Lorna Li | Green Marketing 2.0

At the urging of the nuclear power industry, a one-sentence provision buried deep in the Senate’s recently passed energy bill can essentially make builders of new nuclear plants eligible for tens of billions of dollars in government loan guarantees.

Under current law, the government is only allowed to guarantee a volume of loans authorized each year by Congress, which amounted to $4 billion in loan guarantees for clean energy projects in 2007. This new provision is a huge change that could significantly expand the nuclear industry (considered to be a clean energy industry), which already plans to build 28 new reactors at a cost of approximately $4-5 billion each.

Opponents of the provision say that the loan guarantees that could serve as a “virtual blank check from taxpayers” to help build more nuclear plants. A nuclear power provision of this magnitude mars an otherwise attractive bill that supports renewable energy and improved fuel efficiency. Should Congress even adopt the 35 mpg Corporate Average Fuel Economy standard and 15% Renewable Energy Standard, the nuclear provision would obliterate any environmental gains made by CAFE and RES.

Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne and Graham Nash have launched a nuke-free petition drive and YouTube music video urging Congress not to approve federal loan guarantees for new nuclear power plants. Nearly thirty years ago, these three musicians were prominent in the anti-nuke movement, helping organize the “No Nukes” concerts at Madison Square Garden that stirred public opposition to nuclear power.So far, numerous environmental groups and dozens of artists, such as R.E.M., Ben Harper, Maroon 5, Pearl Jam, Patti Smith and Wynton Marsalis, have rallied alongside the trio. The rockers say they have collected more than 120,000 signatures to present to Congress.

Nuclear Power is Not A Solution for Global Warming

After decades of opposition from environmental groups and other organizations, the nuclear industry is enjoying growing political support as society has grown increasingly concerned about global warming and foreign oil dependence. Nuclear power is being touted as a viable energy alternative to greenhouse gas emitting fossil fuels. Under legislation enacted in 2005, nuclear power qualifies as a “clean technology” because it does not emit carbon gases that contribute to global warming.However, nuclear power is far from clean.

According to Michele Boyd, legislative director of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen:

“None of these so-called ‘advanced’ nuclear reactors deal with the fundamental flaws of nuclear power, such as dangerous radioactive waste, vulnerabilities to air attack and excessive cost,” said Ms. Boyd, whose staff began investigating the provision shortly after the Senate passed the bill last month.

Support a Strong, Clean, Nuke-Free Energy Bill

Nuclear power generates a lot of bang for the buck now, but its byproduct, radioactive waste, creates huge environmental risks that future generations will be forced to face.

Here’s what you can do to let Congress know you favor an energy bill that truly supports environmental sustainability.

• Lobby Congress by signing the 2007 Energy Bill Petition for Strong Fuel Efficiency and Renewable Energy
• Sign the Nuke Free Energy Bill Petition

Technorati Tags: new energy bill, 2007 energy bill, nuclear provision, nuclear subsidy, nuclear loan gaurantee, CAFE, corporate average fuel economy, renewable electricity standard, renewable energy, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, YouTube

Currently, Congress is debating, behind closed doors, the adoption of 2 provisions to the 2007 Energy Bill that can greatly impact our ability to make America more energy independent, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reduce pollution, save consumers money, create jobs and spark economic growth.

The first is the Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency (CAFE) Standard of 35 mpg for cars and trucks by 2020. The second is the Renewable Electricity Standard (RES), which calls for 15% of the nation’s electricity to be generated by renewable resources by 2020.

Why support the Renewable Electricity Standard?According to a study by the Union of Concerned Scientists, renewable energy solutions are both sustainable environmentally and economically. The RES provision has the potential to jump-start new clean energy economy and create tens of thousands of new, good-paying jobs in things like wind and solar manufacturing and installation. For this reason, it has the strong support of the United Steelworkers.

RES will create thousands of megawatts of new clean renewable electricity generation, decreasing the amount of natural gas we use—lowering prices for consumers on their home heating bills and also benefiting industrial users.

Furthermore, RES is doable - two dozen states that have already put their own Renewable Electricity Standard into place. In fact, many states have moved to establish standards of 30 percent or more—demonstrating that the 15 percent plan proposed in this bill is an achievable compromise that all states can meet.

Why is supporting the 35 mpg CAFE standard important?

Supporting the 35 mpg CAFE standard will help us curb our addition to a fossil-fuel based source that is increasingly expensive, causes pollution, and is also from highly volatile areas such as the Persian Gulf. This dependence is both unstable and unsustainable.

