Last night I was on the phone with my mom, describing the fruitless assembly line of scams that plague the online classifieds. It’s a shameful truth – I have to confess – I am one of the suckers wasting time responding to job posts on Craigslist.

My mom has some pretty novel ideas to get me fully employed, but last night’s was totally adorable: “Just go pick up a newspaper for $1.00.”

I might be totally off base, but I haven’t looked in the back of a newspaper since 1994. The only thing I look for in the back these days is for Rob Brezny’s horoscopes or the newest child-porn style pic from American Apparel.

Am I missing something? I wish I were. My mom’s suggestion for another outlet beyond my monitor showed me that she is now the one thinking outside the box! Social media is so dominant that we have become oblivious to the time-honored traditional methods of media sharing. In this very solid definition, courtesy of Wikipedia, social media is described as: Internet and web-based technologies used to transform broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many). It supports the democratization of knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers.

No shet. Which is why this week in New York City and four other major cities – Berlin, London, San Francisco, Toronto and São Paulo – there will be an all-you-can-tweet buffet of workshops, seminars, discussions, and just-for-drinks meets that solidify the impact of social media. A number of workshops are also offered to improve and hone the inexhaustible tools for communicating on a grand scale. Read the rest of this entry »