Over the holidays, I found myself in an odd discussion with my grandfather. He wanted to know what a blog was. As we continued to talk, I assured him it was not a new breed of chickens but in fact it was a new breed of his “Lancaster Farmer.” In today’s information obsessed culture, limitless amounts of both useful and non-useful facts are at our fingertips.

The conversation reminded me how much many of us take for granted these “newfangled” communication methods and how a large segment of the 21st century population (older Americans) still has little knowledge of these channels (or little use for them). Will blogging alter consumer habits in the future? Some would say it already has, and the influx of “non-credible” blogging has become more worthy than the facts and ultimately change how people make decisions for their lives.

Fundraising no longer means reaching out to your network using traditional channels (phone calls and letters). The “new fundraising” means reaching people via social platforms like Twitter and Facebook while providing them accessible methods to easily donate.

Take the case of Haiti, a country ravaged by disaster that is experiencing much-needed relief thanks to Web 2.0 fundraising efforts.

Relief is arriving in the form of donations to organizations like the Red Cross, Yele Haiti Foundation, Doctors without Borders, The Salvation Army, UNICEF and many more. These organizations are not only receiving donations the tradition way of checks through the mail or credit cards over the phone, they’re also receiving them digitally. And we’re not just talking about credit card donations on a corporate website. Some of the most popular methods of donations include text messaging, iTune purchases and Facebook applications.

Text messaging is by far one of the largest generator of donations for the Haiti relief efforts. The Red Cross has raised more than $25 million dollars through texting “Haiti” to 90999. Wyclef Jean even got involved by driving his 1.4 million Twitter followers to donate to his charity Yele Haiti Foundation via texting “Yele” to 501501. It’s reported that he has been able to raise over $2 million for his foundation. Some carriers are even waiving their text messaging fees for these transactions.

You can even purchase songs and donate to the Red Cross via iTunes. Pop singer Rhianna is selling her performance of “Redemption Song” (as seen on Oprah) for $1.29 with proceeds benefiting the Haiti relief efforts. In addition to buying music, you can also donate multiple amounts to the Red Cross via iTunes.

iTunes will continue to provide opportunities to donate when it releases the video and performances from “Hope for Haiti Now: A Global Benefit for Earthquake Relief” on Saturday. The proceeds from these items will go to the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, Oxfam America, Partners in Health, Red Cross, UNICEF, United Nations World Food Programme and the Yele Haiti Foundation.

Facebook’s Farmville even raised money for Haiti by selling “Sweet Seeds for Haiti.” Zynga donated 50% of the proceeds to help the children of Haiti. In all, Farmville raised $1.5 million dollars by selling virtual goods for this relief effort.

I could give even more examples, as new digital donation methods crop up daily, but I think you get the point. Personally, I find it both amazing and refreshing how digital and social media are not only impacting the lives of those who use the channels, but also impacting the lives of those who don’t.

Some may describe it as an obsession, a compulsion or the constant need to be “in the know.” Other can’t fathom communicating without it, including the 77 percent of Americans who use this tool at work.  News flash! Social networking sites — Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter — are transforming the way people, business and certainly advertising communicate.  Hard copy communication channels are a thing of the past; our world is now a viral operation. Logging on while on the clock is corporate America’s most publicized controversy and some employers should re-consider the benefits of the web before enforcing a ban.

Social networking is no longer just a “hobby.”  It’s become a vital organ of the world in which we live, work and play. However, more than half of employers across the nation have banned access to social media in the workplace. Obviously, employers think it’s a bad idea to take advantage of your social networking savvy employees to positively promote your business for FREE. Did I mention FREE promotion? Facebook alone has over 350 million members who could potentially see, hear and interact with your company. Capitalizing on this technology now, may help ease companies into the digital transition to come.

“In today’s difficult business environment, the instinctive reaction can be to batten down the hatches and return to the traditional command-and-control techniques that enable managers to closely monitor and measure productivity. Allowing workers to have more freedom and flexibility might seem counter-intuitive, but it appears to create businesses more capable of maintaining stability,” said Peter Bradwell, a Demos researcher.

In other words, be a lover, not a fighter.

Employers should consider options on how to incorporate social networking into daily work priorities to benefit their company. While here at Pavone, social networking for personal use is not permitted during work hours, we’re encouraged to use it to positively promote the agency. The agency itself is an active participant in Twitter and Facebook, in fact our latest post includes our holiday e-card.