Furthermore, improving CAFE standards to 35 mpg by 2020 - 13 years from now - will give us better gas mileage, thus, more bang for the buck. This way we can keep more money in our wallets, drive cleaner cars, and thus become less dependent on war and pollution causing oil.

According to the UCS study on Clean Vehicles and Fuel Economy, far from destroying auto jobs, CAFE would create 22,300 jobs in the auto industry alone by 2020—and a total of 170,800 jobs by 2020. The CAFE provision would also save consumers nearly $25 billion at the pump in 2020, according to UCS.

Auto-Industry Lies - Et Tu Toyota?

The Big Three automakers and Toyota are lobbying to kill the Senate version and replace it with a loophole-laden compromise called the Hill-Terry bill that calls for 32 to 35 m.p.g. by 2022. Rather than innovate their fleets to become more fuel efficient, they would rather spend $ millions in advertising to convince the public that attaining the 35 mpg standard is bad for consumers and the environment, and that CAFE kills.

While the auto industry has argued for years that fuel-efficiency would compromise public safety due to the need to build smaller, lighter vehicles, according to an October 2007 article in Scientific American, new engine and transmission technologies could enable manufacturers to improve fuel efficiency without significantly cutting vehicle weights.

In spite of the fact that Toyota currently has the technology to make cars that achieve 55 mpg, Toyota’s refusal to step up to the plate and support the 35 mpg CAFE standard has evoked the wrath of environmentalist groups like the NRDC who now question “How Green is Toyota?” That the maker of the Prius could support the Hill-Terry compromise, which according to UCS, would actually cause us to use 700,000 more barrels each day, feels like sheer betrayal.

Is the auto industry genuinely concerned about the economic well-being of American consumers and our ability to get around as cheaply as possible? Hmmm.

In 1922, General Motors dismantled mass transit across the U.S., bought up trolley systems through its subsidiary National City lines, gutted them and tore up all the tracks. GM joined tire manufacturers, construction companies, and oil companies to lobby for Congress for development of a national highway system, which has defined urban development over the last 90 years. It helped that GM’s president Charles Wilson became secretary of defense and Frances DuPont became the federal highway administrator. Thus America became a oil-addicted, nation of drivers.

With Bush and his Big Oil cohorts in power threatening veto, ordinary Americans may be up for another round of seriously getting screwed. Therefore, it’s up to us to take action and DEMAND a clean, energy future NOW.

Take Action and Support a Strong, Clean Energy Bill for 2007

Instead of making the richest companies in the world richer, this energy bill will benefit consumers and working Americans, make us less dependent on foreign oil and better global citizens. Here are simple actions you can take to lobby Congress for a cleaner, greener future:

1. THIS IS IMPORTANT! Sign this petition and pass it on: Energy Bill 2007
2. Meet other clean energy activists online: Energy Bill 2007 Group on Facebook
3. Tell Toyota, “Shame On You” and get your friends to tell Toyota to support 35 mpg now.

By lobbying Congress to adopt strong energy efficiency measures in the 2007 Energy Bill, we can lower emissions and use less energy in the years to come —saving governments, businesses, schools, and consumers money. Energy efficiency is an energy resource just like anything else and is much cheaper than even coal-fired power generation. We must look to energy efficiency as another solution for our energy needs, while at the same time ramping up the amount of electricity we get from renewables. This is our only way we can guarantee a clean, green future for ourselves and future generations.

Technorati Tags: new energy bill, energy bill 2007, cafe, cafe standard, corporate average fuel economy, renewable electricity standard, res, hill-terry, clean tech, fuel efficiency, fuel economy, global warming

“Buzz marketing” is a hot buzzword I hear a lot of these days. Being an analytical type, I want to really understand what it means, before I sling it around like corned beef hash.

Buzz marketing, word of mouth marketing (WOMM), guerrilla marketing and viral marketing are often used interchangeably to describe marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness through self-replicating viral processes.

While Seth Godin, author of Unleashing the IdeaVirus, states that viral marketing is, technically, not the same as word of mouth:
From sethgodin.typepad.com:

Word of mouth is a decaying function. A marketer does something and a consumer tells five or ten friends. And that’s it. It amplifies the marketing action and then fades, usually quickly. A lousy flight on United Airlines is word of mouth. A great meal at Momofuku is word of mouth.

