Last evening I helped stage (with Entrevis and Heartland Circle) an event and three profound things happened:

1) Malcolm Cohan was introduced to several dozen people in Minneapolis before coming here in person in a couple of weeks. Malcolm is being brought to the US by George Johnson of Entrevis. You’ll be hearing a lot about Malcolm and his Vision’s for Humanity. The entire premise of telling vision stories is profound in-and-of-itself, but this guy is so incredibly delightful and the vision stories so powerful and fun to watch that people are creating them like crazy and I’m surprised they are so compelling.

2) We had Malcolm speaking to an audience over Skype video and you can seem him projected in front of the group in the top photo. This isn’t a big deal to do, you might think. It turned out to be a bit of a challenge to hook up to the in-house mixing board (I even brought my own board!) while ensuring the audio from Malcolm came through the speakers so the audience could hear him *and* so that the microphone was fed back into my laptop so Malcolm could interact with the hosts and audience.

After getting everything set up, tested and underway, Murphy’s Law appeared and suddenly the DSL connection dropped completely a few minutes into it! After determining with the excellent staff at Horst Rechelbacher‘s Intelligent Nutrients that it was dead, I pulled a rabbit-out-of-a-hat and connected through my Treo 700p and my Verizon EVDO connection and it worked! It still dropped the Skype video call several times, but it got us through until the DSL came back up in the last ten minutes.

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I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a thought leader in a time where the tools to deliver thoughts globally are easier to use and more available than at any time in human history.

Blogs, podcasts, videos, voice over Internet solutions, free or cheap software for Web sites, forums and commerce, social networks are but a few of the tools available to anyone with a penchant for getting their opinions out into the world. Couple these Internet-centric methods with the more affordable and easy-to-use tools like camcorders, smartphones, audio creation software and hardware — and ever increasing bandwidth — and you have a perfect storm of communication methods that is perfect for thought leaders to deliver big thoughts and facilitate the conversation.

What’s missing? Aggregators of thought leaders coupled with community networks. Corante is one organization that has done a fine job of pulling together thought leaders into one core group around subject categories. Another fine one is ManyWorlds. These and others do not, however, facilitate the conversation in my opinion. They’re set as experts or thought leaders somehow above us who read them.

But here’s my problem: I don’t believe that experts exist. For the same reason unconferences (read Dave Winer’s take on them) have exploded on to the scene and are beginning to disrupt the conference-as-a-huge-revenue-generator,. Most conferences always purport to have ‘experts’ up pontificating about some subject to a passive audience…but we’re no longer passive and the best ideas come from conversation. By design, unconferences are all about participants and conversation…not so-called experts delivering yet another Powerpoint slide deck and joking about “I only have 400 slides” with a courtesy laugh from the audience.

Oliver Schwabe has one of the best posts about this topic I’ve read in some time entitled, The guru is dead. Long live the network:

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If you’re trying to figure out how your business or career is being disrupted by this Internet thingy, don’t look to the flipper-flappers and dweebezarbs….look at processes and value chains.

Chris Pirillo has an interesting post today about “How to Start Business” but instead of it focusing on how to start *a* business, his words encompass more than just startups trying to make the inefficient efficient and disrupt the status quo. I view his post as one that also concerns those trying to reinvent, disrupt or recreate their own businesses:

The Internet is a pretty amazing tool for business—so long as you know how to use it. It is essential to understand that the Internet doesn’t work like more traditional forms of media. The Internet has changed the way that businesses and consumers interact. In order to help you understand this new paradigm here are a few of the key concepts essential to success on the Internet – especially in the blogosphere.

I’ve worked with clients since January of 2006 in a variety of business types in traditional media, telephony, publishing, marketing, public relations and technology. Every single one of them either is being disrupted by new, more efficient (and Internet-centric) offerings or are trying to figure out how they fit in a world where every business is either online or trying to figure out how to map to it.

I just had coffee with a guy from the radio business who has one foot in the traditional and one foot in the new media worlds. He’s a thought leader pushing against the membrane of the future trying to see what’s ahead and we brainstormed several ideas that are so laughingly obvious as a need that bridges these two worlds that I’m stunned they haven’t happened yet (and I’ve been poking around for a bit and there aren’t any that I can find).

