Top Stories reveal Facebook’s broken strategy

Some quick thoughts on Facebook’s latest iteration (as revealed at F8 last night).

The moving 'stream of news' from folks you know has been pushed into the wrong place. It should be in the centre. Facebook should instead push top stories to the edge (as Twitter does with Trends).

The reason they have got this wrong is the reason Facebook is headed in the wrong direction full stop. It can’t find a way of making value without slapping ads on. It is therefore forced into thinking it is a mass media play.

When you think like that you get led by the lowest common denominator (most ‘liked’ over most relevant) that leads you to ‘top stories’ and to placing them in the centre.

Facebook is treating your ‘friends’ as one big community. You only get to choose who you share with once. It should at least be every time you share.

Twitter’s trends is another (in some ways worse) case in point. It surfaces the most shared, not the most relevant - among everyone.

Top Story is kind of ‘trends among friends’. Which is something I previously advocated twitter should do. But now I see it in the flesh and actually working, I realise how even this delivers most liked, not most relevant – even if it is ‘most liked/shared’ among your friends.

For example, when I checked in on Facebook this morning my experience of it was a top story which was a very funny video involving British chef Nigella Lawson (also available on Youtube, on the open web).

The video is entertaining. It would entertain many. But it sure ain’t relevant. Because it gets liked and shared by many of my friends (and presumably their friends) it stays on top story position.

Meanwhile, in a side-thought at the side of the page potentially more relevant stuff ticks by.

What is needed is a way in which you can select, every time, who you wish to share with. Friends may have things in common but that does not mean they share common purposes. Communities do.

And communities of purpose are much more adhoc in nature than Facebook is built for. They are much more like the way conversations develop in twitter – aggregating around a common thing for the time that thing matters to those taking part, moving on to the next as and when the need is solved or the next emerges.

Communities of purpose get together to achieve things – from answering a quick question to making a solution to shared need. Friends hang out.

And this is Facebook’s challenge. Communities of purpose have to be much more adhoc than it is built for – yet this is where the true value (making things with people rather than sending messages at them) resides.

The Top Story thing reveals how far off Facebook is from cracking this, or perhaps even understanding it. It is why, instead, they must attempt to be a media platform. Because media platforms are nice and simple for selling ads on - instead of coming up with ways of creating real value with communities.

Related articles

• The New 'Top' Story: Facebook's Flow Of Change (npr.org)
• Facebook Enhances News Feed and Introduces Ticker (hubspot.com)
• Facebook Now Has 800 Million Users (mashable.com)
• We don't connect to be marketed to (fasterfuture.blogspot.com)

Can you trust the Trust Barometer?

The Edelman Trust Barometer 2011 is out. Cue a bunch of extrapolations no one should have made.

I'm not having a pop at the fine folks of Edelman who bring us this research each year (many of whom I have a great deal of time and respect for). I am calling on everyone to take a moment to think before they quote, tweet or otherwise pontificate based on the results.

For instance (apologies Keith, I've taken you at random from the #Trust2011 stream on twitter today (January 25, 2011)

Nope. You can't conclude that from the Edelman data.

 

This neither. Not with anything like a useful degree of certainty.

The danger in both cases (and they aren't alone, and I've almost certainly been guilty of doing the same myself in the past...) is that we conclude that what is true of a small subset is true for the whole populace.

You may be able to make the case if the sample was relatively representative of the general populace. Random even. But the Edelman data isn't.

And it very clearly isn't. All you have to do is read slide two of their own presentation on the Trust Barometer to know this:

Edelman's Trust Barometer is a survey of a relatively small number of heavy-media consuming social and economic elite.

Please treat it as such.

Doesn't make for as neat a headline, soundbite or tweet does it? The truth's a bitch sometimes, ain't it?

Full report etc here.

