There’s been a lot of discussion lately about what the future’s creative department should look like and who it should be headed by. Do traditional shops need to get rid of their old guard and make way for leaders and practitioners steeped in the traditions of the digital shops?

Surely they need to get rid of dated thinking. Kick out folks who can’t code, tag, and develop an app. And there’s no one who understands how to make use of the new tools available than someone with a digital background. Right?

But what about all that brand stuff? Is a techno creative really better equipped to communicate the client’s brand story than someone who’s been focused on it their entire career? Aren’t the truly great communicators capable of doing their job in more than old-school traditional media?

Digital creatives are getting dinged for lack of branding and planning experience. While traditional creatives apparently can’t grasp the internet. But are either of these characterizations fair?

I think people are getting too caught up on resumes and not focused enough on real skills. For example, I work at a traditional agency yet the majority of the work I do lives online. Some of the work I do is even social media marketing — imagine that. Does this make me a traditional creative or a digital creative. I suspect in the eyes of many recruiters who can’t get past a resume it makes me a traditionalist. But I just see myself as being current.

Marketers need professionals that can tell their story and engage their customers in all media. Be it on Twitter or on a billboard. And that is best done by a media neutral creative, working off a media neutral brief, for a media neutral media buy.

I don’t think the best creative comes from a digital or a traditional background. What is important is their grasp of  today’s tool, the future, and the client’s business.

Yesterday Google launched Google Buzz with a “so what” that rang much clearer but with less of a let down than last weeks iPad introduction. It’s not fully activated so I haven’t used it on my desktop Gmail yet (yes, I activated it) but it is working on my iPhone. It looks interesting but I’m not really excited about it yet because it won’t be all that useful until lots of people adopt it like they have Facebook and Twitter. And as long as it’s tied to a Gmail account, I don’t see that happening quickly. For example Hotmail has a much larger user base than Gmail. And what about all the Yahoo, AOL, AT&T, Comcast, and private domain email addresses that people aren’t going to want to abandon to have their email account attached to Google Buzz? But maybe that’s Google’s strategy — to get people off competitors products.

Google is one of the most important players, if not the most important player on the internet today. It controls what we see on the internet when we search. And they can effect what we don’t see. But today on the internet,  Facebook is the closest thing to a social hub. So far from Google we have Google Connect, Wave, YouTube, Okurt, Picasa, Sidewiki and now Google Buzz — none of these are anything close to a hub for most internet users.

For us who blog, we already know that the two top ways to organically drive traffic is SEO and with social tools. As social continues to grow SEO and SEM (Google’s main business) will become less and less dominant. This means Googles dominance of the Internet will wain to an extent if they don’t gain more control of how we interact socially on the Web. Couple that with Microsoft’s aggressive tactics with Bing, and they have a real interest in investing heavily social tools.

What does that mean? It means I’m excited to see what Google comes up with and how these tools evolve over time. But I’m not seeing this as any huge game changer.

This is the first installment of Jimmy’s Week on the InterWebs. A very low-level look at what’s current and what I think would be interesting for agency folks that is happening on the Web. This may end up being a weekly blog article or it might not.

Lots interesting things going on with Facebook right now. Last week Facebook bought a little company called FriendFeed. FriendFeed had been on the radar of Web hipsters for awhile and is considered to be the next Twitter by some and potentially an even bigger hit.

FriendFeed is basically an aggregator of your social content on the web. It links your social accounts together so when you post something on the Twitter, FriendFeed picks it up, or if your Facebook friend puts something on their wall it will show up on FriendFeed too. You can post to multiple sites on FF as well. All that content in one place can get overwhelling, especially with their lackluster dashboard. But many smart people swear by this site as the future.

Last week, Facebook also announced FaceBook Lite. This is most likely intended to be a more streamlined version that will be a competitor to Twitter.

But it seems they’re also playing nice with Twitter for the benefit of Facebook admins with a tool that allows them to post to both their Facebook page and to Twitter. More about that here.

Next week I’ll be talking with Vitrue about their SRM tool for Facebook posting and tracking.

For a more in-depth analysis of where Facebook may be headed check out Jeremiah Owyang’s more indepth post.

Steamy is a social aggregator on steriods and most likely a precursor to what Google Wave will be. It’s basically a single Web page where you can access all of your communication and information. All of your RSS streams, email, chat, Facebook, social bookmarking, and even join news groups (remember those). This is a really cool service that probably seems pointless to many, but definitely demonstrates where the Web is heading (aggregation). I’ve been using and like it but don’t see it as an all-purpose tool.

In an attempt to stay relevant, MySpace has acquired a social music discovery site iLike. This is probably a good move for them to hold on to the music audience. If they could only do something to improve that awful interface.

Some of you may know that I’ve been listening and learning about tools to monitor the chatter on the Web. I still have a few more to learn about but if folks are interested in seeing and learning more about what each can do, let me know and I’ll share.

This site has been around for awhile but I only recently started paying attention to it. I dig it.

When of the neatest things I stumbled upon this week is the Personas site from MIT. It provides a graphic visualization of your online personality. Enjoy.