Once you have a network - and Facebook has some 200,000,000 people in theirs, I was told yesterday - you can leverage it.

Hillsong does the same thing very effectively with their congregation.

Most of what happens in Facebook is pretty trivial, but some of it is quite interesting. Mainly because of the platform for active communication that is enabled. Blogging in my opinion, although giving the option of two way communication, is still very much a passive medium, where comments and responses flow only when you have a large readership and you touch a nerve.

On the other hand in Facebook once your network node has only a relatively small number of contact points with other nodes, you have the ability to go out and stimulate their interest in two way communication.

The Question application does this very nicely. And it enables quite interesting, albeit brief, debate to take place. You pose a question, invite people to answer it, and... they do. Not surprising really. But quite rewarding. And because human beings tend to respond to positive feed back loops, we are prompted to respond to other people's questions and to ask more ourselves.

And every time this happens, slowly and bit by bit, our intelligence rises and more importantly we gradually opt to change ourselves. This is a giant experiment in social engineering that is only just beginning. Fascinating to observe and to participate in.

I think it also has quite non-trivial aspects to it as well.

As we are very largely, in the Western World, caught up in the denial of what is coming soon to a suburb near you at the moment: Oil at $200 per barrel, Fish supplies dwindling fast, Crashing greenback, Water wars, Climate change.... Each of these things on its own is potentially catastrophic. Together its beyond a train wreck.

So we have to my mind two very real options. We can push our societies over the edge and move to the Afghanistan model - back to a primitive, fear and repression based society (hang on a minute that is what our current government is doing to us right now!). Or we can work on a true societal shift that is based on a move to a new kind of nuclear community - one in which we see a maturation of the concept of Facebook style social networks into local digital trading and social support networks - a new kind of digital socialism, I suppose (and I don't mean socialism in the political sense here).

You know where to reach me. If it is of interest to discuss and brainstorm about this, let me know!

Over the next few weeks I am going to be changing the theme of this blog.

For the last year or so there have been a variety of ideas on this blog. From climate changes to political activism to technology.

Over the last week, I started working on a new book, and have had an idea for another.

Over the next month or so I am going to try to finish the first and get the latter started. I am planning to make the blog the central place for developing the ideas on this new book.

I hope that anyone who regularly visits this blog will keep returning. I think that the idea is going to be engaging for a lot of people.... so feel free to contact me to discuss it.

No title yet, but over the next few weeks I will start to put together the basic concept into a palatable form.