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Saturday in northern Minnesota saw Eric, Kevin and I heading to a state park for our photographic adventure while on Eric’s Photofest. I drove my wife’s Acura RDX to Eric’s lake home and we used the navigation system to find our way to the park and back. Man! It was at least five times harder to use the nav system than it would’ve been if we’d had along a paper map.

Oh yeah…we didn’t just rely on the RDX nav system (which was included in the nearly $7k step up technology package we bought on this SUV) but we had Eric’s handheld GPS, three Palm smartphones (mine with Google Maps on it) and we fooled with all of them at some point on our return.

The problem was the navigation system wanted to return us via highways adding a dozen miles to the trip. We changed that to minimize highways to no avail. We took county roads that we knew went closer to Eric’s place and finally Kevin discovered (since he has an Acura TL with navigation) that if we selected “unverified” roads it would enable us to just start to drive one of these roads and then the system would reconfigure the trip back to Eric’s using the most direct route.

It’s not like these roads were gravel logging roads. These were paved, highway-like county roads that should be on any navigation system. The other amazing thing was watching my very techno-savvy buddy Eric being befuddled by the illogical menu structure and nomenclature to look something up. For example, discovering the Savanna State Park should have been in some sort of easily accessible hierarchy but instead brought up Savannah, Georgia and other Savanna’s. Shouldn’t this system be smart enough to know that lookups should be narrowed to areas one is driving in?

What was fascinating about this occurrence was how many people I know who have begun to rely completely on the navigation systems in their cars. My daughter will at some point since she’s navigationally challenged and my bride loves nav systems for much the same reason. If three guys like Eric, Kevin and myself are challenged to use thousands of dollars worth of systems like we had at our fingertips and find them inefficient and cumbersome to configure appropriately, what chance do others have?

The atlas you see to the right is one that I’ve used extensively over the years as I’ve poked around my state. It has every rural road and even logging roads in it and thus it’s incredibly simple to look up and plot a route at a glance. Even a Minnesota roadmap would’ve been more useful than our respective navigation electronics.

One more reason to understand the limitations of technology and to be pragmatic about their use.

Often I write about Google Goodness, and then I go into the closet, slip on my tinfoil hat and my lead underwear (you should know that both protect against the surveillance gamma rays emanating from a laptop), and write about the possible negative implications about what they’re doing. If you can’t look at both up-n-downsides in a pragmatic and open way, then there’s no guidance as change accelerates and no assurance Google won’t inadvertently slip into doing evil.

According to this BusinessWeek article, Google is fighting-the-good-fight against wireless net neutrality to which I need to call bullsh*t to both Google’s counsel and BW itself:

"Google’s agenda is clear. As a provider of a host of Internet services, including search, e-mail, and online video through YouTube (NWS), Google wants to ensure its content can flow unimpeded and untaxed over the world’s broadband networks. One way to do that is by making sure there’s plenty of competition in the market for high-speed Internet access—in particular, from providers other than behemoths like AT&T (T) and Comcast (CMCSA). "Google’s key interest here is in seeing fourth and fifth [broadband access] pipes to the home to compete with cable and telecom companies," says Whitt." (Richard Whitt is the former head of the regulatory department for MCI and is acting as Google’s Washington telecom and media counsel).

To me, their agenda is clear and it’s only marginally about the pipes or defending against the anti-net neutrality trolls. It’s all about selling ads.

Let’s follow the money. According to Google’s own annual report, "We derive most of our revenues from fees we receive from our advertisers through our AdWords and AdSense programs." We knew that since many of us marvel at the amazingly-accelerating-revenues of the Google advertising machine. But if those ad dollars are tied only to our seeking behavior while performing a search — instead of when we’re doing email, reading a blog or site, collaborating on a document, looking up something on a map on our PC or handheld, roaming around with our smartphone or sitting in a cafe with Wifi or on a park bench with municipal wireless, etc. — then they’re inherently limited in top-line revenue to only search-centric, behaviorial advertising.

Google wants unfettered distribution via wireless networks and that’s one key part to the "Google Ads Everywhere" strategy too. But if *I* were in strategy sessions at Google, I’d be more interested in being able to deliver targeted ads to a specific person and their precise needs at every single touch point possible.

That’s the agenda kids.