There are strong indicators that the initial blogging rush has slowed considerably. In July 2006, there were 175,000 new blogs posted per day compared to 120,000 as of March 2007 according to Technorati and according to Gartner, there are already over 200 million ‘ex-bloggers’ accounted for.
In the midst of the blogging craze, a small percentage [...]

Over a decade ago when I was a senior at Hawken School I can remember listening to a conversation between Dr. Carr, our headmaster at the time, and our IT manager (whose name I can’t remember). The year was 1996 and Google had yet to reach omnipotence. As a matter of fact, Netscape [...]

Adweek recently published a good recap. of the social marketing landscape that lays out the current brands active in the space, and several of the companies that are attempting to bring services to market that somehow leverage word-of-mouth.
The article does a good job representing the spectrum of approaches that social marketing agencies are taking to [...]

A study was recently conducted by TWI Surveys, Inc. on behalf of the Society for New Communications Research that explored current awareness and knowledge of social media, as well as prioritization of social media. The study used a survey method amongst a sample of 260 senior PR and marcomm professionals.
According to SNCR:

70% are currently [...]

I somehow missed this when it first came out, but was recently directed to a fantastic Wall Street Journal article on a new wave of influencers and figured it was worth a blog posting.
I suppose it is simply a natural law that power-law distributions will gradually emerge in any controlled system - even those that [...]

TechCrunch covered start-up Strayform recently and their business model sort of piqued my curiosity a bit. The basic gist of it is that music producers and consumers sign-up for a community where the consumers can basically sponsor the producers.
I don’t know how successful the site is, especially because their branding and general design strike [...]

The Council of Public Relations Firms has recently sponsored a white paper examining how social media is influencing the PR industry (PDF). The paper is authored by Paul Rand from Zocalo Group and Giovanni Rodriguez from Hubbub who use a combination of primary research (elite interviews with several media execs.) and secondary research (analysis of opinion polls [...]

The New Communications Review just published a piece I authored a while back entitled, “The Articulation of Power in Social Media.”  The piece is actually an adaptation of my dissertation, which I hope has actually becoming readable thanks to the work of Nina Shariff from v-Fluence. 
I am happy with this version of it, which some [...]

I’ve been doing a bit of digging on the impact of the Internet with regard to politics. Here is some food for thought from the Pew Internet and American Life Project (2006) report on e-government and e-policy.

On a typical day in August 2006, 26 million Americans were using the Internet for new or information [...]

I got an e-mail from a friend this morning with the subject line ‘Digg - Revolt,’ and no words in the body of the text.  I immediately Googled the term and was inundated with a number of stories that described how a copyright encryption key for HD-DVD discs was posted to Digg and subsequently pushed to [...]