Related articles

• Trust Plunges in the United States While Resilient Across the Globe (prnewswire.com)
• Trust Transformed: Results of the 2011 Edelman Trust Barometer (edelman.com)
• U.S. trust in business tumbles (theglobeandmail.com)
• Corporate Reputation: Everybody's Watching (mediabistro.com)

Why the ASA can't regulate peer to peer

Marketing Week has published a cover story on the ins and outs of the ASA deciding it should have some kind of regulatory jurisdiction over the behaviour of brands using Facebook pages and Twitter accounts.
My comments are included in the piece - which you read in full here.
But here's a link to the blog post I wrote on the subject when the idea was first floated.
An extract:

"You have to ask how they expect the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) to police this?
And more importantly, why they think they are better placed to police this than those they seek to protect?
It's another example of the advertising world attempting to place a broadcast, centre-out solution on a peer-to-peer space. You ain't in Kansas any more, Dorothy.
They make the assumption that the act of setting up a page or account and filling it with dishonesty is equal to broadcasting that dishonesty to unsuspecting audiences. Which is to fundamentally misunderstand how distribution happens in social media."

Related articles

• Is the ASA's new online remit a missed opportunity? (simoncollister.com)
• Facebook gets you shared, Twitter gets the clicks (lostremote.com)

Participation is the new default

A short while ago I wrote about the 90:9:1 rule - how I felt this was less a rule about human behaviour and more one about opportunity.

The story of the Internet has been one of lowering the transaction cost of forming groups. The lower the cost the lower the motivation required so to do = the greater the opportunity for all parties to engage.

We have the best set of tools in history to connect people (and if you think our current set are cool, wait until we truly get out of the silos). And the impact of their arrival has been to reduce our reliance on organisation from the centre - for our entertainment and our news etc (from Facebook to YouTube, IM to SMS).

When given the opportunity to connect, we take it. Whether it's to move into cities to be together - or to never be out of sight of our mobile phones - such is our reliance on the connection they offer.

The internet and our ever-growing collection of digital toys have given us a new order of magnitude of self-organising behaviour, not a new behaviour.

The 1:9:90 rule suggests it is normal for people not to participate (90% being lurkers).

500m people on Facebook suggests otherwise. Each of them has had to, as a minimum price for admission, contribute their own profile. This is the age of the total community - one in which to take part you have to create part.

And through this we are reminded that as in the real world, so in the digital.
We have an innate ability to identify and punish freeloaders and all-for-themselves bores. The more we and others can express our humanity online the more we will apply those innate abilities. Brands and orgs attempting to join in will have to put down their shields and meet us as equals; face to face and in the flesh of genuine human interaction.

The cost is low, the barriers increasingly surmounted and surmountable. Does anyone still believe only 1% of us is motivated (as the 1:9:90 rule would have it)?

So let's build our new institutions, our updated organisations, with the expectation of 99% participation.
If our governments, schools, businesses etc were designed from the off with that expectation I suspect they'd look somewhat different.

Participation was the old default. And now it's back.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Making The News Via The Internet (webupon.com)
• 'One third of young women check Facebook before loo in the morning' (taragana.com)

Facebook is not a media owner - it's an enabling platform

Image via CrunchBase

The whole Facebook privacy thing reveals a large strategic problem Facebook has created for itself.

It has become popular precisely because people feel they can trust in the control over the level of sharing they have - and the limitations on what each individual regards as 'going public'. For most Facebook users going public means sharing with friends. And for most Facebook users friends mean friends (which is why the vast majority don't have hundreds).

It's structurally a collection of hard-edged networks - silos - self-limiting communities rather than the adhoc, fuzzy-edged self-forming communities of the kind that Twitter (and the blogosphere for that matter) enjoys. It was built for privacy - so the hard-edges are a natural outcome.

I have written about the risk Facebook has built into its model, previously: Hoarding Data Can Seriously Damage Your Wealth and How Twitter is Going to Beat Facebook

I think the guys at Facebook understand this problem more and more as they scale. And I think that's why they keep introducing the Twitter-like conversation elements. But it's also why they keep pushing what they can get away with on privacy.

While I do believe in the longer term our notions of private/public will shift over time, that's not what the vast majority of their 500m (that's a guess) users have signed up for. So when what they, very seriously, regard as their private data starts getting used for FB's own purposes - serving unwelcome ads, for example - things kick off.

The guts of the problem, it seems to me, is that Facebook is developing business models as if it's a media owner. ie we've got all this great content - let's sell ads on it. Let's flog wasteful, ineffective ads on it (remember kids, click-thru rates are somewhere down round your ankles, even in uber-targeted Facebook-land).

But Facebook isn't a media owner. All the media on it is yours. You made and shared it. It's yours not theirs.

