We’ve all got TSA horror stories (my favorite is the time at MCO that I was threatened with arrest for moving some of the plastic tubs from one line – where there were lots – to our line – where there were none).

Here’s a horror story with a small social media angle…some screeners in Philadelphia forced a disabled 4 year old’s parents to remove his leg braces – then had him hobble through the metal detector. His parents were (understandably and justifiably) infuriated, and after a local newspaper columnist covered the story…

On Friday, TSA spokeswoman Ann Davis said the boy never should have been told to remove his braces.

TSA policy should have allowed the parents to help the boy to a private screening area where he could have been swabbed for traces of explosive materials.

So I have a bunch of hobbies, and – shockingly – am on email lists or discussion boards for many of them.

That’s the core power of social media – the ability to find and join highly specialized conversations that are specifically relevant to you.

On one of my email lists today, one of the members – not a frequent contributor, but a participant – jumped into a conversation about a $2,000 product another of the listers was thinking about buying.

He is subscribed under his corporate email – he works for Leupold, a competing manufacturer in the space – and he gave a precise and thoughtful critique of the product that was being considered, informed by his professional expertise.

He wrapped up by hinting at some products that were currently under wraps,

Here’s a document I did for a friend who’s a newspaper editor.

I left out a huge monetization stream from lead gen and affiliate sales, but otherwise it seems pretty on point:

A Modest Proposal For The [Xxxxxx] Newspaper
View more documents from Marc Danziger.

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Like most people I’m often kind of amazed when my mouth does my thinking for me – both good amazed and bad amazed. yesterday, meeting with a prospective client, and trying to explain the way I think through the problem of implementing social media I improvisationally explained something well enough that I want to get it down in text before I forget it.

What I explained is that “social media in the enterprise is a three-axis problem.”

The three axes are:

ABOUT
WITH
AMONG

…as in conversations ABOUT you, conversations WITH you, and conversations AMONG you.

And that you need to solve the problem in all three, but prioritize the axes based on the specifics of the organization and its situation.

Over the weekend, I was reading ReadWrite Web and TechCrunch about ‘content farms’ like Demand Media and the new Aol.

MacManus and Arrington are deeply worried about what they see (MacManus):

So is the Web becoming awash with low-quality content produced by content farms like Demand Media, Answers.com and now AOL? Yes it is.

From my analysis of Demand Media and similar sites, such content is very generic and lacks depth. While I wouldn’t go as far as wikiHow founder Jack Herrick and say that it “lacks soul,” it certainly lacks passion and often also lacks knowledge of the topic at hand. Arrington’s analogy with fast food is apt – it is content produced quickly and made to order.

It’s more of a ‘hierarchy’ than a law, but I always wanted a law…here’s something I just put together for a presentation I’m doing tomorrow that’s so right, Jack Black should have done it.

It’s a hierarchy for small business survival in the marketing sphere. Maybe even for big business. I’ll explain tomorrow afternoon…