You’re a cynical bunch you Australian media and general Australian people.

I’m talking about your response to the campaign that has driven this blog out of a two year hiatus. I’m talking about Invisible Childrens “Stop Kony” campaign which every bugger seems to be bleating about at the moment. So why not join the chorus? I want to tackle some stuff up front so you know where I stand on it;

- “He’s just one Warlord and there’s heaps of them just as bad” – yes, he is just one Warlord, and there are loads and loads of evil people. But you can’t tell me that 30,000 kids freed from his demonic control and influence is not a good result.

And of course it’s one warlord. This is a central, key and genius aspect of the campaign. Being just one, the worst one, makes the objective achievable. If the message was ‘overthrow capitalism’, ‘bring world peace’ or ‘end poverty and starvation’… these are abstract problems that have no face, no clear, simple and quick end. Everyone feels they are just too big to be tackled and beaten. An appeal to an individual on any of these levels will fail because we cannot have hope of achieving such grand outcomes. But one guy? Surely we can help the Ugandan army catch and bring to justice one guy…?

And the truly sad truth is that many of us are too apathetic to act on a problem that we can’t see a clear and simple end to.

- “The kids are poor and are probably better looked after than they would be away from him” – I can’t stomach this one. Seriously? If I was dirt poor I would still rather stay dirt poor and on the brink of death than sign on to kill my parents, kill my countrymen, mutilate, rape, destroy and violate. I would rather stay dirt poor and on the brink of death than sign on to possibly be forcibly addicted to heroin and amphetamines so that I was better able to be controlled and directed to carry out inhuman acts. Oh, and that’s assuming (wrongly) that I have some choice in the matter, which in reality, I don’t.

- “Military intervention is not the answer” - What else can you answer this kind of behaviour with? PLEASE tell me. Please tell me how else you are meant to face off with a madman with 30,000 crack addicted children wielding automatic weapons. Avoid collateral damage where possible, but this inhumanity is of a scale that is deserving, demanding actually, of a powerful response.

- “But what happens after he’s gone? There is no plan to fix things, etc” - erm. Firstly, when has that bothered us before? And secondly, once he’s gone, at least the world will be in a position to be able to assist the ex-child soldiers. Until he’s gone, those 30,000 kids are still child soldiers and sex slaves. At least we know how to deal with that sort of problem, a bit.

- “Invisible Children is a lobby group, they have an agenda!” - Yes, and yes. But it’s a good agenda, or appears to be. And maybe it’s a bit Machiavellian, but if there is an ulterior motive, it can’t be any worse than leaving 30,000 children in the situation they are currently in.

- “One does not simply overthrow a Ugandan Warlord with a status update” - no. One does not. But if you think this is the guts of the campaign, you’ve barely scratched the surface and you need to open your eyes a little but. More on this follows.

With that out of the way I can get to the guts of this post.

I’m in love with this campaign.

I love it. I want to smooch it, and hold it and hug it and squeeze it. It is quite simply the most exquisitely perfect campaign I have ever seen. And that’s not just because it’s for a good cause. It’s because it leverages and manipulates (in a good way) to a perfect ends all that we envisage and hold dear as marketers and advertisers (and it’s about time that these dark arts were seriously put towards some good use, but that’s another topic).

First up, let’s talk about the sales funnel (STOP SNORING). This basic idea is at the heart of all marketing and advertising. And it goes like this, numbers are examples only to makes the maths easier.

Goal; sell something to your audience.

Target audience; This is the people you want to sell stuff too. Say 5,000 people in this example.

- You make an ad, banner, email, social campaign target it at/to them. You reach 1,000.

- Of those 1,000 perhaps 100 click the link and visit the website. This is your response rate.

- Of those 100 people, let’s say 5 carry out some form of pre-buying action. Fill out a form, leave their details, like the status update, etc.

- And of those 5, one (1) goes on to buy your product or service directly as a result of, and in a straight line from the ad.

