I asked Kimberly Peterson, who writes about the health care administration all about web burnout something that I have suffered from on a couple of occasions. This is what Kimberly wrote

Buzznetworker has had the privilege of being the top choice for many guest posts, and the quality of the posts we get is astounding. This one, by Dave Macaulay of Aplus.net is certainly no exception.  Dave as been thinking a lot about the ‘Blogosphere’ and has some great insight as to where we’ve been in the past few years and where we’re headed.

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Acme Printing has one. The local historic preservation society has one, too. So does your Aunt Clara. Chances are that at one time or another you’ve read someone’s blog, even regularly. Or maybe you have your own.

There are political blogs, business blogs, university and high school blogs, blogs about just one thing: woodworking or coin collecting or 1950s bebop. Now there are even photoblogs, sketchblogs and blogs comprised solely of music (MP3 blog), video (vlogs) and other multimedia, in addition to the traditional text-based blogs.

How did we get here, arriving in Web 2.0 land? The “blogosphere” has become an Internet fixture – although technology watchers like Gartner predicted that blogging would peak in 2007 as the novelty of this as a publishing format gradually wears off. Still, Technorati’s “State of the Blogosphere / 2008” may suggest otherwise: in 2007 there were 94.1 million U.S. blog readers and 22.6 million U.S. bloggers (eMarketer, May 2008); while 184 million people worldwide have started a blog and 346 million read them – 77% of active Internet users (Universal McCann, March 2008).

It’s remarkable to think that the concept of a blog, or “Webblog,” dates back only a few years to the early/mid 1990s. Many credit Swarthmore student Justin Hall with creating the very first blog, Links.net. Other early bloggers followed, experimenting with online diaries, journals and Web-based commentary that linked to other articles. Commercial blogging platforms launched with Open Diary in 1998 and LiveJournal in March 1999 and then Blogger’s free blog-creation service later that same year. Blogging went mobile with the availability of new apps in 2003, and by the end of 2004, Merriam-Webster dictionary declared “blog” as its “Word of the Year.” And ever since, blogs have been gaining notice – and notoriety – for their role in breaking news and entertainment stories.

So where’s blogging headed? The future is here…it’s mostly about making what we have now – even better:

• Better design, more sophisticated blogging platforms: new widgets, plug-ins, custom CSS and a wide array of SEO tools – thanks to TypePad and WordPress and the other major blogging services
• Mainstream marketing/brand building channels for business, higher education and the non-profit world.
• More ad revenue – and not just for the big guys: Google AdSenseAdify and other ad networks are generating some serious ad revenue for the A-listers, and they’re interested in the smaller and mid-sized bloggers too
• “Tweet”, and then some: Micro-blogging – short text (140 characters or less) and/or multimedia posts – is here to stay. TwitterPlurk continue to transform the world of social blogging. So do lifestreaming aggregators like FriendFeed and Plaxo Pulse that allow people to continuously share their daily activities and discoveries online

New and different kinds of blogs and blog hybrids will start to appear as well:

• More collaborative, multi-author blogs
• Cross-platform “tumblelogs” like Tumblr will bridge the gap between long form content and micro-sharing
• Blog mashups that combine wikis and electronic mailing lists with other content-creating virtual communities online

At the same time, we’ll return to long-form blogging in a big way – something that’s already happening. The best new blogs are still personal and diary like, but very, very focused: What I Saw Riding My Bike Around about post-Katrina New Orleans and Art Spark Theatreby an illustrator in Northern California who likes to discover unexpected connections. Or they delve deeply in a special topic: I Love Typography and Film Noir

Blogs continue to be democratic, diverse, dynamic experiments in self-expression that have quickly become an integral part of our lives. Even the lines between blogs and mainstream media are beginning to blur. Bloggers increasingly influence political races. They drive conversations that can make, or break, brands. They offer informed insights on topics we care deeply about – and often can’t get elsewhere.

