To be a child with cancer in the 1970s meant almost certain death. Then, one day, some smart pediatric oncologists got together and said this won’t work. We can’t sit here as individuals and expect to solve this problem.

They formed an association to trade ideas, tell others what works, what doesn’t work.

They formed a network.

Now about 90% of children survive cancer.

Being newspapermen or women alone in this world trying to figure it out on our own will mean almost certain death for many of our products.

We can’t expect a single ‘a ha’ moment turn profits around, to regain readers and viewers and our communities. There probably isn’t a silver bullet.

I’m going to push this hard in the newsrooms I interact with this year. We need to get out there and join in the conversations. We need to trade ideas, not just with each other, but with the public at large.

The Networked Journalism Summit this year was a start. Poynter plans to launch online groups. There are plenty of existing media groups on Facebook. While there’s certainly a lot of noise, there’s some excellent conversations happening on twitter.

If you’re just reading media blogs you’re doing yourself a disservice. Quit lurking in the digital shadows. Start commenting. Join these networks, join the discussion. Start a blog. It doesn’t matter if you write obits or you own a large network of newspapers. The point is to trade ideas. The flow of ideas outweighs the network of people in it.

This year we shouldn’t simply talk about what we should do. We should talk about what we’re doing. Let’s get into heated debates with each other because it needs to happen. Let’s be honest when we fail and when we triumph.

40 Downloadable Open Source Social Software Applications by Max Kiesler:

While large scale social sites like Flickr, Digg, Youtube and Myspace have predominated the web-o-sphere over the past few years there still is a need for narrow content verticals in this arena. This list will give you links to 40 open source resources to get you started building your own social bookmarking, networking, filesharing or search application. The following is a list of what I consider the be the best open source social software that Ive found over the past year.

Newspapers.com, you have no excuse.

I already hate MySpace because it’s a really, really bad application. But now they’re taking notes from another site I generally hate, Digg, with MySpace News. Except, in typical MySpace fashion, they’re doing it in a completely retarded, annoying and inept way, unlike Digg.

When someone links a site, through Digg, email, whatever, I want to go to that site. I don’t want a giant banner of the top of the page. But unlike other shitty sites that still do this, MySpace news doesn’t even give you the option to remove that damn frame.

If there’s a link on a site for http://www.whatever.com/blog/boring-post.php, I want to go to the URL http://www.whatever.com/blog/boring-post.php. I don’t want to go to http://news.myspace.com/toms-favorites/kitten_pictures/1230498712/.

It’s a flagrant brand push on content that isn’t even theirs. At least Google News, Yahoo News, and other sites that piss Sam Zell off, take you to the intended URL. MySpace just blatently steals content and slaps their branding all over it under the guise of “social news.”

I’m surprised the link icon actually even links to the intended URL, instead of the myspace page.

Boy, I can’t wait until they add another frame with annoying match.com advertising or talking “shoot the emoticon” flash ads.

Man I hate Tom. What a jerk.

Good thing the idiot “community” on myspace doesn’t give a shit about “news,” as evidenced by the lack of votes for the dumb stories on the news homepage.

At least every once in a while on Digg, you can find something interesting that doesn’t have anything to do with World of Warcraft, Steve Jobs, or Steve Jobs/World of Warcraft mashups.

Save and share links have cropped up all over on news sites this past year, especially from web services del.icio.us, digg and Facebook. Examples here, here and here.Some newspaper sites are displaying track backs from blogs. And you’d be hard pressed to find a news site that doesn’t offer XML syndication, even if it’s truncated to headlines only.

I’ve even heard rumblings from some news organizations planning to offer headline widgets for bloggers, in the hopes news sites can tap new audiences.

That’s all fine and good, but what invariably happens when someone follows a link to a web page is that they immediately leave it once they’re finished with it, especially when they come from digg, del.icio.us or Facebook.

So what’s a Web site to do once they attract an audience through these referrals? There’s always been talk about providing interactive news for online reader, through slide shows, video and Flash whatnots. Related content is nice, but who decides what’s related? Robots and producers, that’s who.

Jeff Jarvis got a look at the new USA Today where the site begins using machine generated tags. Jarvis ponders, “given the biorhythm of news, I wonder whether a folksonomy can take hold in time.” But that “biorhythm of news” is mostly a byproduct of traditional news media: TV and Newspapers, one with limited time, the other with limited space.

The Web has neither restraint. Articles and photo and video can sit on a server indefinitely. News becomes evergreen. Old news may be new news to someone and even if it’s not, that content may still be relevant to someone else.

So why not make the news itself interactive by letting users decide where it should go? Why not break free of the traditional categories (news, sports, business, features, etc.) and let readers create their own categories?

And then set your Web team loose on building XML feeds and headline widgets based around those categories, or blocks of categories, thus making those tools relevant to people looking to syndicate and share specific types of information.