Got it? Also, the leads are considered warmer as you get lower down. There’s variations on this, and more complex campaigns and ways of looking at it, but basically that’s it. The key is to maximise the engagement and influence of you or your brand on the leads at every step of the process. The idea of that is that at some point you will move them further down the funnel.

Right. Next up we have online advocacy.

From a marketing perspective, an online advocate is someone who spruiks your brand or product for you. That’s nice, but I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about social causes and activating people online, mainly through social networks.

I do not love this concept. In fact I have, until this week, hated it. I have joked about its ineffectiveness and ridiculousness. Because it used to be true, and kind of still is, you really can’t overthrow a Ugandan Warlord by liking a Facebook status. Not on it’s own. And not even with 500,000 other status updates.

BUT, within the structure of a well defined and executed campaign, attached to a broader mechanism of connected personalities, organisations, politicians and lobbyists, you totally can.

So let’s first look at the “sales funnel” for this campaign, and how it makes the most of, well, everything.

Goal; Make this Kony guy (in)famous enough that support for the US troops currently advising the Ugandan military does not dry up and finish.

The ultimate goal is awareness, and any kind of declaration of support for the campaign to catch this guy.

Target audience; Predominantly young people, but ultimately, everyone, everywhere.

Before we even enter the ‘funnel’… have you heard about Kony? Yeah? Invisible Children have just reached one of their goals. Awareness. Yours. On that note, have you discussed it with anyone at all? Yeah? That too? Right, you’ve helped disseminate their message. Welcome to the campaign. You’re now helping them meet their awareness objective. Yaysies!

OK, once more unto the funnel, dear friends.

- They have an ad. It’s 29 minutes long and currently has over 42 million views on YouTube alone (the official video alone, it’s been reposted and is also on other video sharing platforms). Have you watched it? You’re now a stat that Invisible Children can add to their dossier to be presented to policy makers in Washington. Hell, it was even played in full on Channel 10 here last night, so there’s another 45 viewers right there.

- Have you been to their website and had a click around? Yeah, me too. Congratulations, you’re another stat in that dossier. One more person aware and active.

- So let’s say you saw the ad, cried at your desk, wanted to do something. You signed up for their Action Kit. You’re a sale! Not only are you another stat in the dossier, but you’ve given them cash to fund their activities and push their agenda.

- And finally, you take part in the night of action. Or if you’re in the US, you write and call your local member of state to express support for the military advisers currently in Uganda.

And that’s their ‘sales’ made and objectives met. And they maximised and benefited from your engagement at every step of the process.

Invisible Children have derived value from your every interaction with this campaign at every level.

But wait, there’s more. They have leveraged the social and connected nature of people and technology these days to use you and your networks to increase the reach of their message and pour more people into the top of this funnel, and hence, more activism and sales come out the other end. BAM! During your journey through the funnel, did any of the below happen?

-Did you care about it enough, in any way shape or form, positive or negative, to comment, share or email this around? Mmhmmm? Welcome back to the campaign and congrats on raising more awareness. You’re also another stat in the dossier.

- Now, you may actually follow through with their night of action and take part in the penultimate activation event. You’re well and truly part of the campaign now, reaching even the non-connected, anti-social punters who still only look to walls for their news and current affairs.

And with the advent of this campaign I eat my metaphorical hat…

… in relation to attempts at effecting political and social change through Facebook ‘likes’. Invisible Children gone and went and done something that could work.

Your standard run of the mill Facebook “Stop Puppy Farms” campaign is flat. A single person sets up the group and thinks that if they get 100,000 ‘likes’ that the government will act. They won’t.

Stop Kony is different. The structure within which their audience are being encouraged to act is not flat. If you like the statuses, or even become aware and interact with the campaign at all, you form the base. You are the grassroots. You are the slacktivist.

If you take it a step further, share with your friends, buy the action kit, use the action kit, hassle a politician, etc. you’re the next level up, you’re an activist!

