Elizabeth Lawley captured David Weinberger’s opening remarks at the Corante Symposium on Social Architecture the other day.  The part that really caught my eye was a recounting of the social aspect of these do-it-yourself media tools:

Tosses out a list of tools (wikis, weblogs, email, IM, etc), then asks what these things have in common?

• they connect people to people
• they tend to be relatively low-tech, small, bottom-up, inexpensive
• very human, suffused with human voice

Key points:  using these simple, inexpensive tools, you can make real connections with the right people for your business.  It’s not without some risk, and there’s a learning curve involved, naturally.  But the rewards are great.  Yes, there is hype, but there are also really valuable connections to make.