You’re reading this because you have an interest in social media and networking. You probably use Facebook on a daily basis and although you use an RSS reader to catch the news you also receive breaking world news and blog updates from Twitter. You may even be so audacious to have gone pro on your Flickr account and have countless sets of personal images uploaded on Yahoo! servers - accessible to you throughout the world. Remember to use the proper licensing!

I know! Your one of those people who maneuvers throughout the web, registering the same user name and linking to that

indistinguishable profile image we see everywhere. With so many accounts I’m sure you differentiate and remember them using a social bookmarking site like Del.icio.us or Mister-Wong. You must have also registered for an OpenID at some point in your past. Let’s face it, you’re a social media nut and everyone who watches your UStream channel knows it!

But in this world sweetheart, we are the minority. It may look like everyone who uses the Internet is engulfed in social media; the truth is they’re not. That group is very homogenized, but they are the ones who, with their consistent activity, make this social media world of Web 2.0 look so big.

Take for example the tangible, human friends in your first life. How many of the people you surround yourself with know what a Google Reader is? Does it mean anything to your father that Jaiku was just acquired? He can’t be as eager as us to experience the next shift in microblogging, can he? Try asking your best friends from high school what they think about the whole Scoble/Facebook debacle. They will try to commit you! Probably should anyways.

So, <Seinfeld> Who are these people?</Seinfeld>

If you want to go even deeper into social networking you can look into the world of Wikipedia, IRC

and open source development like Linux. There must be millions of people involved in the progress. The truth is that only 1,546 Wikipedians have the administrative right to monitor its six million registered users, many of whom are inactive after registering. Try becoming actively involved in high profile open source project like Linux and you’ll find it’s as complex communities get. You need to literally start in the mail room. Getting your name on a mailing list to become a guinea pig for bugs is the first step of that ladder. Both of those diverse little groups assemble with many others in the thousands of channels and servers on IRC, the archaic chat service that will and should forever remain as it always has.

The question now becomes “when did we begin social networking”. Was it when you first left feedback on an eBay auction? Maybe your first memory was when you felt compelled to review a webpage you found on StumbleUpon. Perhaps commenting in a blog or maybe having one of your own, hosted on Blogger was the start of your networking incumbency. I still love the BBS’s and webforums from yesteryear. Most of school chums jumped on the MSN Instant Messenger bandwagon and rightfully so. Where else could you be rejected by a potential mate and easily deny being sincerely interested? Mind games, shmind games!

However far back we go you have to wonder “will the rapport building stop?” Probably not. So let’s stay on the wave and contribute to the best of our abilities? We are after all, just the minority.

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By MikeonTV on Jan 8th. It's been read by 2,106 users.