With the news that the General Assembly of Maryland is banning Facebook and Myspace connections, we have an interesting issue before us regarding social media. Is "big" a good thing or do good things really come in small packages?

Some people think Facebook, growing at millions of people every month, is a good place to build your community, but when you have a widespread network, hacker bozos like messing with you. The reason Mac's are generally immune to computer viruses is that there are not enough people using them for malware hackers to cause the mayhem they like to do. Facebook and Myspace present the kind of playground the web-vandals like to ransack.

But so far, the smaller, more focused players in social media, like Linkedin and Plaxo have been fairly immune to malware. So what I am wondering is, have we gone past the time of importance for mass media? Are we, as Seth Godin sees it, becoming a planet of tribes again? I'm no longer sure social media is a replacement for traditional media,, but a means to reconnect on a more personal level, so applying massive scale to an approach may not be the best.

I'm going to be looking in this more.