I've been thinking a lot about what makes the work I do and the ideas I have different from my contemporaries. Rather facetiously, I talk about the internet as a new religion embraced by the masses in search of salvation. By resisting internet orthodoxy, I deliberately try to see our society and its relationship with technology in a unique manner.

This begins with refusing to use the same jargon and phrases as others, and playing with words to find more accessible and meaningful ways of explaining trends and phenomena. The internet is full of technical concepts that have exclusive and rigid meanings.

Yet the power and resilience of the internet is derived from its open nature, so it only makes sense that we embrace freedom when we talk and think about related ideas and concepts. I do this by generally distrusting technical authorities, including early adopters, technology executives, and I.T. admins. I respect their knowledge, but always question whether their perspective has the potential to be transfered to people who aren't in a position of technical authority (the vast majority of us).

When it comes to the world of social media, which is both technical and non-technical, elitist and also accessible, I find myself consistently frustrated by the level of "group think." In contrast to other technical areas, social media accommodates anyone and everyone, so jargon isn't an acceptable vocabulary to control the discussion and analysis.

What you commonly find is a spoken and unspoken orthodoxy, rules that dictates how tools should be used and people should act. The problem is that this stifles innovation and doesn't allow for the kind of true experimentation we should be seeing in this sector.

Public relations, marketing and advertising people lament the rash of social media experts who project their own industry orthodoxy onto an emergent discipline. Few understand the dynamic involved when in a long chain of diverse individuals and organizations who have a range of expertise culturally acclimatize their own networks and friends.

The seeds of this kind of internet orthodoxy were sown in Ursula Franklin's definition of technology as being "how we do things around here". The variable comes in how we define where we are, with the internet collapsing space into time and everyone being "here" at some point in time.

This past Monday I was fortunate enough to attend the first ever Free Summit held in San Mateo, California. Organized Hosted by TechDirt.com founder Mike Masnick with help from the folks at and organized by Sagescape, who also organized the Tech Policy Summit, the event sought to analyze and understand the business of free. The keynote speaker for the event was Wired editor Chris Anderson, whom I had seen deliver the same presentation a year earlier here in Toronto.

While I wrote a detailed report on the event for my clients, as well as a few CBC radio spots on the subject, I wanted to share some personal thoughts on my blog.

At one point during the day, Chris Anderson wondered aloud why it took 15 years to start talking about free in the context of business, and I feel the answer is that we've been focusing on the wrong things. The obsession with making money online has distracted us from the fact that people are where the real value lies.

Social media is finally teaching us to look at social dynamics and understand social relationships. It is rapidly becoming clear to all who care to notice that the moral taught to us by the web is "free."

April seemed to fly by so quickly I was unable to post any of the reviews or thoughts I had over the last month. While I have been posting some items to my private network, I still have several posts I will be publishing on my blog in the days and weeks to come.

On Sundays I tend to spend my late afternoon and early evening going over my rss feeds and news sources in part to look at the week past but mostly to get a gauge on the week ahead.

The big news over the weekend of course is that Microsoft has backed off in their quest to buy Yahoo. The irony for me is that this past Thursday morning I did a series of interviews on CBC Radio in which I speculated that the merger was inevitable. I still believe this to be the case, however it seems the likelihood of my being right is getting lower and lower.

Check out this series of headlines from the New York Times:

• May 1st: Microsoft Outlines Its Yahoo Strategies
• May 2nd: Raising Yahoo Bid, Microsoft Steps up Talks
• May 2nd: Higher Offer by Microsoft Brings Yahoo to Table
• May 3rd: Microsoft Withdraws Bid for Yahoo
• May 4th: Will Microsoft Really Walk?

That's just the New York Times. The blogosphere as a whole is just exploding with posts, and even I am breaking a month long hiatus to post on the subject. Ironically a lot of the talk is on the death of Yahoo, and the degree to which their price will fall in the morning. This suggests to me that Microsoft may be doing all of this to drive the price lower so as to finally acquire Yahoo.

Yet who knows what will happen, and it goes to show that just when something appears to be certain it will quickly transform into something entirely different. Expect the unexpected!