Facebook is an enabling platform. Indeed it has the potential to be a collection of any number of enabling platforms. And if it could only start believing that (Zuckerberg and co must know it) then it could start to earn a crust in an appropriate way.

When it recognises that it'll spot its business model. And it sure as hell ain't ads.

It's much closer to this kind of thing...

Facebook needs a business model in which it is working with brands and orgs to bring together people who care about the same issues to work together to fix them - and to enable them - creating real RoI (making stuff and making stuff better - think Salesforce-style Dell IdeaStorms) rather than messaging the hell out of the harvested eyeballs (that'll be ads).

And only Facebook has the data through which it could find people who care about the same stuff across all the friend-to-friend silos, and reach out to them to bring them together to surface the wikifixes for products and surfaces the brands need. No one else could do this.

That's quite some competitive advantage.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Facebook's open disdain for privacy, continued (blogs.ft.com)
• Facebook Calls All Hands Meeting On Privacy (allfacebook.com)
• Facebook Needs to Find Its Voice on Privacy (gigaom.com)
• Europe Blasts Facebook, Calls Privacy Changes "Unacceptable" (businessinsider.com)

Why I hate automation in human communication

Image via Wikipedia

Stephen Waddington was kind enough to ask for my thoughts on Bots (and specifically Twitter Bots) for his latest article on Reputation Online.

He's also blogged about his motivation for writing the article.

Stephen has compiled the thoughts of several social thinkers and you can read the aggregation in his article.

But I thought it may be good to share the interview Stephen conducted with me as part of that process, in full.

So, here it is:

Stephen: Is there a real world equivalent to script building in the virtual world? I'm looking for a metaphor?

Me: It's a little like someone who arrives at a university's Freshers' Week and goes about indiscriminately joining each and every club and society. And then they refuse to come to any of the meetings unless they first get appointed to the organising committee. By people they don't yet know and whom don't yet know them.
Or the speed dater who takes everyones number and doesn't call anyone.
Or the boss of a large org who expects everyone to greet him by name each morning but doesn't bother learning the names of his staff to respond with.
In short it's anti-social in the purist form: ie not the way humans expect each other to behave.

Stephen: Is the size of a network as a means of measuring influence/authority appropriate under any circumstances?

Me: If that network is a perfect match for the niche you are interested in. That is a perfect match, and a perfect match Right Now. But the reality is influence flows. It's a real-time web in a real-time world.
Think of a flock. Think of the times you tried to change the direction the flock was moving in. If you succeeded you may claim some influence. If you failed, where was the influence then? Same network - at least the same nodes - in play. But the interactions between the nodes vary on each occasion. And it is in the interactions that change-in-state occurs. Finding nodal start points is important, but the peer to peer mechanic itself is more vital.

Stephen: What is the downside of using a script to build a social network? Technically and socially?

Me: Technically it's likely you will be in breach of many networks' terms and conditions. Check out twitters rules, for an example. But more critically you will mark yourself out as using social networks in a broadcast, one-to-many way. No one wants to talk to someone who doesn't listen.
I have this dream that as us humans spot the bots we block them, refuse to follow them etc to such a degree that the fuzzy edge around our communities hardens against them. And we end up with a walled off Escape From New York scenario where the bots are all following each other, broadcasting welcome messages at each other. Every bot talking but nobody listening.

Stephen: Agencies are flogging bots as a means to build guaranteed follower numbers? How should an agency that deems this inappropriate counter this from a sale perspective?

Me: Well, we have to point out that follower numbers don't equal interaction or desired outcome. Social media means nothing in its own right. We have the best set of tools for connecting people in history. So what are you going to do with them? Harvest eyeballs? Come on! Ditch the spam-tastic waste machine of the 20th century - get efficient. Keep your million eyeballs, I'd rather connect with a small group of people who care sufficiently about the purpose at hand to want to make it better. These people find each other through genuine human interactions, not carpet bombing. Famous for 15 people beats famous for 15 minutes.

Stephen: What should clients/agencies be measuring?

Me: Outcomes.

Stephen: Are there any other points that you'd want to make on this topic?

