Along the road of my career in technology—dancing at the intersection of hardware, software, and 'wetware' (us!)—i've survived many jaunts down the alley ways of: artificial intelligence, expert systems, knowledge management, customer relationship management, groupware, computer mediated communications, and numerous other 'collaborative' software.

I will not venture into beginning to bore you with an accounting of the alphabetic acronymn soup spawned, predominantly in large enterprises, as a result of these frequent, frantic forays fashioned for fervent followers of finding the holy grail of 'seamless' communication, collaboration, workflow, etc. Nothing fancy really, just searching for magic bullets.

danah boyd recently blogged an abstract for a paper she's writing on The Significance of "Social Software". 'Social Software' is a fairly benign term when compared to the more arrogant 'Knowledge Management'. Imagine managing knowledge? Yours, let alone someone else's? I'm with Jim McGee in preferring the term—knowledge work over knowledge management when talking about "...the critical issues of organizational adaptation, survival, and competence in face of increasingly discontinuous environmental change…"

Hm. Some see social software, and social networking services, as bricks, if not mortar, in floatation devices (?) for the next evolutionary footpaths in this search to soften the impact softening of "increasingly discontinuous environmental change". Are we evolving towards more meaningful social interactions via these social software services?