The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — inaugurated a new kind of Gillmor Gang. To the undisclosed, it looks the same: silly chat, mangled technology disruptions, and dead air. To the more clueful, who recognize we're entering a new age of social media, the intersection of social monitoring and proactive brand creation tools spells big trouble for old media and their thin-skinned attacks on the realtime enterprise. As @scobleizer describes Rackspace's move to Chatter, you get the idea that social media is not just the province of the Ashton's and Lady Gaga's, but a million personal clouds that resonate with accumulated authority and credibility. Mainstream media can play a role here; @jborthwick describes the velocity with which a New York Times reporter validated the Bin Laden story as it broke on Twitter. @jtaschek reminisces about the speeds and feeds days of recognizable software giving way to micro-authority and pushrank.