And above that is the lobby group itself. A formidably powerful group (they’ve already influenced foreign policy enough to get the military there in the first place). A lobby group which has just been armed with; 42 million YouTube views of their ad (and associated shares, likes, comments), 2.26 million Facebook ‘likes’, website visits in the millions of hits per day and money. Sweet, sweet money to keep their machine rolling and their quest to rope in celebrities and politicians to further the cause and increase their influence.

And the ultimate objective is truly simple and very achievable. Keep the audience engaged and inspired enough, for long enough to keep the US advisers to the Ugandan military in Uganda long enough to bring Kony to justice.

And once they catch the Number 1 International War Criminal… well, there’s always number two.

On a personal note, I’m married and a father now. I wasn’t the last time I updated this blog. A lot has happened between posts. The Social Web, and the new connected universe we now live out our lives in is actually an immensely powerful tool. Stop Kony is by no means the only way it can be used to good ends. Heck, in the last week alone I’ve personally connected people who can help each other in some way to make either, or both lives better. Amplify that, target it, direct it… and we can invert the pyramid of influence and right the wrong of money driving political power and get it back to people driving political power. Given I know more about these technologies and platforms than most, should I live in a world, and ask my daughter to live in a world, where I have the power to do good, to make things better, to improve the lives of those so desperately in need… and not do something?

I thank, and love, this campaign for opening eyes, mine and others. For empowering slacktivists and activists. And for having it’s head and heart aligned and in a good place. We see far too much of the opposite these days.

If you’re reading this, the enigmatic, hashtagged, web savvy, social title for this post hasn’t put you off, and that’s a good thing. I hope.

I was out for a run this morning, and a few things hit me. Bear with me while I break it down.

I was thinking about this blog post from a few months ago. To summarise, it’s a young woman who still hand writes a lot of letters and explores that idea, or at least hints at something more sinister and scary; that in this day and age, with technology becoming more integrated with everything we do, handwriting, plain old ball point pen handwriting, could become an art form, or worse still, a lost art form.

I can’t remember the last time I hand-wrote something to someone other than myself.

I was also thinking about the anticipation of communication. Remember waiting with baited breath as your old modem dialled, fizzed and buzzed it’s way online and you could check your email? Or rushing down to the letterbox to see if there was anything inside other than a bill? I communicated by letter only with my now-wife for several years and the anticipation of communication is quite dizzying and sweet. I thought about this because whilst jogging I checked my email 3 times, caught up on Twitter replies, DM’s and LinkedIn recommendations… it was all immediate gratification, or in some cases disappointment.

Hardly a replacement for the joy of finding a hand written, hand addressed envelope intended for you and you only.

So I’m going to do something small about it to hopefully give some joy, excitement, maybe even a laugh to some of you.

If I have met you in person in the last week or two, or tweeted back and forth a few times, basically had some kind of online engagement with you recently or in the future, I’m going to hand-write, hand address and post you a #slowtweet. Just a short message from me, and maybe a little picture, because I like drawing pictures.

You probably know who you are, if you’ve read this far, or suspect it anyway. My gifts to you are the anticipation you will feel between reading this blog post and opening a hand addressed envelope dropping on your desk or somewhere sometime soon (time to be determined by Australia Post), and the message therein.

And if you want to send something back, you’re very welcome. Either way, welcome to the #slowtweet.

So, a little over a year ago I sent my second “Good Apple” newsletter, cryptically mentioning a big upcoming project.

I promptly disappeared for 13 months and left my website, newsletter and blog to gather dust.

Truth is I can’t say too much about it, as the project is still ticking along without me. Also, I want to give my work its dues. It wound up being a pretty impressive piece of innovation, strategy and execution, so I’ll address it in more detail when I can in a case study or overview.

For now I want to let you know that the single most important lesson I learnt in the last 13 months is that I NEVER want to stop learning. If I ever imply to you that I know everything about a topic, kick me in the shins. Hard.

