We should all realize that our digital community is a little more like the small town life filled with nosy neighbors, than an anonymous big city. Privacy is something we should all take seriously and only share what we’re entirely comfortable with everyone in Mayberry knowing — even Aunt Bea.

Here are a couple tools that can help you understand what is public about you or anyone else on the Facebook.

YourOpenBook.org

zesty.ca/facebook/

Here’s a tool that may actually help you stay a little more private.

ReclaimPrivacy.org

The truth is that Facebook is constantly changing how they address privacy. And because advertisers are Facebook’s customers and not you, Facebook is unlikely to hold your privacy more dear than ad revenue.

To paraphrase what a South Carolina State trooper once said to a smart-asssed New Yorker friend “when on Facebook, you act like you Moma is looking over your shoulder all the time.”

And one more thing; it doesn’t hurt to Google yourself every now and then too. You never know what you might find.

I’ve written a lot here about the rapid change in technology our industry is experiencing right now. I’ve also written a lot about how smaller to midsized advertising agencies are finding it hard to staff with enough talented people. And how marketing departments struggle just to keep up with their workload in their downsized departments. Everyone is stressed these days just to keep up with the work while business leaders are looking for strategies to stay profitable in the new economy.

Fortunately social technology has enabled new ways of working, connecting, and collaborating that, when leveraged correctly, can have real benefits to the cost and effectiveness of providing services to clients. How so?

One example is Basecamp that enables project management and collaboration with no regard for proximity or even brick and mortar. The cloud has freed us from the need for large and narrowly structured organizations to complete complex projects.

This means my business and even a group of freelancers can function within your project just as if we’re an integrated part or your organization. Suddenly, collaboration isn’t pain in the butt for a project manager but a chance to bring in expertise and fresh thinking from anywhere on the globe.

It also allows business to add expertise and services without having to take on the significant costs of moving to a bigger space and hiring more people. Because collaboration is so much easier these days, my business can integrate with your business in the cloud on a project by project basis. Imagine the flexibility and the cost advantages you suddenly have.

Collaboration make you competitive. It can turn men into giants. And give small businesses the reach of mega corporations. Now each project you touch can be so much more effective and drive more ROI. Truly, collaboration is the new competition. How will you use collaboration to become more effective?

Unfortunately this is often the world where the best talent operates. One where the client is stuck in video village, isolated from the process by a 200-foot video cable, multiple layers of producers and an elitist attitude.

For those that have been trying to ignore the stock market, whose pagers keep buzzing with calls to work as 4th assistant to the assistant on a beer commercial, it’s time to wake up. Clients don’t need to put up with the old model anymore. I suggest you stop making fun of the kid with the 7D and consider buying one yourself.

Thirty years ago we were here in print technology. Every major city had specialized type houses, photo labs, and pre-press shops. There were teams of people who perfected the building and delivery of print ads to newspapers and magazine ads. They were staffed by talented professionals with a high degree of skill. Most of these places don’t exist anymore.

Today we have digital presses and software that enables one person to do it all on the same desktop. But we also have digital cameras that shoot cinematic images at native 800 ISO and products like Adobe CS Production, Apple FCP Suite, and Autodesk Smoke that can potentially complete post production from a single desktop.

This means leaner and meaner crews, no film developing and transfers, and a more integrated production process. It also means that it’s feasible for a single organization to possess the ability to script, produce, direct and complete post production without being a massively expensive company to operate and hire. This is where Fluid Films comes in. Welcome to the future.

I also believed in what I was doing. It was the right thing for the clients.

This passion birthed a business plan. One that I feel very strongly about and that I had hoped to execute with my former employer. But that didn’t happen.

When others don’t act you can sit around and complain or you can harness your passion, work with others that feel the same way, and do something creative. The world today is a tough place but it’s up to creative people to make the most of it and create opportunity for us and others.

So today, my business partner, Jason Gorbett and I are officially announcing the founding of Fluid Films. Over the next several days, I’ll be sharing our vision for a transmedia company and how what we’re doing is the right thing for companies and institutions. Please stay tuned.

Studios are reporting the biggest Memorial Day weekend ever.  Why is this important? The advertising industry is consumed these days with articles about the “changing” media landscape, detailing why it will never be the same. While it’s important that we keep up with the advancement of media technology, it’s also important to recognize that we’re not experiencing a rapid, wholesale transformation of an entire society’s media consumption habits. People still love to go to the movies, watch cable television, and, gasp, read the occasional newspaper.

What we’re experiencing is more of an evolution. Some people are quickly adopting  new technology – but not everyone. And many of the adopters aren’t necessarily dumping the old media but rather adding another way to consume media to their diet. Here are nine statistics that might surprise you if you’ve spent too much time reading and listening to the gurus.

• While every social media expert may own an iPhone, most Americans still don’t own any smartphone at all.
• Unlike me, most people aren’t dumping cable for Internet TV. More people than ever are subscribing to broadband Internet and cable TV.  Only 3.9 percent have broadband.
• 45 percent of all ads recorded on DVRs are actually viewed.
• Only 10 percent of Americans have devices that connect their TVs to the Web.
• The top bandwidth hog for mobile is e-mail, not social networking.
• Pop stars are still selling millions of singles.
• E-book sales may be skyrocketing, but only 5 percent of people own a dedicated device to read one on.
• People are using iPads with TV, not instead of it.
• Most people are not interested in owning a 3-D television. In fact, most don’t even own an HD set yet.

So what’s the takeaway for a marketer who wants to make the most out of the latest technology? Know your customer, learn her habits, and you’ll find it easy to speak to her where she is.