Viral marketing is a compounding function. A marketer does something and then a consumer tells five or ten people. Then then they tell five or ten people. And it repeats. And grows and grows. Like a virus spreading through a population. The marketer doesn’t have to actually do anything else. (They can help by making it easier for the word to spread, but in the classic examples, the marketer is out of the loop.) The Mona Lisa is an ideavirus.

most marketers will not debate the difference.

Buzz marketing can be word-of-mouth delivered or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet. In this series of posts, we are going to focus on the viral effects of a buzz marketing campaign that leverages social media networks, as opposed to viral advertising strategies and tactics.

What is Social Media Marketing?

Buzz marketing that leverages the network and conversation effects of the social web is often referred to as social media marketing.

According to a great series of posts on Do It Yourself Social Media Marketing by Stepforth Web Marketing:
From www.stepforth.com:

Social media marketing (SMM) or social media optimization (SMO) is a method of promoting your brand (be it yourself, a product, a service, or a company) by strategically making your presence known across various social media networks (such as Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, MySpace)

Do not expect your social media marketing campaign to immediately drive business – it’s best used for branding or online reputation management, that will indirectly convert your target audience into fans, and your fans into customers.

Why do Social Media Marketing?

Every day, someone out there, somewhere is discussing something important to your business. They could be discussing your brand, your company executives, your competitors, or your industry.

Either they are hyping up your company and generating positive buzz about your products, or they are criticizing your service and sowing the dissention over the value you bring to your industry, and humanity in general.

According to internet marketing expert Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim:
From www.marketingpilgrim.com:

A great brand can take months, if not years, and millions of dollars to build. It should be the thing you hold most precious.

It can be destroyed in hours by a blogger upset with your company.

A new product launch could take hundreds of TV commercials, dozens of newspaper ads, and an expensive ad agency.

It can also spread like a virus with the praise of just one customer, at one message board.

A company can dominate market share, throttle competition and hold the #1 brand in the world.

It can also crash in months if it fails to listen to what its customers want.

This is happening whether you like it or not, so why not join in on the discussion? By participating in online conversations you can contribute your valuable expertise, quell misconceptions and doubts about your company, product, or industry and grab some more valuable web real estate in the process.

What are the SEO Benefits of Buzz Marketing through Social Networks?

When users search on your company name or targeted keyword phrases, search engine results pages (SERPs) will frequently display threaded discussions on social networking sites like Ning, forums like Webmaster World, and user review sites like Yelp. If there’s a lot of activity on these threads and, thus, continuous, freshly updated user-generated content, these threads will often rise to the top of SERPs.

These discussions can often include positive as well as negative opinions about your company or organization. Therefore, defensively, you want to be sure that you are doing your best to manage your online reputation, and diffuse or bury any negative publicity that could appear on this valuable SERP real estate.

Pro-actively, you should absolutely capitalize on the positive buzz, establish yourself as a thought leader or industry expert and generate as much brand awareness as possible. All the while, you can scatter valuable target keyword phrases and links to important web resources, especially your own, all over the social web and blogosphere. This can drive a great deal of traffic back to your website or other online locations where your product is sold.

If you have not included buzz marketing into your online marketing strategy, then you should. Otherwise, you are missing out on a great opportunity to generate a brand awareness and search engine optimization benefits for a fraction of the cost that online and traditional advertising requires.

Technorati Tags: social media marketing, SMM, social media optimization, SMO, buzz marketing, word of mouth marketing, WOMM, viral marketing, search engine marketing, SEM, search engine optimization, SEO, search engine results pages, SERP, seth godin, andy beal, lorna li, lornali

A/B tests for landing pages allow you to compare the performance of 2 entirely different pages, so you can try out different layouts, move around different sections of the page and change the overall look and feel of the page.

Google’s Website Optimizer makes A/B split testing for landing pages extremely simple.  All you need to do is identify 3 pages:

1. Your control page
2. Your test page
3. Your conversion page

If you have a desired action, such as membership registration, mailing list sign-up, or a sale, indicate the confirmation or thank you page of that transaction as your conversion page.

1.  In the Campaign Management tab, click on the Website Optimizer link.

2. Click on “Get Started

3.  Agree to the User Agreement

4.  Create a new experiment

5.  Enter the page names and urls for each page.Google will automatically verify the urls for those pages.

6.  Click continue and the website optimizer will ask whether you or your webmaster will install the javascript tags onto your experiment pages.

If your web team will install the tags, Website Optimizer then generates a link to the page whereyour webmaster can access the necessary javascript.