A constant desire for knowledge is what makes digital tick. New tools are nice, but slobbering lust and enthusiasm from the rest of us online is what makes or breaks a trend and changes communication, behaviour, even the world. May I always be a slobbering enthusiast… (please read that in the least unpalatable interpretation available).

I’m not ruining any surprises by saying that the past 13 months was a very experimental project in terms of what we did online and where, a true suck it and see approach. Alongside that I was tackling a client from an industry of which I had no experience; Pharmaceutical. Heck, I haven’t studied science for more than 15 years, but the last year has seen me printing scientific research and publications to devour on the train like so much fruit flavoured Mentos (or is that just me, again?)

The other thing I have learnt is that now more than ever before I have a desire to do something good with my skills and experience.

The GFC, hurricanes, tidal waves, gangland criminals, back-stabbing politicians… the world doesn’t need more people out being mercenary, selfish or pursuing aims other than the increasing of niceness… who’s with me? Drop me a line at morgwn@digitalartscience.com.au, hit me up on Twitter (@morgwn) or just generally stalk me, get in touch and together we can find new ways to be good, using this wonderful thing we call the internet.

It’s a rainy and cold Sunday afternoon. I’m at a crossroads. And whether you’re with me or not, I’m out to make a difference. Watch this space.

Hello friends, colleagues and clients,

Digital Art Science has been trucking along for a few months now.  There’s some excellent work under the belt and a lot of promising developments sitting just over the horizon.  With the end of the financial year over and done with, and a fascinating digital landscape taking shape for the new financial year, I thought that now would be the time to breathe new life into the type of commentary and attitudes that prevail online in Australia.

I don’t know if you noticed, but by and large, digital evangelists are a cynical bunch. I would say that narry a day passes where I do not witness a brand, organisation or individual being dragged across the coals by members of my previously named ‘digital nobility’. Critique (some measured, some not so) abounds for anyone for not tuning in, logging in and opening up. I understand the motivations behind this, heck, I’m probably guilty of it, but what riles me, and what motivated me to begin this post (and subsequent activities soon to be revealed), is what we do to those that actually do make the leap.

For the most part, they’re torn to shreds; “You’re doing it wrong!”, “You’re marketing to us!” or “This is a cursory/bumbling attempt to engage customers online in a faux innovative and technically clumsily executed and inaccessible way”, I’m para-phrasing, and censoring here, but you get the gist (if you add significant vitriol, awful grammar and txt-spk-esque shortenings and smileys).

So, onto “The Good Apple”.

It’s not a(nother) Macintosh fanboy rant. I firmly believe that much like one bad apple can spoil the bunch, a good apple can have a positive effect. And I take it upon myself now, with you as my witness, to be that good apple.

So sign up to the newsletter, I’ll aim to get it out every week or so and it shall contain insights into digital branding, marketing and innovation, respect where respect is due, encouragement where confidence falters, puns when a smile is needed (and because I can’t help it), and anything else that’s crossing my screen (and should grace yours too). I might even make some more videos…

Thanks team, I look forward to engaging with your inboxes.

Hey! See that up there? That’s my new business card. It’s index card sized (3in x 5in) I call it my big-ness card and it’s been doing the round with my clients in it’s previous form. Complete with Sudoku puzzles on the back for when things get a little dull (that would be AFTER meeting with me).

Anyway, onto what I’m writing about this afternoon.

Those of you that know me, may or may not know that I dabble with painting.  Have done for many years.

Well this weekend (Queens’ Birthday weekend), I’ll be setting up my easel in the St Kilda Botanical Gardens and taking part in the ‘Paint these Gardens‘ art competition. Sounds like fun! Even if it rains.

I’ll be tweeting updates of my artwork as I go along, so please follow me on Twitter (@morgwn). And if you’re in the area, pop down on Monday afternoon and vote for MEEEEEEE in the people’s choice awards.