Face it, this generation is like no other and social networking is here to stay. Knowing that, social networking at work should be a trained, monitored and encouraged activity.  Its capabilities should never be questioned because you shouldn’t question a good thing. After all, we’re living in a digital world and it’s about time companies learn to live there too.

Last Friday night, fairly late, I unleashed a modest Facebook application called Your Halloween Name using the slightly-more-than-beta interface of AppDeveloper from the newbie start-up AppBank. My creation follows the primal recipe of most Facebook apps in that it promises to:

A) tell you something about yourself, and

B) share that something with a small coterie of friends who will, in turn, share it with others.

Your Halloween Name also features dopey, spurious, black-and-white drawings of vampires, werewolves and some sort of bug-brained creature. It took me far less than three hours to produce, start-to-finish.

But within a half hour of publishing this content, a friend reported that his cousin had used it. And, as I write this — barely 48 hours later — 29,431 unique Facebook users have encountered my trivial Halloween pursuit, which does little more than translate their name into a spooky moniker (a la the credits on the annual Simpson’s Halloween Special.)

Here’s some current data from my recent foray into viral content:

• 28.25% of those users are between one and 18-years-old, while a meager 2.26% are over 55.
• Nearly three quarters are under 35.
• Females outnumber males in a ratio of 79.22% to 20.78%.
• The users are nearly all from the U.S. and Canada, with the states of New York (2,484 impressions) and California (1,390) leading the pack.

Later this weekend, over on YouTube, my millennial offspring introduced me to the Mean Kitty Song which has enjoyed 26,634,112 views since its posting in 2007. The Mean Kitty Song and its subsequent spin-off video franchise are basically amateurish videos of a guy playing with kittens. They are unpolished, nominally edited, and relatively goofy. They are, in short, pretty much next to nothing in the grand scheme of things. And yet, if each of the Mean Kitty Song’s views was made by a unique individual (of course, the viewers are not actually unique), that number would constitute roughly 1 in 12 of every human living in the United States. That’s one powerful kitty, friends.

Today in still another corner of the digital world, I watched the exceptional advertising case study for the Queensland Tourism Board by the firm Sapient Nitro. This campaign used classified display ads to generate one of this year’s most massively successful returns in earned media.

My experimental Your Halloween Name app, the Mean Kitty Song, and Sapient Nitro’s Best Job in the World Campaign all share a few common features:

• They look like they were thrown together.
• They are casual.
• They are very, very cheap.
• They do not appear to sell anything.

All of this got me to musing. It seems like content that isn’t overly crafted or commercial may also help lower the barrier to viewership. It’s almost as though, as digital foragers, we have become accustomed to favor content that signals its own impermanence and lack of airs. While we might well shell out ten bucks to see a blockbuster movie, that movie usually costs upwards of $30 million to make. If that same movie returns $100 million in profits, it has delivered only 10 million impressions, give or take. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the Mean Kitty dude probably spent about three days and $150 in software to generate twice that many viewings.

In my mind, none of this tolls the death knoll for the thirty-second spot, an ad format that has been much lamented by our industry of late. But it does mean that a few creepy Facebook drawings, a kitten caught on an amateurish videocam, or a classified ad all have the power to drive one more nail into the spot’s coffin.

That’s what I’m calling next-to-nothing to the something-th power

I don’t know why it’s so damn hard to figure this out, but the raging stat geek in me has always wondered: What’s the record for the most comments ever on a single blog post?

I just spent a good five minutes trying to Google the answer every which way imaginable, but I can’t find it. I mean you’d think there’d be lists of this stuff all over the place on the Internet (c’mon Technorati). I found an entry from an obscure blog from 2006 that touches on the topic, but the few record-breakers it cites aren’t higher than some popular blog entries I’ve seen recently.  It does, however, link to another blog entry whose comments reveal some contenders.

I routinely see blog entries with comment totals in excess of 1,000. That happens all the time. So I’m guessing the record is well beyond that. Actually, what renewed my curiosity on the matter was when I stumbled onto the satirical blog “Stuff White People Like.” I must be the last person on Earth to discover it, because it gets a sick amount of comments to every post. We’re talking hundreds, sometimes over a thousand comments to every post. One post (for some weird reason because it’s not even close to being the funniest post on there) has 14,588 comments and counting!

That’s the most comments I’ve ever seen on a single blog entry. If anyone has proof of more (we’re talking blogs, not message boards or forums), please let me know… with a comment, of course.