Acronym

This month on Acronym, we’re taking a close look at social media, online collaboration, and Web 2.0—tying into a special supplement that ASAE & The Center members will be receiving alongside this month’s Associations Now. We’d like to encourage the association community to grapple a bit with social media and its implications for our profession. As Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing said in a post not too long ago, “Content isn’t king; conversation is.” And the new technologies and platforms now available—MySpace and Facebook, Flickr and YouTube, blogs and wikis and more—are all predicated on the idea that people don’t just want to post information, they want to talk about it with like-minded (and sometimes not so like-minded) people. What does that mean for associations? And how are associations already interacting with social media?

A number of association professionals (and others with an interest in social media) have agreed to provide guest posts to share their perspective, and of course your regular Acronym bloggers will be chiming in as well. We hope to get your perspective in comments—feel free to say what’s on your mind!

Michael Wesch, a professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, lays out a lot of the major issues surrounding Web 2.0 in a short video called “The Machine Is Us/ing Us.” Take a look. What do you think of the video? Is Wesch correct in his assessment, or is he way off?