Hope to see you there. I can’t tell you exactly where I’ll be, it depends on the weather, but what better excuse to explore the lovely gardens!

Never has the individual had so much power at their disposal as they do online today. What started as a ‘get back in touch with’ or stalk your old classmates and colleagues phenomena, has evolved into… well, basically millions of individual digital PR agencies, servicing one demanding client, themselves. And it’s being powered further by Twitter, Tumblr, FriendFeed, Plurk, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc, etc. It’s called, whether you like it or not, Social Media (pfui).

The amazing thing is, most businesses and brands have yet to break into it with any real or lasting success.

Some would argue that they missed the boat. I advised my clients to jump in at the start and ride the wave while it was going up. Brands were the catalysts for people signing up to services like Twitter, before they were splashed all over every newspaper, every day. The logic being that the users are going to sign up eventually anyway, so why not give them a push and be their first pleasant memory of web 3.0 (sorry).

I haven’t seen anyone really jump in yet, with the exception of Skittles, but that was just weird.

Perhaps it was the pool of clients active at the time, or a general sense of wwworld weariness that surrounds anything online. The fear that it may be just a fad (Hello, Second Life!)

In my book they missed an absolutely stellar opportunity. I hope that some client-side marketing people have learned, and are willing to take a little risk with something different next time. Oh well, that’s my personal beef out of the way. Onto something more meaningful…

Businesses, small, medium but potentially not so much large, can reap some real benefit from the Social Media phenomenon and earn brownie points for partaking in the spirit that it is intended.

I’m talking about personal profile management. Anyone on a social network, or dabbling in social media has a profile of some description. A physical one (for want of a better word) that contains personal information and links, photos, videos, quizzes (gggaaarrrggghhhh, just stop it Facebook friends! If the data and results are not qualitative, quantitative, justifiable or pretty damned funny, I just don’t care!). Then there is the broader definition of ‘profile’, meaning what that persons connections think of them. Or put simply, what kind of recall and memorability their personal brand inspires in their ‘audience’.

Businesses could really benefit by putting in place some soft social media policy, and encouraging their employees to generate, propagate, discuss and engage with content and connections about their place of employment.

So often a company, particularly SME’s, are built around the personality, passion and skill of one, or a small handful (a pinch?) of people, who inevitably become the company’s directors. These guys are the magnets for referrals and new business and often the lonely advocates out there networking and spruiking.

All I am saying is give employees the scope to build their own ‘profile’ by hitching it firmly to the wagon of the company’s profile, and vice versa. Share the responsibility for letting everyone know what a company does and why its the best. I’d certainly be inclined to approach a company if I knew a handful of their heroes through Social Media.

There’s some risk about disgruntled grunts despoiling your brand image (and theirs too), but I always sanity check tweets, status updates and the like by asking myself, ‘Would I stand up on my desk and shout this to the office?’ If the answer is no, don’t post it. If the answer is yes, post it, and if you work in an office where all sorts of off-colour things are screamed from atop the desks…there’s quite often a delete button.

Two things hit me when I watch ABC’s ‘The Gruen Transfer‘.

First of all, it’s a reminder that people outside of the advertising industry don’t think about brands, advertising and marketing in the same way, or as consistently as we (and the guys on the show) do. That may not sound like much, but it’s pretty shocking for me to realise that for the last 12 years or so, I’ve been analysing and dissecting brand and marketing messages much more thoroughly than they are intended to be.  Probably explains how and why I have gravitated to this industry.

The second thing is just how old-guard and traditional they are. With the exception of Todd Sampson, the panelists are caricatures of advertising industry stereotypes.

But all this has been said before by people with more time and insight than me.

Last night was the episode where the ‘The Pitch’ segment challenged two agencies (JWT versus The Foundry) to sell Obesity to the general public. JWT stuck their tongues in their cheeks and called on fatties to up their consumption for the sake of the economy. While The Foundry decided to shock everyone into silence by drawing a parallel between massively, horrendously bigotted insults and a fat joke. Kind of off piste if you ask me.