If content could be delivered at high-speed, (this was back when everyone had dial-up at home) via the internet, people would no longer be content to watch Baywatch in their living room.  Heck, they could watch it on their desktop. This was mainly perceived as a technical problem at the time. Everyone thought people really wanted TV on the world wide web delivered to the personal computer. And also that TV viewing would be better if it were more interactive.

We now  have Hulu, YouTube, and even smart phones that can stream content. Yet the vast majority of video is still consumed in the living room passively. Especially entertainment media.

Conversely, the internet has been making inroads into our family room. Google TV, officially launched today, Apple TV, Boxee, set-top boxes, and even some televisions now deliver the web to our TV.

Only most people don’t want to actually look at the Web on their TV or really want to “lean in” to their PC to watch their favorite sit-com. The computer is work. The TV is passive relaxation.

However there is software that’s started to change this work/play separation. You guessed it, iOS (and Android). The iPhone brings our work email and our entertainment together. The iPad has our reading material and our spreadsheets on the same device and also provides a wonderful screen for watching that sit-com. But they don’t do it at the same time.

iOS and Android don’t require you to watch TV on a computer. They morph  a Droid, iPhone or iPad into a video playback device and then later morph it into a book and then into a calender to schedule a business meeting.

There are no windows, mice, keyboards reminding you to you’re on a computer — it’s a seamless transformation from one device to another. The operating system truly changes the entire function of the device from one app to the next. Apple and Google have put their amazing software  into Apple TV and now Google TV.

In the end, the Web hasn’t converged with TV, rather the TV now has the power to be transformed into countless devices that leverages the internet.

While at first Steve’s “hobby” and Google’s low-profile launch don’t look all that earth shattering, consider the tiny computing power of a Droid, an iPhone or iPad and consider how profoundly they’ve changed the way we look at what a phone or a tablet computer can and should be.

While the pundits are arguing that Steve Jobs is just trying to sell more from his iTunes store and Google is just trying to sell more ad space, Apple TV and Google TV, through the power of their app driven software, will transform your TV, in the near future, into whatever open-source community thinks it should be. That might mean a giant cook book, a weather monitoring station, a spreadsheet, a giant drawing tablet, a virtual conference room, or musical instrument. And get ready for touch-screen TVs.

This presents some amazing opportunities for advertisers and some scary times for media outlets. Yes, TV man, Google wants more of your advertising dollars.

First lets look at sentiment. Seems my taste for indie rock (and not pop ballads) isn’t shared by everyone. Sentiment for these folks is pretty darn positive. And positive in almost the exact same numbers. Bowersox get’ one percentage point on DeWyze. And negative sentiment is exactly the same.

But the story doesn’t end there. Since this is a popularity contest, the winner is going to need more buzz about them.

And it looks like over time DeWyze has had an advantage over Bowersox. And last week DeWyze was able make significant gains.

Looking at the percentage of posts ratio, in combination with a tie on sentiment, I think this is pretty safe call for DeWyze. So I’m going on record here for DeWyze.

I’m expecting to see a real dive in some pretty positive sentiment overall. Maybe not a wholesale hate fest but some definite disappointment. So what does a quick analysis tell us?

First there are a lot of positive things being said about Lost in general. Not surprising. But there are still more people “disappointed” than “satisfied.” Seems I’m not alone but not everyone agrees with me either.

So now lets look at the content of posts. Here the vast majority of references to “Lost” have positive sentiment. That makes it appear that most people have some pretty good things to say about Lost over our allotted time period of  30 days.  Maybe I’m wrong. People may have been pretty happy about the way the show was ending.

But then when we look the actual posts about Lost things start to get a little more mixed. So maybe I’m on to something — people aren’t entirely happy with the way the show is winding down.

OK. So now for the true test. How has the sentiment changed day to day. This shows a huge spike in negativity on the day the second to last show aired and then a more mixed but also more positive take on the very last show.

This tells us there are more people happy about the ending of the show than feeling let down, like me. So way to go Lost writers, you made most of blogoshpere happy, just not me.

I’m writing this from “video village” on the set of a video and print production in LA. I’ve been really, really busy with this campaign so I haven’t had time to blog as much this last week. So what better time to address blogging frequency – which is exactly what I write about this week at the agency blog.

Some people love to rant. Even more people love to rant on a blog. Some blogs were even created for people to rant about politics, the price of milk, or even their ex’s grooming habits.

In the non-digital world, people find that kind of behavior repulsive. They simply don’t want to be around people that are negative. It’s true online too, don’t believe me? Read this great post by Brian Solis on the subject, he’s got numbers to prove people don’t want to hear about your problems. So if you blog or tweet about your brand, your business, or even your personal brand and you use negative language, you’ve got a problem.

Top 10 reasons people don’t want to hear your rant:

1. People read blogs because they’re looking for helpful opinions. Ranting only helps you vent.
2. You’re readers will tune you out.
3. People will think you’re a hot head. Do you really want clients or a potential employer to think you’re a hot head?
4. You’re only as  funny as Lewis Black in your mind. You’re readers won’t get it.
5. Most people are put in timeout for having tantrums offline.
6. The squeaky wheel gets the grease but not page hits or followers.
7. No one respects a complainer.
8. Negative advertising doesn’t work for a leader.
9. Even your mom hates it when you whine.
10. A successful blog champions solutions not problems.

So next time you feel like ranting, call a friend instead. Then sit down and think about how you can flip your rant on it’s head and write about solutions to the problem that has you so worked up. Channel the negative energy and do something positive with it instead. You’re readers will thank you for it by reading the post instead of tuning you out.