It's a beautiful, sunny, Sunday summer's morning here in New England. For years at this time many people from all over become interested in the summertime Tanglewood concert series in western Massachusetts, owned and operated by The Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO). So it was only natural I would find and read this story from the Berkshire Eagle, a real newspaper with an online component, about the serious issues facing the BSO over declining ticket sales, new competition from New York City, and generational changes in people's travel and entertainment tastes. It's a very comprehensive, well-written piece by Jessica Willis of the Berkshire Eagle staff. (A local person who called this year's lineup a public relations disaster is what caught my eye first.)

But I was most impressed by the Berkshire Eagle's inclusion of a trackback in this story. A trackback lets me let them know that I've written something about what they wrote. (That's not a great sentence, I realize, but this is Sunday and it's been a long week.) In this way, Jessica Willis and others at the Berkshire Eagle can be automatically alerted to online posts with reaction — positive and negative — to anything they've published. It lets ordinary people like me who might have additional information, join the conversation. And, when that happens, readers of the Berkshire Eagle get a broader view of perspectives from people other than the journalist penning the orginal piece. In a nutshell, in my humble opinion, that's what this social media thing is all about.

So here's your chance. Do you have a point of view about how or why the BSO should find a way back to the days when Janis Joplin rocked the concert series? If you have a blog of your own, you can link to Ms. Willis' piece, read it, write your own post, insert the trackback offered by the Berkshire Eagle, and her readers will be your readers too if they elect to read your perspective.

It's just that simple. It's just that powerful.

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