The recent Jaron Lanier book, You Are Not A Gadget, argues that mob madness has taken over the Internet and that social and participatory media have simply gone mediocre.

But Caterina Fake, the co-founder of Flickr, takes a different view. She asserts the participatory pieces are in and of themselves important but not necessarily because they create an end-result book or song or article.

Rather, it's the process we should be celebrating, the involvement of people in sharing assets that will be useful to others.

"Systems such as Wikipedia, Flickr, Delicious, Facebook, Twitter, Hunch and various parts of the open source movement are based around small contributory systems, bodies of work in which there are incremental improvements by multiple contributors, or exposing small actions that would be insignificant in isolation, but are meaningful in the aggregate."

Media organizations are finding it necessary to tell employees how they should behave online all over again with the growth of social media.

In the initial wave of guides a decade ago, employers were likely to remind staff that email wasn't theirs as a plaything. In other words, don't write what you wouldn't want to see published.

But these latest guides go farther out of necessity --- social media publishes you all over, and organizations fear their reputations are affected with each Tweet, Facebook post or Flickr stream.

The most recent guides come from the Washington Post, and the response online has been characteristically negative. The Post acknowledges that certain basic privileges are traded when one is a Post journalist. And it demands that its journalists not publish material that might breach standards.

There is also a directive not to associate with or follow those who themselves might breach standards, and that's likely the most contentious of the guidelines, mainly because many journalists use social media as intelligence-gathering and surveillance on others' comments.