Clay Shirky is a great evangelist of collaboration and believes that taking advantage of “spare” brainpower will change the way society works.

The audience is becoming more and more engaged. Engaged and empowered to contribute on anything from local news and politics to helping resolving issues big and small.

One thing I would like to focus on is that one person can easily be very, very wrong but the average of the majority is a path to greater accuracy. When these innovations empower the majority to contribute this sets the groundwork for a magnitude of improvement.

It’s a bit repetitive but I think it is justified: “People don’t buy what you do, they buy Why you do it.”

I sometimes forget that not everyone is aware of what has happened around the world. Rarely do I speak to anyone that does not access the Internet on an hourly basis (or more).

Ps. My summarizing things into one sentence is proving a challenge, but more efforts will be made. I know beyond a doubt that if you allow a text string to be 160 characters it will be used at some point.
So by design your typical wordpress installation (such as this one) provides a lot of freedom. Freedom to expand well beyond what may be necessary at times.

The first was that the speaker Bob Ansett referenced “Think Global but act Local”, which I could not agree with more especially considering we are about to launch Local.net. Bob is a great speaker; it was a great pleasure to listen to his fun and fantastic on the job and life experiences.

The second was a brief talk by Andrew Meyles of Forsythes that referenced the “United Breaks Guitars” music video, highlighting just how important customer service is and how the Internet can effect your business even without your being online.

I imagine the people at United Airlines would be following this (with over 5 million views at the time of this blog). But if you or an employee was to do something that resulted in such a response then you really need to really look at things in-house and you would really want to know of and engage with those effected in aid of a solution. Customer service in the web world very much requires business to keep a pulse on social interaction related to their business. Web2 people would much prefer spend 4 minutes typing up a blog post that tells the world about an experience then spent for the third time over twenty minutes on the phone explaining in very simple English without being understood and little hope for a solution.

It also intrigues me that people think it will not happen to them because they are not as big as United. Just remember this, not everyone you have a negative effect on is going to upload such an enlightening video, but as soon as someone does you can safely guess there would be lots of people willing to comment and share it within their own networks. That video has 5.4 million views but 22,000 people have added their comments to the story and 35,000 have rated it highly.

This is a grass roots project by four mates in Sydney. They aim to improve the education of the children of Kiandu Village in Kenya. They are doing a fantastic job and have setup a website at Kiandu.com with the whole story and ideas on how you can help out. If you donate to this great cause every cent goes into this school. No admin or marketing fees here.
Please watch the video and if you think they are doing a great job and can spare $50 via PayPal it will go a long way.

The Kiandu Story from Kiandu on Vimeo.

We are in the final days now before the release of Local.net, a project that has been almost two years in the making. It is a very exciting time and I cannot wait to send out the next batch of invite codes to the 10,000+ people that have registered.

I could not help but write about the energy and excitement that we have been living. The pure adrenalin that is driving the Local.net team is a fantastic experience and has highlighted just why some people call their businesses their babies. The months and months of anticipation, the unknown, and the joy of brining something to the world that would make a life of its own!!!

Local.net is a website that has a particular relevance and context but it will be the users and their influence that will ultimately determine its purpose(s). Building anything that does not have a fixed purpose or application is extremely difficult and for the entire time we where developing there was always the unknown… Would the public like it or not!

This element of surprise has made for an interesting time; the anticipation of what people may think has been cause for much careful thinking. You can have test groups and ask as many family members and friends for feedback that you like but nothing will remove the stress and anticipation of what the general public might do, both those with positive or negative intentions.

Thankfully, everyone that has been involved with the project has been excited and most importantly (for our sanity) everyone that has only recently been made aware of what Local.net does has received it exceptionally well, beating our wildest expectations.
On this note I would like to thank everyone that has helped out to get it to where it is today. The people working in-house, those working from afar and very importantly those that have no idea their experiences and influence have contributed.
Everyone who is directly involved has my thanks already but I would like to say a quick thanks to a few people that would never have known:

• Craig Newmark from craigslist.org for operating his website as a democracy and swearing by it. He is the founder but is also the customer service rep and that is inspirational and I think it is instrumental in his websites great success.
• Mike Mathieu and FrontSeat for launching Walkscore. If not for that we would have been completely different. Our original vision was far broader but after discovering Walkscore we realised that we don’t need to do it all and to focus in on what we could do best.
• Matt Flannery, Jessica Jackley and Kiva.org. They had a difficult problem to solve but found a great win-win solution that uses a social architecture.
• Michael Arrington and TechCrunch for improving transparency and highlighting man what to do and not to do scenarios. I enjoy reading TechCrunch and actually paying the proper attention to what works and what doesn’t. It is free to read and so I think many people do not pay sufficient value/respect to the lessons that can be learnt. I see it all the time and it is comparable to reading and watching video of people tripping as they walk down a specific street and yet many of those watching still walk down that same street without caution of tripping. Because you think you are different doesn’t make you different.

There are a great many others, too many to mention but my quick blog post has already well and truly over shot the preferred word count.

For those that read my blog but have no idea what Local.net is all about… no need to worry, it will not be to long until we launch the public beta and so you can check it out for yourself.