Flickr on Shine

Would you post a picture of your kid online?

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Freaks. Pedophiles. Kidnappers. These are my thoughts every time I want to post a picture of my son, LBZ online. They are my clanging, internal alarm, warning me about the perils of technology and a world in which my son's innocently posted picture could be...what, exactly?…

Social media: Is it a revolution or a fad?

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You might have seen the video. It's called Social Media Revolution and it's already gotten over 400,000 hits on YouTube since its release only a few weeks ago. It tells a story through numbers about the furious growth of social media around the world. Facts appear on the screen in rapid succession with haunting music in the background: "If Facebook were a country, it would be the world's 4th largest." "By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers. . . 96% of them have joined a social network." "Social media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web."

It spews its facts so fast you can barely digest them, which is how many people feel about the pace of virtual updates on sites like Facebook and Twitter. Will it ever stop coming at us and demanding our attention, fractured as it is because we're sifting through emails, texts, all while uploading our latest photos to Flickr?

According to Erik Qualman, who created the video to promote his new book, Socialnomics, it won't be stopping any time soon. And if you don't want to be left behind, you'll embrace the social media revolution:

I had a chat with Qualman about what all this means for us and our careers. Following is a condensed version of our conversation.

Take a 101 class in Web 2.0

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<img style="width:381px;height:387px;" alt="Getty Images" title="Getty Images" src="http://a323.yahoofs.com/phugc/Toj0bhHRJhhX/photos/3c9a9c7cd59857b2a2aade12f409d941/mr_02c385005c676d.jpg?ug_____DpLGoUS1W" align="left" width="381" height="387">It took 25 years for television technology to mature into a mainstream thing. That happened at warp speed with the Internet, from the first Mosaic browser in 1993 to Netscape going public in 1995; you know the rest. Any of you remember the pre-Internet world just 15 years ago?<br><br><p>Recently I attended the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, co-produced by O’Reilly Media and TechWeb. It was a real eye-opener into what’s happening in Web-land. Here’s the scoop: the Web is evolving into something even more powerful and profound than before—Web 2.0.