If you will install the tags, then you will be taken directly to the page.

7.  Copy the control and tracking scripts and follow the instructions on the page as to where to paste the code in your experiment pages.

8.  When complete, click the Validate pages button, and Google will verify whether the script is correctly installed.

If validation is successful, all you need to do is let the experiment run for 1-2 weeks.  Google will automatically alternate the different landing pages and track their conversion performance. To see how they are doing, go back to the Website Optimizer experiment list by clicking on the Website Optimizer link, and view your report.

Technorati Tags: google website optimizer, landing page optimization, testing landing page, ppc, pay-per-click, a/b test, a/b split test, lorna li, lornali

On October 9th, Steve Miller, Product Manager Google Earth, gave a presentation for Net Tuesday on Google Earth Outreach - a program that enables nonprofits and NGOs to use Google Earth and other geo-spatial applications to tell their stories.

Steve highlighted a number of organizations that leveraged Google Earth to tell their stories in effective, compelling ways, starting with the organization that inspired the creation of the Google Earth Outreach program.

Google Earth Outreach got started because Steve’s friend Rebecca Moore, a passionate environmentalist, was involved with Neighbors Against Irresponsible Logging, a community group that was fighting to protect the from the San Jose Water Company’s proposed logging operations with Big Creek Lumber.

Residents were mailed a legal notice and vague black and white map of the area affected by the “proposed timber harvest.” Rebecca decided to create an alternative map on Google Earth to outline areas that the logging concession would affect and school districts that would be impacted by logging.

Google Earth Outreach is particular useful to NGOs and nonprofits that have multiple program locations as it enables them to organize information about each program and keep track of them geographically.

For example, the U.S. Memorial Holocaust Museum created Crisis in Darfur an interactive map of the genocide conflict in Western Sudan.

Damaged and destroyed villages are indicated with clickable orange and red flame icons that pop up a description of the village, and additional information like photos and testimonials. Top-line presentation is simple, but additional resources are available for those who want to learn more. Each window links back to the US Holocaust Memorial Museaum website.

Appalachian Voices, partnered with Google Earth to raise awareness about about mountaintop removal coal mining in the Appalachian mountains. By creating compelling presence and providing valuable information, Appalachian Voices succeeded in driving a large volume of traffic to their site and generating public awareness about their projects.

Some Google Earth best practices they employed included:

• A User’s Guide, which they placed front and center, which gives a site content overview and explains the meaning of different colors and icons

• Historical overlays of the region, combined with imagery - which presents a very compelling picture of the environmental damage caused by mountaintop removal coal mining

• Consistently placed icons to show where you can download additional data

• A Call to Action - which was to sign a petition

The results?

Within the first 10 days Appalachian voices received 10,000 signatures from all 50 states

Other product features that Steve highlighted were:

• Customization of placemark descriptions

• Photo uploads and video embedding

• Time span documentation, such as this graphical representation of world population growth.

Google provides extensive tutorials on how to use Google Earth’s powerful features. In addition, they offer a grant program which provides qualifying organization access to use Google Earth Pro, valued at $400 a license, which includes:

• Higher resolution printing

• Video-making capability - record videos

• The ability to import more data

For more information about Google Earth, visit, the Google Earth Blog. For more information about Net2 and Web 2.0 technologies that empower social change, visit the Net2 blog.

[google, google earth, google earth outreach, u.s. memorial holocaust museum, crisis in darfur, nail, Neighbors Against Irresponsible Logging, Appalachian Voices environmental activism, social activism, Rebecca Moore, Steve Miller, net tuesday, netsquared, net2, lorna li[/tags]

I’ve been thinking a lot about friendship lately.

My tech event buddy and bub.blicio.us photographer Brian Caldwell recently posted a question on LinkedIn Answers “How do you define “friend” these days?”

Now Brian is a highly intelligent uber-geek, LinkedIn 500+ power user and tech event social butterfly. His blog sports an entire community of users and his posts get more comments that his total number of published articles. So I was surprised to find that he felt a twinge of loneliness in his socially networked hi-tech world.

Me: “Dude, you know so many people.”

Him: “They’re all mostly acquaintances. I have no friends!”

Me: “What are you talking about? I’ll be your friend. Turn off your computer, get out of your house, and no, don’t buy Halo 3.”

As we mused about the concept of friendship in a Web 2.0 world, it became clear to us that it all boils down to time. Authentic, real-life relationships take time and effort, and when you’re spread too thin in a hectic, modern world, it’s hard to cultivate meaningful friendships.