We’ll continue to want the first word, the inside scoop, the final say. We’ll also network more. We’ll use video, audio and chat in ways yet imagined. And someday soon, your blog will be the first thing you read in the morning, every morning, over your cup of coffee. For many, it already is.

The following is a guest post from Buzz Bishop. I love getting his guest posts, because he always has such an interesting take on social media, it never fails to make me think.

My grandfather taught me a great lesson about being a successful salesman.

Whenever he would call on a client, he didn’t just talk to the manager.  He talked to the clerks, to reception, to the assistants. You see, the man in the corner office may be the boss today, but the ones on the bottom rungs will be the boss tomorrow, or will move to another company to be the boss.

By talking to the rest of the staff, my grandfather was effectively growing his business by creating relationships that would be valuable in the future. Sure, the assistant wasn’t going to be buying his widgets today, but 3 yrs later he was buying them by the bushel.

The same thing is happening with the internet. We have two generations, one that didn’t grow up with it, and one that is.

The managers in power, making decisions now, didn’t grow up with this internet, and don’t understand how to use it - but those below are powering it up for a generational coup the likes of which has never been seen before.

If your company doesn’t have a social media strategy, a way to reach out and touch your audience and become a part of their lives, they’re going to forget you ever existed.

The youth of today (and youth can now mean anyone under 30) are constantly connected. They’re online all the time. They tell their friends what they’re feeling and doing, not day by day, but second by second.

The train is steaming down the tracks and if you don’t quickly buy a ticket, this train won’t just pass you by, it will roll right over you.

Look at the bottom rungs of your demographic ladder, that’s your future. You can’t grow your business the way it’s been growing for decades, your farming methods need to change.

Buzz Bishop is a radio host with 95Crave and tech columnist with 24hrs.  He’s a new media advocate constantly rallying against old media traditions to bring them into the new media world.

Today’s post is another brilliant guest post from Buzz Bishop.

Even if you have no grasp whatsoever of the concepts of social media and how they can work for you, you’re one step ahead.  You’re here.  You’re trying.  You’re learning.

Your audience, on the other hand, are miles behind even you.  Which is why you have time.

Mainstream media is skewered for dumbing down the news.  Unfortunately we have to, we’re broadcasting, not narrowcasting and to catch that cume, you’ve got to dumb it down.

The internet can preach to a niche, or chase that long tail because their are economies to be found in those areas, but when it comes to MSM, you just have to cast the biggest net to scoop the most fish, regardless of size, shape, colour or texture.

Yes, a lot of people are using Twitter, or Facebook, or FriendFeed or LinkedIn, but even more have no idea what you’re talking about.  They’ll catch up, eventually, but this is your chance to better bait the hook.

You’re here, you’re trying to learn about the tools to better communicate and interact with your audience. 

When you use new media tools effectively, the early adopters will follow and they will start the chorus and spread your message.  It will take a while to trickle down, and while it won’t trickle all the way through, you will get enough of a bump to make it worth the effort.

You’ve just got to make that effort.  And you have, you’re here reading BuzzNetworker.

Buzz Bishop is a radio host with 95Crave and tech columnist with 24hrs.  He’s a new media advocate constantly rallying against old media traditions to bring them into the new media world.

The following is a guest post from David Mullings of Realvibez Media and Co-Founder of StartupToons.

Social networking is all the rage right now, and yet many business people are not totally sold on the idea or can’t figure out how they can leverage these networks for their businesses.

It’s vital to think of these networks as additional tools in your box of tactics rather than anything big and scary. I set out to build my personal thought leadership brand via Facebook because I believe that personal brands can fuel corporate brands. Since the age of 15 I have been working to become a positive role model for young people around the world and I saw an opportunity to continue this.

