Note: We’re back from holiday, digging out of email and catching up with news. 
Really good data on growth in social network traffic in the first half of 2008.  Inside Facebook carries results of recent comscore rankings. In short, Facebook and Hi5 are the fastest growing networks, while MySpace is less hot in terms of growth, [...]

As a base to the acid of web 2.0 tools, their blogs, tweets (twits?), Duncan Work’s blog — 100 Trillion Connections — is an interesting balance.
Recently, Duncan posted some of his thoughts on the connection between the important work being done in mapping the human brain, and it’s implications for the social brain.
His conclusion?
… mapping [...]

It’s a never-ending sport.  With some drastic implications.
There’s ample evidence that the social networks are nothing more that the dot.com bubble revisited.  At the same time, big time players are putting heavy bets down that there’s a pot of gold out there somewhere.  So what are social networks really worth?
MIT’s Technology Review, in my opinion, [...]

I’ve been pounding on the difference between viral and organic this whole spring, both on this blog, and in pretty much every meeting that talks about web-based marketing.
Although I know it’s not particularly endearing, I love it when my predictions come true. Back in March, I wrote:
An organic campaign nourishes the hosts (or network [...]

Ning, the largest provider of customizable social network software, just raised $60 million, on a pre-money valuation of $500 million, so says Venture Beat. This on top of $44 million on a $170 million valuation back in July, 2007. In a generally depressed venture environment, according to the Industry Standard, this is [...]

Here are some interesting stories I saw this week, and why…

Industry Standard: 10 ‘Net Services that Will Succeed and 10 That Probably Won’t.  A new set of choices for the new new new new new thing, most of which I hadn’t heard about yet, and some harsh knocks on buzz darlings Second Life, Zillow, Twitter [...]

Good friend Rebecca Saltman turned me on to this piece in the Journal of Philanthropy (ironically, a paid subscription site). It looks at how Steve Case leveraged both Parade Magazine and Facebook to build a socially-focused initiative that funds smaller non-profits.
The competitions, financed by the foundation created by Steve Case, founder of AOL, and [...]

It has taken me the better part of a decade, but I finally think the Economist might understand a thing or two about the business of digital media. Throughout the 90’s and into this century, it seemed they were late to the table, with obvious observations that hit the newsstands six months after they [...]

Doesn’t matter if we’re talking about search, marketing, or web 2.0… organic is the new viral. A viral campaign uses its hosts to its own ends usually increasing attention to a particular web site.
An organic campaign nourishes the hosts (or network nodes), and gains the social ‘word-of-mouth’ hyper-growth as the result of its direct benefit [...]