Take 15 minutes to check this out:

It is all about the data. Social-media is dominated by "marketers" at the moment. I actually think that information-engineers have yet to fully contribute.

I was talking the other day with Rich Portelance from Canterbury School about the things that they are doing with technology at the school. Rich has a background in branding and marketing and our conversation naturally turned to the social media topics that my friend Peter Baron at AdmissionsQuest has been talking so much about.

In many ways, this election was a testament to the impact of the information technology. We are in a kind of "second age" of information technology--it isn't maturing, it has matured.

Social-media apps like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, realtime video chat, broadband connections, web-2.0 mashups, and rich community websites (e.g. barackobama.com) have come together in an unprecedented way to bear witness to history in the making.

I take home a couple of lessons from this.

One of the more fascinating topics that has emerged from the drama that is our Presidential elections is this whole business of matching names of registered voters against various official State databases.