I joined Facebook in June 2007 and to date I have managed to accomplish the following:

• Asked to endorse a book on entrepreneurship by a frequent contributor to CNBC’s The Big Idea
• Been introduced to a venture capital firm
• Received an introduction to an angel investor who is now an advisor
• Interviewed for a book by an Inc. Magazine Contributing Editor about Gen-Y entrepreneurs
• Interviewed about effectively using Facebook to network for business
• Paid speaking engagement at Boston College to present to the Entrepreneur Society and major article in school paper
• Landing a mention for a new venture on Inc. magazine’s staff blog on the day of launch
• Asked for quotes for a major magazine article on social media and the Caribbean
• A feature on CollegeMogul.com, a popular blog focused on gen-y ventures
• Built a fan page for the country of Jamaica that has hit 1600 fans in less than 3 months with no money spent

So, how, within just under a year, did I accomplish this?

Read more

This is  guest post contributed by a partner in crime, the very lovely Sarah Morgan.

I’m not a "social media marketer" or "social media strategist" or "social" anything - not by title, anyway. I’m a director at a PR agency who cares passionately (some might say "obsessively" - toMAto, toMAHto) about social media and what it’s capable of.

I work in healthcare: all my clients are pharmaceutical companies, biotechs, medical-device companies, etc. There might be more staid industries… but let’s just say that most aren’t hopping up and down to try the latest wild and crazy way to reach out their target audiences.

Partly, it’s their fault. Corporate-casual notwithstanding, some people still wear suits every day, mentally, if you know what I mean. There are a lot of "lifers" comfortable doing things the old way. And, partly, we - all of us who spend our days talking about medicine - we ARE up against a lot. FDA, CDER, DDMAC - there’s an alphabet soup of government agencies regulating every word we even think about using.

The problem, of course, is that while government is slow, social media is fast. So how do we make the most of these fabulous technologies when the regulations we’d need to abide by don’t even exist yet?

Apart from consultants, the tech industry, and some standout social media rock stars, I think most industries are like this. Everyone is grappling with social media. At this point everybody knows it’s cool - but they don’t know what it is, how it can help them, or - what they really need to know - how it can hurt them… and how it CAN’T.

But here’s the thing.

While it’s not trendy to admit, I remember the 90s.

Do you?

90210 on Thursday nights, Gap overalls - and this brand new internet thing. What this double-u-double-u-double-u-dot meant and whether or not you had to say the haitch-tee-tee-pee-colon-backslash-backslash thing first.
What a website was. What it was for. Whether a company needed one. What you’d do with it if you had one. What good it might do for a company and a brand. Whether it was nice to do someday or necessary to do now. And how terrifyingly it would open a company up to the public. Liabilities. Complaints. Negative comments.

I read this morning about the return of romper shorts. 90210 is coming back to TV in the fall. And as much as we like to think we’re breaking ground in the social media world in the last couple of years - and I’d be the first to say that we are - we can’t forget that we’ve been through this before, too.
All those fears are the the same ones we have now.  Everybody was scared and confused of Web 1.0 too. Everybody tiptoed up to it and poked at it and held it upside down and tried to figure out how it’d fit with their job description, their worldview.

Ain’t nothing new.

But that’s not a bad thing. What if we can remember how we got people comfortable then? Wouldn’t that help us do our jobs faster this time around? Which people led the charge? Which got it, and which were the ones that had to be dragged in? What efforts made people feel comfortable? Which ones were big, expensive, showy busts?

Thinking back - thinking ahead. Not always mutually exclusive. Social media’s creating fantastically cool new ways to communicate, but you might not have to create fantastically cool new ways to get people into it.

Don’t go for the romper shorts, though.

Sarah Morgan blogs here, twitters here, works at MCSPR, and is not sure what she thinks of the 90210 remake - but as long as the sideburns are shorter, she’ll give it a chance.

Many of the established and well respected blogs within the online marketing community have recently started to make their audiences available to a variety of new voices. I’ve done it here and both Michael Gray and Jeremy Shoemaker have both recently put the call out for guest bloggers.

I’m totally interested and willing to have guest bloggers on Buzznetworker, (see below) but I also take it very seriously. I have high standards – I want to make sure that it fits the tone and topic of my site, and that the content is exclusive – it can only be published here. I’m thrilled if my guest bloggers post and on their own site and link back to their post, but I’m uncomfortable when they start repurposing that content.