Me: There is an exception to my anti-auto position. It is to take advantage of the growing Web of Things. Automated reports from devices, buildings etc that I choose to receive status reports from are welcome. I'm also ok with bloggers adding an RSS feed of their posts (and similar) provided that isn't the only or major representation of themselves in any particular network. If the content prompts conversation in the environment in which it is shared, or helps people with shared purpose find each other, that's a good thing.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Twitter.com vs The Twitter Ecosystem (avc.com)
• Twitter Usage is Very Concentrated According to Harvard Research (myventurepad.com)

10 Reasons Why Your Social Media Strategy Will Fail

I compiled this for a presentation - with the real-time help of @vero @andrewspong @picklejar - and thought it might be useful to share here. By all means add to it by making comments on this post.

Your Social + Media Strategy Will Fail If:

1. You think of yourselves as owners rather than as an enabling platform
2. You don’t place social + media at the heart of what you do (it can’t be layered on)
3. You fail to listen – and join in
4. You don’t go where your communities are
5. Your message doesn’t match your actions (authenticity)
6. You try to use peer-to-peer for push/broadcast (you can't use it, you can participate in it)
7. You set yourselves up as a ‘brand’ or ‘corporation’ rather than as a human - and speak like a brochure.
8. You approach it as a purely comms medium and make it just one department’s responsibility.
9. You fail to think (honestly) about what’s in it for the user
10. You don’t give it enough time (don’t do campaigns, do relationships)

Related articles by Zemanta

• Social + Media = Change (fasterfuture.blogspot.com)
• GetMoot.com - Collaborate With Your Team (killerstartups.com)

Seth Godin on how he uses social media

Image via Wikipedia

As I read Seth Godin's blog today we had a brief discussion in the 90:10 office about his use (or otherwise) of social media.

I had my thoughts and theories. I'm sure many of you do. So I thought I'd get it straight from the horse's mouth.

So here (with permission) is the email exchange that followed:

Me: "Hi Seth, please forgive the interruption.

"I've been following your work for some many years and always been interested in your apparent disengagement from social media (ie no blog comments on your blog, no follows or replies via twitter etc).

"I don't see you commenting on other people's blogs when they write something you've inspired, or linking out to others who have inspired you, either.

"But I've always made the assumption (you clearly aren't daft, after all) that you are paying a great deal of attention to what is said about you and your thinking via social tools; that you are listening, gathering, considering and incorporating - much in the same way as Apple does.

"Am I anywhere close? And if so what listening tech do you use, how do you go about filtering and why have you chosen to operate this way?

Seth: "David,

"Thanks for your note about comments. I'm delighted that you're interested in my blog, and commend you to: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/06/why_i_dont_have.html for my post on this topic.

"I actually often link to blogs when it's directly on point, I work hard to give credit when it's useful to reader and source and I used to comment on blogs that mentioned me quite frequently.

"I do in fact get an astounding amount of inbound info, and I think if you look at my outbound in terms of impact and number of words, it's pretty big, it's just all in one place.

"Anyway, I hope that link helps you out. It's a disability, but I deal with it.

Me: "Cool. I understand, I think, - something approaching Clay Shirky's 'Fame' thinking (abundance of attention - which Clay and others discussed a little here) combined with the desire to lead (in a triiibes way)?

"Would you mind if I blogged your response; your approach is one often discussed among the people who hang out in the networks I share :-)"

Seth: "sure thing".

So there you have it. Fully engaged.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Size Matters To Those That Want Size (blogworldexpo.com)
• How to deserve an audience - revisited (broadcasting-brain.com)
• Social media raises the bar on what's required of lawyers in client development (kevin.lexblog.com)
• In Social Media, Adjust, Credit, and Engage (mikemoran.com)
• A conundrum for you (socialfish.org)
• MENG Survey Reveals the Top 20 Marketing Blogs That Marketing Executives Read (prweb.com)

The threat of SEO to the real-time web

Image via Wikipedia

The brochure, the news report, the press release, the 'professional' communication. They all have something in common - they lack a human voice.

I have often railed against this particular form of insanity (ie when we wish to communicate with humans, so many orgs choose to do so by massaging out the humanity from their messages).

On the Internet this form of received professional speak got replaced (for a large chunk of folks, you know the ones, the 'internet marketers') by a new form of stilted inhuman syntax - writing for seo.

'Don't repeat key words more than 'x' times, do place your keywords in order 'y', don't, do, don't, do.

Don't be flawed, don't be natural. Don't write like you think, don't write like you feel. Don't be human.

