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Every so often I peruse the local readings list in the Boston Phoenix to get a sense of what readings are in town. It lists the title, author, time, location. Simple enough, but I then generally Google the book to see what the heck it's about.

The social media landscape will get simpler. It has to. There's a jumble of tools, as Rachel Happe reminded us today, and most ordinary people (beyond the early adopters) will want a single input form for posting information.

The Open Community Enablement Model (oCEM) is a definition of how a service provider works with its client community to enable them to do their jobs. It is similar to the CRM/CEM paradigms, but the "C" does not stand for "Customer"; it does not assume a customer/vendor relationship where the end goal is customer retention / expansion (i.e., more sales).

Spam is the name we give to unsolicited emails from unknown people. We shouldn't call spam what our friends send to us, but we have the same problem, that of having to wade through too many unimportant messages in a limited amount of time.

Kudos to David Berlind for predicting seven years ago that IBM would buy Sun (His headline was When Will IBM Buy Sun? Essentially: "As a tool for marginalizing Microsoft, Java is everything OS/2 was not.")

Here's a question you don't ask everyday: how many people are the victims of human trafficking in the Boston area?

I wanted to take a few moments and try to understand the hysteria at Facebook's changes, what it means, and what users should really be concerned with. I am not a Facebook apologist. I use Facebook, I use Twitter, and even get lulled into using emerging sites like Twine.

"Your readers know more than you."

Dan Gillmor coined this as the now-familiar journalistic koan: the reporter aims to inform but always finds that some readers have more information about the story they're reporting. This was always the case, he explained, but it took on a new urgency in the Internet era, as readers found outlets to respond, and correct, reporters publicly.

I need a standard set of adjectives for tagging content in a shared bookmarking system, particularly describing quality. No standard exists that I am aware of.

This is what I know is out there today:

"Disregard the hype and the haters," PC Mag's longtime columnist John C.

I went to my first meeting of the Social Media Club Boston tonight. I'd held off for a while, since I'm not in marketing. Of course, now that I'm on Twitter, I can't help from being in marketing. And, the promised topic was good: "Change-Dot-Gov".

This is a series of articles on re-imagining how links can work in the semantic social web. My interest is investigating what could be regarded as the central dogma of the web for the last ten years: that hyperlinks confer authority. It's the central dogma of Google, and it's also the fundamental to the social web.

I appear to have found evidence of plagiarism of a 2005 copying from a 1995 without proper attribution -- but I can't tell with absolute certainty until I open the 1995 book. For now I am trusting Google Books. [See update at bottom from the 1995 author.]