Darren Rowse, from ProBlogger has defined some great key criteria that any guest blogger should take into account before you submit a post.

1. Research the Blog
2. On Being Yourself
3. Look for Gaps in the blog
4. Sell Yourself
5. Be Reliable
6. Add Value

The sixth point here comes from Marketing Pilgrim and I think it’s a very good and relevant point. If you’re not adding value almost every time you post, whether that post is on your site or someone else’s, you’re just adding to the noise.

Guest blogging really is bringing a new voice and a new perspective to an established site, and it’s important to keep that in mind when you’re offering up a post for someone else’s site.

All this said, I am now officially throwing the doors open. I’m looking for guest posts. The only criteria I have is that the post is on topic of the site (Something social media related – case studies, advanced social media thoughts, opinion pieces…) and that you don’t republish the content anywhere else. Please make sure you link up your posts and provide any images you want to go along with the post, complete with appropriate attribution.

Comment and let me know if I should be looking out for a post from you, and I’ll make sure I watch my inbox. I’m really looking forward to seeing what my readers come up with!!

My final guest post for the day, is another good one from Lisa Thomas-Tench.

So Plurk is all about creating karma. I’m not sure I get it.

I’m familiar with the term  but I’m not sure how it applies to this particular form of social media.

Let’s look at what increases your Plurk karma: microposting, replying, getting more ‘friends’ and ‘fans’, using icons in your posts, and inviting people to join.

I mean, to me, karma’s about doing good and being rewarded. Plurk’s about talking about yourself in, possibly, a very inane way. It’s about being popular and joining a clique. It’s about being able to click on smiley faces. It’s about having the time to obsess about your little karma number going up and down.

Essentially, Plurk is engaging you in a game rather than a distinct form of social connectivity. Unlike Twitter, where the content of your tweets determines your value in the community, Plurk values frequency and absurdity (what’s the difference between a ‘friend’ and a ‘fan’? No one I’ve asked on Plurk even seems to care).

How does this increase one’s ability to connect and share through media? I’m not sure yet if it does. In fact, I think that it bypasses the ‘social’ part of social media in a way that encourages anti-social behaviours, to a certain extent. People trying to drive up their karma numbers will pollute the timeline with valueless fluff and winking yellow faces, bringing in additional players to the game.

Twitter may be falling apart half the time, but I’ll take dharma over karma any day of the week.

This is a guest post by my new BFF, Shannon. OMG, I can’t tell you how much she and me connect. Seriously. It’s ridiculous. We were born 9 days apart. We’re the same age. The difference? She’s American and I am Canadian, and she has kids, (and gets to be married to the GM of Morton’s!) and I am 33, with no kids, and am married to a roadie.

***

Last night, I had an eight-some.  That’s right; Seven chicks, one guy, two hours. You see, I am a mommy blogger. *ducks* 

I take almost no shame in that fact.  None of us do, really; we just feel like we should.  That is not the point, however.  The point is, mommy bloggers, being the red-headed step sisters of the blogosphere, (ED: i hate that word!)tend to stick together.  We run in packs, simply because we don’t know where else we’d fit in.

Mommy blogging is a lot like being stuck in junior high school by request.  Everyone is uber-sensitive and wants to be liked.  Having a post with no comments is just as bad as having a yearbook with no signatures in the jacket.  No one is sure quite how to navigate through the whole system, since there are no rules to this gig yet, and we tend to go to extremes in our life online.

Some of us are flirts.  Some of us take that to a trampy, shock-value level.  Some of us are reserved and demure.  Some of us are Fuck-You bloggers, always in your face, ready to fight at the drop of a hat.  Some of us are merely trolls, looking to find fault with every other mom out there, and in that we validate our own parenting.  Some of us want to be Dooce.  All of us are on Plurk.

Sites like Plurk and Twitter are great for the mom blog set, because it gives us the chance to be women, lovers, humans; anything but moms for five minutes.  Our blogs are all about our kids, and many of us forgot to include ourselves in them.  Get us on Twitter, though, and we can laugh at ourselves, cry with each other and learn about another level of each other, one the blogs we keep may not let come through.

