OPEN

Yes, yes, I know Andrew Marr’s rule of thumb about headlines with a question mark – the answer is usually no.

And of course that rule applies here too – but just take a look at these posts:

• Nicholas Carr: Undiggnified: about the in-fighting in the Digg community. And he points to…
• Digital Micro Markets: Why Digg fraud, Google bombing, Wikipedia vandalism will not be stopped: what the headline says…
• And this piece of dark prediction for the future of social media optimisation as a dark art, Graywolf ‘s SEO Blog: The Dark Side of Social Media Optimization: how the people who brought you email, then search, then blog spam are planning to pollute any community they can for link-bucks… 

Social media will survive and be strong. I don’t know if some of these large communities and networks will though. Perhaps the future of networks is that only the open ones will thrive. Thrive because they can break apart and reform easily whenever the idiots and the crooks turn up.