A Group Authored Book on Social Media

This book was published through a social networking process - very interesting. Here's the description:

In what began as a half dare, the editors, Gavin Heaton and Drew McLellan challenged bloggers around the world to contribute one page — 400 words — on the topic of “conversation”. The resulting book, The Age of Conversation, brings together over 100 of the world’s leading marketers, writers, thinkers and creative innovators in a ground-breaking and unusual publication. And in the spirit of conversation, you can follow-up and extend your interest in the topics covered in the book at the Age of Conversation blog — www.ageofconversation.com.

All the proceeds from the sale of this book (less printing and shipping) go to Variety, the Children’s Charity. We thank you for supporting this initiative with your purchase.

 

Here's a more detailed description of the book process from the Shaping Youth Blog

Think about it. Drew McClellan and Gavin Heaton have never met each other, live in opposite parts of the world, and shared a few commonalities that seeded an idea.

In three months time, these agents of change have brought a top quality book to market and a fully published probono project to fruition, uniting disparate views and s into a digital conversation that will no doubt spark new thinking among communicators everywhere!

AdAge review here.

Nick Rice, one of my blog readers, contributed a chapter.  He also pointed me recently to a tool called CoReap ( www.coreap.com ), a social search and bookmarking add-on for your web browser.  If you bookmark web sites and web pages on a regular basis, or do team research on the web, then CoReap is just the tool for you! CoReap helps you find and bookmark websites of interest, and share them with your friends, from anywhere, anytime!

With CoReap, you can not only manage your bookmarks online, but since CoReap seamlessly integrates with existing web search platforms like Google and Yahoo, bookmarks shared in your social search network are
displayed alongside the web search results.

My problem with it is that I do a lot of my tagging into del.icio.us - so I'd have to fool around with livewire and see if it can bookmark into del.icio.us and this .. and then of course getting enough colleagues to use it.  I could this, however, potentially useful for a group or team wanting to work together and the focus was on research.

Comments

[Shaping Youth]

I haven't even started tagging other than Technorati, so need to really get serious about 'reach' for our blog as Shaping Youth progresses. I need to tag more effectively and develop "best practices." (I look to your blog for a healthy dose of mental floss and pragmatics quite often, so thanks!)

I'm also quite optimistic this social media model could be used for nonprofit collaborative efforts...

From exchanging information to cause-marketing and fundraising, I see considerable potential here...(e.g. personal case studies & first hand solutions for situational conundrums like cyberbullying, a unique "BlogHer's Act" point of view on a given topic, or an eco-book of hands-on action steps of innovation and education. (World Wildlife Fund had a fun forum going for kids' ideas on how to help the planet; which would convert nicely to a participatory, action-steps 'blook' to step out into community service. Lots of ideas...

p.s. Fast Company just ran an article on the Age of Conversation too, I didn't notice Brian Reich was a co-contributor! It'll take me awhile to get to know the whole team, but I'm honored to be a part of the co-authoring effort and furthering the conversation. Thanks for the ping on Shaping Youth; let's definitely keep in touch.

http://blog.fastcompany.com/experts/breich/2007/07/age_of_conversation.html

[Gavin Heaton]

Hey Beth, thanks for featuring The Age of Conversation. We are all very excited about it and hope that it really is the start of the conversation. Thanks for being part of it!