4.2 billion Revenues

Tom, this has come from a brilliant BBC series The Virtual Revolution, on how the internet is changing global politics and the world.

Thanks Chris. Let's just say 'we all' invented it, including Mr Gore :)

Tom:

British work on Packet Switching was done independently of American effort, led by Paul Baran at RAND (and predates it.

You Brits get the web and even the computer. The telephone, telephone netowrk, and the Internet are US Intellectual Property and Inventions.

Yes, I agree, the tools will reveal patterns. But that comes after, that's the analysis that comes after the fact. There is way too much importance being given to 'real-time' in the wrong places. Real-time technologies are important but in other ways than many people seem to be thinking about them today.

As a native American it is my firm belief that rocks do in fact go to Heaven.

Catholics and Presbyterians however do not !

"rather treating them as synaptic firings and looking for patterns"

you guys are very poetic. Totally agree, there are patterns in the noise, that's where the gold is. As they say "where there's muck there's brass"

"...with music.... With music you can have individuals all talking at the same time. And it's not noise. lt's a perfect harmony!""

Wow, I LOVE this line.

I agree with your premise Tom, but I disagree with your conclusion.

Great post Tom and I totally agree. Real Time is noise when it comes to news because the closer it gets to 'real time' the less context, reflection, and thinking is involved, so not only is it noise, it's uninformed noise.

Are derivatives being created to short countries, states?
.......

it's far worse than you think.

I don't think there'd be DRM in this first edition of the chip, but I could be wrong. However, your thinking is another puzzle piece that makes this ultimately possible:

I ran into Shel Holtz and he said he once asked Richard Edelman what exactly was being measured, and he said it was 'confidence that organizations will do the right thing,' which I guess is a type of 'trust sentiment' rather than trust itself.

So if trust in all sources of information declines, doesn't that beg the question: what, if anything, DO people trust? There has to be something, right? Do they only trust what they see with their own eyes now?

As they say in advertising, no one ever got fired for buying a prime-time TV spot.

Craigslist enables a lot of value to be created and so do other types of Internet enabled services. A lot of the value is 'off the books' in that it isn't easily measurable in terms of dollars...

One man's pain is another man's gain. $13.6 billion is a lot of freed up money that people spent on other things. If people spent that $13.6 billion on goods made overseas, then Craigslist has done a lot of damage to this country. But if they spent it on other local services and goods, no harm done really.

Great article. Very insightful. I completely agree that current reputation models are limited in their usefulness to what's publicly exposed and frightening to think about how the data could be used. All the big guns come to mind since they are all based on traditional (out-dated) social business models.

"Maybe that will change with the iPad, which is a much more closed system than any of Apple products from the past ten years."

I don't quite understand why you're saying things like that. IPad is not more proprietary than iPhone - it's been already reported that you can run the iPad OS on the iPhone. And surely you'll be free to jailbreak your ipad just as you can do with the iphone.

Tom Foremski on Does More Media Lead To Less Total Media Trust?

Douglas, I think you hit it on the head, Edelman is not measuring 'trust' it is measuring a type of sentiment.

Upon reading your post I am reminded of something said to me by a Wall Street CIO: "Trust does not scale!"

Trust is a circumstance of one-to-one relationships.
And if online relationships are virtual, then so too is online "trust" virtual - that is, "almost" trust, but "not completely according to strict definition."

Thanks Scott, I'm using the top line numbers that Edelman representatives provided.

Tom, maybe I missed that part of the report. The statistic I see has trust in "people like me" going from 47% in 2009 to 44% in 2010, as shown in Fig. 8 on page 5 of the report.

If there's another figure elsewhere that shows a drop of 20 points for this category, I'd like to be sure I see it.

Very insightful, and scary. It is amazing to me how many people post personal information on their social media sites including when they are going to be away from their home, when they are coming back, and now with smart phones people are updating where there exact location is throughout the day. Seems like a home invaders dream come true.

Vlad: I agree with you. Change happens and is happening. Stopping change would be ridiculous. I'm pointing out that we will have to come up with some answers to some hard questions. It's better to be prepared than to be surprised.

Tom, thanks for joining us at Social Media Camp. I also loved this talk from Brian, Jeremy and Jolie. Common sense rules, but not many folks follow. We have video from each session and will get that up this week as I think there was a little something for everyone to peruse.

YES! Sure, jobs - that's all what REALLY matters.

We shouldn't kill the illegal drugs industry - it creates so many jobs: starting from regular poor Afgans, going to taliban, drug dealers, cops chasing drug dealers, doctors trying to cure drug addicts and funeral firms helping to burry those drug addicts too.