And then the real-time web: Lower effort to post. Lower effort to connect. Lower barriers to revealing ourselves. Lower barriers to less guarded spontaneity. Oliver Cromwell would approve.(pictured)

As one of the founders put it: "the trouble with Twitter is that with it you run the risk of revealing the real you."

That risk is the risk you have to take if you care to connect with other humans.

It is a risk that seo drives out.

Now that google is prioritising the real time web in its returns it was inevitable that the SEO pros would wade in.

'Order your 140chars thusly', they will ordain. And I will studiously ignore them.

I am part of a real time web - a very human part. Part of the real time web (as it emerges as the eighth mass media) is its ability for us to become not only the connections, but also the way in which the connections are formed.

Focusing on seo in tweets interrupts that.

It'll fool the automota. But if you aren't worth connecting with no amount of pro-seo styled tweeting will mask this to the humans behind the accounts.

In the old world of site-as-destination there was value in 'driving traffic'. In the new world of user-as-destination the only value is in creating real, enduring human connection.

Only humans, expressing themselves through authentic human voice, can do this.

Related articles by Zemanta

• We Media: Mainstream News Taps Into Citizen Journalism (technologyreview.com)
• Social media 2009 and beyond (myventurepad.com)

A powerful tool for the real-time age

Remember that a-tissue Twitter-powered hayfever map that Kleenex did?

Yesterday I was kicking around an idea to track expressed activity in a mash-up of Twitter and googlemaps.
And I'm starting to wonder if there is a solution to the 'social media monitoring' problem I identified at last month's Monitoring Social Media buried somewhere in functionality like this.

My contention was that current monitoring tech gives us snap shots which we can the examine under the microscope. A boon in developing a strategy based on where people WERE talking about you, in what ways and in what parts of the social media toolset.

But what we increasingly need for the real-time web is a video version - because the peer-to-peer interaction of the Internet is more flock than rational in it's nature.

Past recorded behaviour is not necessarily a predictor of future interaction.

Put another way, we're trying to drive using the rear-view mirrors.

We need real time - to know that the flock is moving, at what speed, at what rate of change of speed and in what direction. That may equip us to join in more effectively as part of the movement -as true amplifiers - rather than trying to turn the flock in our chosen direction. (there's a chapter in my book on our inability to dictate to flocks from the centre).

Mashing up real-time expressions of particular activities and displaying this on a map of the physical world would at least show the spread of an activity through a geolocated community (through a street, a town, a county, a nation...)

Further, this could be mapped against other activity to reveal real-time correlations.
Imagine if there was a link between the spread of unhappiness and street crime and you could see, in real time, a cloud of despair headed your way. The police could staff up - heading it off by knowing the direction it was headed in and at what speed.

Perhaps a business could better predict demand and allocate resource more efficiently as a result?

Imagine a despot could use it to put down a revolution before it got off the ground?

And imagine if you mapped this not only against the physical world, but also against the digital?

A powerful tool for the real-time age.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Pete Cashmore lists 10 Web trends, social gaming one of them (games.com)
• Why Is Technorati Looking For Bloggers To Blog About Blogging? (ricksrss.com)
• Favrd Shuts Down - Not Twitter's Last Laugh (Thank you, Textism) (readwriteweb.com)
• E-safety: the 'googleability test' (a suggestion). (dougbelshaw.com)

200M Facebook users and a whole heap of secrets

Via Techcrunch it turns out Facebook is now claiming MORE THAN 200M ACTIVE users, with the fastest growing demographic in the over 35s (almost literally everyone and their mother is now on Facebook).

The average user has 120 friends (helpful for those of us calculating the eyeball-focused numbers required of 'reach' in social media.

Half (100M) log in every day and one in ten update their status every day.
Which, I guess means on average 60 of your friends log in each day to see up to 12 status updates from the rest of your friends each day.

And that leaves 90M social netlurkers (as Iain Harrison neatly put it) popping in for a lurk at what their friends are up to each day. If they contributed we'd have a little more for everyone.

All of these big numbers mean its increasingly important to brands and organisations to understand what people are saying about them in this big old bruiser of a social network - which is of course pretty much hidden away in Facebook's password protected vaults (which won't help the user if their preference is to publish in a brand's face).

Even tracking the relatively public formation of groups and pages is a challenge. It requires a human to log in, conduct a search, note and sift the old and the new etc.