My fingers are too cold in my breezy Elwood flat to rant coherently about it, so I’ll kick it bullet point style.

• Obesity is NOT comparable in any way shape or form to being black, gay or Jewish
• Discrimination against fat people is virtually non-existent. Was the trade in fat people for cheap/free labour abolished only last century? Were millions of fat people killed in death camps before and during WWII? Do fat people get beaten up and killed by marauding gangs of redneck teenagers? Bugger, I started to rant there.
• Being fat is a choice (with the exception of glandular problems). Being black is not a lifestyle choice, nor is being gay, or Jewish. A fat person can change their situation and actually improve pretty much every aspect of their life, they wouldn’t be giving anything up, or going against their beliefs.

In a word “grrrrrr”.  I could go on.  But that wasn’t even the most offensive and ridiculous thing about last nights programme.

Did anyone else balk at Bridget Taylors little campaign extension idea? Let’s put a fit bird and an ugly bird on the Speight boat to the UK and see if we can get the Kiwi’s mate to knob the ugly one in the ultimate test of mateship?

Now I’m not ugly, or a woman, but I can imagine that ugly women face more discrimination and have fewer avenues to change their situations, especially when they shouldn’t have to. As always, it’s society that needs education and enlightenment, and let’s face it, a little more maturity and humanity. Perhaps ‘The Pitch’ challenge should’ve been to sell ‘Ugly’, but that might’ve dragged the attitudes of the panel, and TV-land in general, a little close to the sweaty and unforgiving spotlight.

There’s lots of talk about innovation, and digital and digital innovation and innovating digitally, but how much does it really achieve? Tweeters, Bloggers, Facebook junkies and technology advocates, the Web 3.0 harbingers, 2.0 monkeys and social media specialists… most of what I see makes life easier for people that have spent a lot of time complicating their digital engagements (myself included). How much use is a tool like Ping to someone who doesn’t even use one of the channels it aggregates? UnHub is awesome, but if it only links to one page, what USE is it?

The train of thought I’m on at the moment is all about applying this stuff to something other than marketing and keeping my browser tabs to a minimum.  The power of the tools we boffins use every day is largely unrealised, and in order to take best advantage of it, we need to roll things back a bit and really look at the core functions these tools carry out.

What better way to introduce new users and audiences to a tool than by integrating it into their lives to solve a problem that they already actually have?

I am finding blogs to be the hub of this, and they are super-awesomely useful.

I run blogs as the central portal for projects, with key milestones and documents hosted there-on. Nice, hey? Means that the stakeholders and influencers can log on any time and check progress, even comment on it and feedback. And if they’re up for it, I can make users ‘admins’ so they can post and edit along with me.

From a blog you can run a plain old RSS feed and use it to update people wherever they like, ping, Facebook, twitter, the lot.

And running multiple projects can get complicated, so I feed the RSS from all these blogs into one blog (and my feedreader) and I generate a to do list. Well, I say I, but it’s really the internets doing it all for me.

There, I just circumvented email as the core contact channel and made a trackable, time based, version controlled project management sytem.

That’s enough for this afternoon, I have a lot of coffee to get through yet.

Don’t normally rate this kind of thing, but after I ranted last week about the VB and Legacy ‘Raise a glass’ campaign, I noticed a lot of web traffic coming from searches for the advertising campaign.

It culminated in my blog being quoted in The Australian. 

While not entirely relevant to the digital world, perhaps the campaign instigators should’ve been a little more wary of their digital ‘footprint’.  From the second it was posted, my vitriolic post was in the top 5 results for a search on the campaign keywords and strapline, and now, thanks to The Australian, it’ll stay there, and among the results will be the Raise a glass website, and a bunch of negative news… clever none.

I was consulting for the DSE the other day on new digital technologies and it set off a fruitful train of thought.