Last night, I checked in on my Plurk site.  Now, I know that Colleen will stone me dead for cheating on Twitter behind her back, but I’m coming clean.  I popped in and a few moms were hanging around.  One asked if we wanted to play Truth or Dare (see paragraph above, i.e. Junior High.)  Seven of us said yes.

Two hours later and one private Sex 101 plurk thread later, I closed the laptop having revealed things I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone.  I learned things about a group of bloggers whom I spend every morning with through their blogs and couldn’t have guessed if you paid me.   A blog friendship based on fluffy stories of boo-boos and marital angst turned into a real friendship based on actual, real-life similarities.

If you would have told me five year ago that a friendship could be built through a keyboard and some cleverly coded flash, I would have laughed you out of the room.

If you would have told me five years ago that I would someday spend two hours in a chat room talking about very nitty, gritty details of my sex life with seven people I have never met in person, I would have A) asked you what a chat room was and B) slapped you fairly hard across your face.

Have you ever had that moment online, the moment that changed your view of the internet?  You know, when you realized it was good for more than scrabble and porn?  Do tell…..

Buzz Bishop, a local traditional journalist and budding social media advocate, has been thinking a lot about echo chamber feedback, and what happens when it’s all the same people at all the same conferences and on the same networks, talking about all the same things. Are we just talking to ourselves?

Buzz has kindly offered his thoughts on the this very possibility below:

Gary Vaynerchuk has been making the media rounds to hype up his book, 101 Wines – but it’s not your usual wine book tour.

He’s not all over the Food Network, or the lifestyle shows - he’s on MSNBC doing programs like Jim Cramer’s Mad Money and The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch.

Something he said on Deutsch stuck with me - the decision to stay away from the wine world is a conscious one.

“I’m a big fan of not playing in the playground you’re supposed to,” Gary says. “I’m a wine guy and I don’t go to wine events. I speak at technology conferences. I spoke at Facebook the other day. I want to be in different places where people are curious about wine.”

(Gary Vaynerchuk on The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch)
It’s an idea I’ve repeated to many a broadcast colleague ever since. Yes, you need to swim in the waters of your own business, but if you want to grow it, you need to go outside your comfort zone.

“All these internet guys love to live just on the internet sometimes,” Vaynerchuk added. “You need to go out there and shake some hands and kiss some babies. That’s how you can spread it dramatically.”

I follow many of Vancouver’s digerati, but the message seems to constantly be the same. The same people who tweeted from Northern Voice at UBC are the ones who tweeted at VidFest on Granville Island and are now tweeting at nextMEDIA in Banff. The same faces are at XCamp or XParty each month.

Where are the fresh influences? Where are the new ideas coming from? If there are new influences and ideas, how are they being spread outside the clique?

While we’re busily leaping from Twitter to Plurk, there are legions of “straights” just discovering Facebook. The elite in social media are so busy flirting around looking for the next cool thing, they’re just spinning past the regular folks instead of taking these 2.0, and 3.0 ideas and making them mainstream.

It’s not just an echo chamber; it’s an echo chamber that is about to experience serious feedback as the message just continues to loop around the same group of people.

There are some very smart, fresh and exciting thinkers in this group. People with great ideas to help change the way things are done, but how is the message getting outside the loop?

I’m in mainstream media, a world that is begging and pleading to be led into the next generation of marketing and distribution. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I twitter, that’s why I blog, that’s why I follow you. I want to learn about what you’ve got to say. I want to bring it back to my business and make it better.

The Social Media world is a highschool dance with nervous shy people on the side while all the b-boys dance in the middle. It’s time the b-boys took the hand of the shy wannabes and taught them to dance.

***
I have to agree with Buzz for the most part. I’m part of the digerati, but I constantly forget that the mainstream crowd thinks I’m this uber-techy early adopter. I forget that many people don’t even know how blogging works.

So, how do we help the mainstreamers to get into the social media world?