For my part, right now, I'd find it really useful if there was at least an automated way in which I could get alerts when a new group or fan page is created relating to my choice of keywords.

If anyone has put together a way of delivering that, please let me know. If not, watch this space.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Top Reasons for Using Twitter | Online Social Networking (jonggunlee.tistory.com)
• The Growing Complexity Of Facebook Is Confusing Your Mom (techcrunch.com)
• Facebook Rising - Comscore's Top Social Networking Sites for 2008 (webmetricsguru.com)
• Facebook Week: Facebook Resources, Analysis and Insights (mashable.com)
• Who Has The Most Photos Of Them All? Hint: It Is Not Facebook (tsurch.com)
• Facebook Grays: Over-35 Users Double in 60 Days (marketingpilgrim.com)
• Social Media Makes Real-Time Important (kennykellogg.com)
• Social Media Marketing and women of a certain age (clearcastdigitalmedia.com)

Who follows me makes me who I am

I am made greater by my connections, so are my connections. A Stowe Boyd line I enjoy and share a lot.

So it's nice to be able to see my connections described.

TwitterSheep looks through the profile descriptions of your twitter followers and creates a tag cloud.

I guess who follows you is a pretty good description of who you are.

Who follows me makes me who I am - or as I've put if before, I am part of a community, therefore I am.

Seems to work for me...

Defining social media

I often get asked for a definition of what social media is.

There are those who see the phrase as standing in the way of the true significance of the adhoc group forming nature of the internet (communities of purpose, as I so often refer to them).

Alan Moore asked recently via twitter for a definition those outside the echo chamber might more easily 'get'.

It's a tough call. Many people start off refering to social media as a channel or tool which can be used to target audiences. Avoid.

I usually answer the 'what is social media' question with:

"Any form of peer-to-peer communications which are digitally enabled."

It's my catch-all to cover everything from sms texting, through email, through digg, facebook, twitter, et al.

But what if peer-to-peer isn't a shared term of reference between you and those you are joining in conversation?

Well, rather than the broadcast media's concept of one to many, social media is, as the name implies, more pluralist.

It's many media. (image courtesy)

Many to many.

Many publishers, many advertisers, many marketers, many distributors, many organisers, many producers, serving many, many, many adhoc self-forming niches of relevance (which is why it's a network, a supply web - not a channel or supply chain).

No longer does a small handful control who publishes, who advertises, who markets, who distributes, who organises, who produces. No longer does a handful choose what the many have to accept as relevant (eg the lowest common denominator of mass media and mass production).

Social media is about, for and by all of us. All of the many potential groups of us. And we (and therefore the number of our groups) are many.

At its simplest, social media is where humans talk to each other about any and everything, as humans.

And as we do that, we share information about ourselves. Thanks to the real-time global Power of the Network, we are now better able than ever to find others like us, who care about the same problems we want to solve (right now).

Through our global real-time conversations we find solutions we are prepared to act on to make happen.

Right there is where the value emerges.

BTW: Here's the latest from the #socialmediais tag in twitter.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Trust can't be broadcast (sociallyminded.co.uk)
• Social Media Storm Erupts as Motrin Brand Campaign implodes, needs to be run by someone who knows the Brand well and Social Media, well (webmetricsguru.com)
• Twitter's missing millions: How social media will make money (fasterfuture.blogspot.com)
• What My Kids Taught Me About Social Media (searchengineguide.com)
• Review of must read new social media marketing book (andrewgrill.com)
• 15 reasons why companies may fear social media (socialmediatoday.com)

How influence really works

Cover via Amazon

Mark Earls is heading up a cracking free session at NESTA on Feb 9 in London.

If you want a clue about how this influence stuff really works, I'd rate this one as unmissable.
All the details.

Book your place.

Mark is The Man when it comes to communicating Herd behaviour (hence his book Herd, right, and twitter moniker @herdmeister).

You'll also find him among the consulting network at BrandoSocial, I've been building :-)

Related articles by Zemanta

• Good Ideas In 2009 (paulisakson.typepad.com)
• Listening to Tribes: The need to lead (fasterfuture.blogspot.com)
• Trust (conversationagent.com)
• Traditional Advertising is The Art of Reduction (socialhallucinations.com)

The Map of Online Communities

As found on XKCD.com
It's a map of online communities.
See it larger here
Amused me!