Light, Motion and Magic

One of the things I like best about being connected on the internet is following links to all sorts of interesting things. Sometimes I discover blog articles, YouTube clips, art or music sites, political media, food articles…It’s an interesting world out there, and I know I’m only exploring a tiny fraction of it.

Here are some of the recent interesting things I’ve found:

From @FranchiseKing: “Here’s what a TRILLION dollars looks like” at PageTutor.com. WOW!

From Gary Price’s Resource Shelf Newsletter: This week’s issue was all about statistics, and I found A Collection of Social Network Stats for 2009 especially interesting from the blog Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang. Here’s some highlights:

• Nielsen Online shows that Social networks and blogs are now the 4th most popular online activity ahead of personal email, Member communities are visited by 67% of the global online population, time spent is growing at 3 times the overall internet rate, accounting for almost 10% of all internet time, PDF, Nielsen Online, March

• 150 million people around the world are now actively using Facebook and almost half of them are using Facebook every day. This includes people in every continent—even Antarctica. If Facebook were a country, it would be the eighth most populated in the world, just ahead of Japan, Russia and Nigeria. Facebook is used in more than 35 different languages and 170 countries and territories. Source: Mark Zuckerberg, Jan 7, 2009

• 175mm users, with 600k daily growth of users, with the fastest growing segment “45% of Facebook’s US audience is now 26 years old or older.” Inside Facebook, Feb 15th, 2009.

• On LinkedIn: “The site’s traffic is up in the recession. It hit 36 million members last Monday and is adding them at a rate of about one member per second. According to ComScore, it’s gone from about 3.6 million unique monthly visitors a year ago to 7.7 million today, Adage, March 2

• According to Compete, the growth rate for Twitter was 752%, for a total of 4.43 million unique visitors in December 2008, in the start of 2008, Twitter had only around 500,000 unique monthly visitors. Source: Mashable/Compete, Jan 9, 2009

• Demographics of Twitter: Lots of stats here: 11% of online adults use Twitter or update their status online

• Comscore data shows that “In February, 4 million people in the U.S. visited the site, up from 2.6 million the month before, according to the latest data from comScore. That represents a 55 percent month-over-month growth rate, compared to 33 percent growth in each of the two months prior.” Comscore, March

And this last item is just too cute! From @Amy2boys on Twitter “This is not my kid or my dog, but I had to pass it along!” Check it out.

Tags:@Amy2boys, @FranchiseKing, A Collection of Social Network Stats for 2009, Facebook, Gary Price, Internet, Jeremiah Owyang, LinkedIn, links, PageTutor.com, Resource Shelf Newsletter, Trillion dollars, Twitter, Web Strategy

Part of the long-term process of starting my company is starting this blog. To participate in the online network of connections and community is an indispensable part of doing business these days. And besides that - I enjoy it!

I’ve been spending a lot of time on the social and blogging networks Facebook, Entrecard and Work It! Mom over the last week. Learning the ropes, making connections and visiting other sites is very time-consuming but well worth the effort. I wanted to write about it today when I ran across this post from Dazzlin Donna called Friendship Pockets Form Via Social Networks.

“Facebook, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, Mixx…need I go on?
There are too many social networks to even begin to list them all these
days, and keeping up with them can be a chore. But the advantages of
networking and connecting with others via these sites far outweighs the
hassles. You just have to find the few that you like best and
concentrate on spending time there, rather than dividing your time up
between too many places.”

Considering the time it takes to participate, she’s absolutely right about having to pick judiciously. Donna goes on to talk about the familiar names that one begins to run across - those that participate in several of the same circles. They begin to form what she calls “Friendship Pockets”.

“So who cares about these friendship pockets anyway? Well, I
think they do matter, because the pockets represent your strongest
networks. Those people who befriend you in several overlapping
networks are generally the ones who you can depend upon the most. These
are the ones you can rely on to help you share your sites with others,
the ones who will come to your aid when needed, and the ones who will
reciprocate when you help them out.

If you don’t already know these friends well, make an effort to get
to know them better. You obviously all share some common traits, and
together you can grow each others’ businesses faster than you can
alone. The tighter your friendship pockets become, the more strength they collectively have. Take a little time to develop these pockets further and your site will only benefit.“

You took the words right out of my mouth, Donna. Thanks for the great post!

Tags:Blogging, blogging communicty, business, Dazzlin Donna, Entrecard, Facebook, Friendship Pockets Form Via Social Networks, social networks, Work it! Mom