Viral marketing agency Pandemic Labs has a great outline of the problems faced by those wanting to use cutting-edge online social tools to promote their products and services. They’re rightly hyper-conscious about being perceived as spammers: users are fantastically intolerant of unwanted ads, and since a social platform is essentially run by the users, it’s not always the most hospitable marketing environment.

In general, the solution they find is to build trust and online character through actual good-faith participations in the chosen platforms; that is, comment on YouTube videos that aren’t your own, and find MySpace friends who aren’t necessarily clients. This may seem like a frivolous use of time and the online advertising budget — after all, someone has to be manning the keyboard since those wall posts won’t magically appear on their own — but in the long run it creates a better and more interesting market for everyone. And who knows, you might have some fun while you’re at it.

When your tech company is founded by an Archaeologist. These pictures were taken of my excavated structure during a meso-American Mayan archaeological excavation that I worked on in the Naco Valley of Central Eastern Honduras. The year was spring 1995, 2 years after an image was centered on the new World Wide Web. It was digging in these trenches that influenced my path into ‘media culture’.

The emergence of profound tools on any given society will always change the society. It does not take a background in material culture to see the impact digital is having on our lives and society — just try to capture the attention of most children without a screen.

One thing is completely certain in these ever changing times; nothing will ever be the same now that digital has begun. I was mussing to a colleague that in a world with ubiquitous GPS quite soon one will know longer be able to claim that one was lost.

These are the subtle facts belonging to the most major paradigm shift to hit organized human culture arguably since the emergence of agriculture and settlement.