Much is said about the democratisation and freedom offered by the internet. Freedom of speech and the possibility for real, human voices to tunnel their way out from beneath oppressive regimes of violence, fear and censorship (Hi Stephen Conroy and your blasted internet filter). I’m not questioning the opportunities for expression, growth and freedom. That would be silly.

What I’m wondering about is a little more rooted in technology and levels of understanding and engagement achieved and achievable from various groups and individuals.

In my musings on web 3.0 I often refer to aggregation and personalisation. Tools like Twitter, Yahoo pipes, RSS and the like. They make it easier to filter rubbish, or just the stuff that I’m not interested in, so that it never even reaches my eyeballs. I like it, it saves me time and makes me look and feel smart. But what I realised is that in order for web 3.0 to exist, there has to be hordes of peeps still languishing in web 2.0 creating the content that I am filtering. Does that put us web 3.0 users at the pointy end? Or the ‘early-adopter’ end of a bell-curve? And what of our attitudes to the stragglers?

Like it or not, and much to the chagrin of innovators, there’s still a lot of Web 1.0 content and attitudes around. And what happens when a brand, individual or government body tries to bring itself up to date? More often than not, they’re subjected to a hail of vitriol from innovators who ‘could’ve done it so much better’ (but let’s face it, didn’t).

So I’m going to apply a mental filter of a simple capitalist ‘social class’ system over use of the web today and see what jumps out.

I’d argue that there is a three tiered system in place. Obviously, within each class there are varying degrees of cross-over and grey areas, but hey, this is only a blog, not a sociological study.

The Underclass and Working classes are still wallowing in Web 1.0. How often do you come across a site that was developed in 1997 and still serves as the hub for a business, individual or government/administrative department? Heaps. It’s all still out there, and heck, it’s enough for some people. Why would they need to innovate and bring themselves up to date? A lot of stuff happens in the real world that doesn’t need a widget, iPhone app or blog (although it pains me to admit that). So your common, garden variety luddite could be that way by choice, ignorance of anything different, or by an inability/lack of skills and resources to drag themselves up. Content with their ‘lot’, or unable to struggle out of it… sounds both apt and clear to me…

Which brings us to the Middle classes. The lower echelons still may dip a toe in Web 1.0, while the upper may have a grasp of 3.0, heck, they might even be silently following us on Twitter. These guys get blogs, maybe make them, they understand and use google and search and are prolific creators of content. Thrashing about in the fertile grounds of Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, free WordPress/Blogger/Blogspot accounts and the like, these are the guys at the butt of the Web 3.0 joke (being that 3.0 is filtering the crap out of 2.0). They’re happy and connected. They spend a lot of time on Facebook, today’s suburbian garden party (they might refer to it as a soiree). They aspire to improve themselves and attempt to get ahead of the curve. Again, if they innovate or update, the 3.0 pundits look down their collective noses at them and shun (filter out) 99.9% of the content these little battlers put their hearts and souls into. Comfortable, competent, striving for improvement, but always that little bit behind… I give you, the sprawling middle class that is Web 2.0.

And now on to that envied and enviable group. The Digital Nobility. They take what they want, like and need from the classes below, and leave what they don’t. Lording it over everyone. Headpatting, golf-clapping and hand-shaking occasionally, but more often snickering behind velvet gloved hands at the attempts to be web-savvy and digitally hip. Internet A-listers that are whispered about by the lower classes for their celebrity (real, imagined or digital) activity, visibility and their apparent propensity to not actually do much of anything except sit in ivory towers mocking or applauding the sound and fury taking place ‘down there’ in areas they’re too good to tread. Prime targets as the subject of the question, ‘What are they for, anyway?’.

Sorry, boffins.  That was a little harsh, but in exaggeration you get to the nuts of a theory, and by and large it works.

As for the Hardcore, who actually create the tools, portals and technologies that all classes interact with the web and each other through? They’re , um, like, Wizards or Magicians or something.  They’ll love that, the Dungeons and Dragons playing nerds.