True friendship requires real-time time shared experiences

Yet it’s all very weird, because, online, my number of friends seems to be exponentially growing, with little to no effort on my part. Thanks to the social media revolution, all of sudden, people I’ve never met are connecting to me as friends, through shared interests and online community participation, in addition to the spam factor. Friends that have fallen out of touch for years, are finding me on Facebook in droves. In fact, my Facebook profile has a more active social life than I do.

My infrequent Twitters have gathered a following. The growth of my LinkedIn Network has been on autopilot, increasing at a steady 10 connections a week, allowing me access to a whopping 1.7m people.

Web 2.0 has Redefined Friendship

Social networks have redefined friendship and the way we connect to each other, allowing us to maintain more relationships over time with a lot less effort than before.

According to Stowe Boyd:
From www.stoweboyd.com:

[T]he new nature of connected friendship is taking on the shape of the Web itself:

1. it is increasingly open (much of our fraternizing is in public),
2. tolerant of diversity (I disagree publicly with my friends, but I accept this as part of friendship, not a blind gang-like sharing of narrow perspectives; and they are from all over, all colors, all shapes and sizes)
3. bottom-up (its not because we work together, or because we are members of some organized group)
4. personal (I don’t belong to cliques, but am connected to individuals)
5. flowing (people’s relationships are constantly changing, and shifting in complexity).

Many would look at the new state of friendship and suggest that something has been lost when you don’t have a small group of friends that all know each other, that invite each other over to bbqs every weekend, and who all attended the same schools, workplaces, and places of worship. But I believe that we are moving away from a narrow, parochial, and inbred sort of friendship.

We look to ourselves — and our networks of contacts — to make sense of the world that confronts us, and we define right and wrong based on the meaning we find through personal affiliation, connection, and commitment.

Indeed, the enhanced connectivity that social networks afford, breaks down traditional models of friendship that are based on physical proximity, allowing individuals to connect more so than ever on shared interests, globally. Geographic boundaries to friendship have been completely broken down.

Online friends from Tribe.net, enjoy beers in Iquitos, Peru, where we are attending a conference on Amazonian shamanism.

Have Social Networks Improved the Quality of Friendships?

Anne Truitt Zelenka, editor of Web Worker Daily, believes that friendships in the connected age are both higher in quantity and in quality.
From www.annezelenka.com:

More connectedness suddenly jumps us to a totally different curve of friendship quality vs. friendship quantity. You can stay in touch with many more people. You can give specially targeted support because you understand much better the contours and context of each friend’s life. You can connect and communicate with much less trouble than before, because you know when your friends are available and how best to reach them.

To a certain agree, I would agree with Anne. I look at my own life, I would describe friendship as a moving train. People get on, people get off. Except now, rather than disappearing from my life, they linger on the periphery, like a constellation of stars that I can, thanks to the social web, reach out and touch if the need or desire arises.

My web-unsavvy friends however, run the real risk of dropping out of my life - as people move, phone numbers and emails change. But these people are a minority these days. Overall, my net of friendship is cast wider, further, and stays intact much longer, and all of the sudden, I have friends, lots of friends who I’ve known for years. I derive a sense of comfort to know that all these people, with whom I’ve shared experiences and a connection, albeit for a moment in time, are still, somehow, in my life, although on the far, outer periphery of it.

Which would you prefer? Meeting up with virtual friends in a digital world, or enjoying fine tea and fine company in nature?

Have Social Networks Contributed to the Declining Quality of Friendship?

In his article “The Web Changes How We Define Friendship“, Steve Rubel ponders how friendship will look like in 10 years. While he recognizes that current Web technologies help scale friendship it in quantity and allows us to spread our networks spread far and wide, he juxtaposes this development with the observation that friendship is declining in quality.

Steve refers to a Wikipedia article on the Decline of Friendship, which states that, according to a 2006 study, “the number and quality of friendships for the average American has been declining since at least 1985. According to the study, “25% of Americans have no close confidants, and that the average total number of confidants per person has dropped to 2.” Steve, however, does not do much more than ponder whether the social web might have contributed to this trend.

Whether or not increasing connectivity is responsible for the declining quality of friendship, a recent study shows that heavy online users still possess the same number of close friends as the average person.

According to the ScienceDaily article Is Social Networking Changing The Face Of Friendship? the average person has a social network of around 150 friends, ranging from very close friends to casual acquaintances. However according to research by Dr Will Reader and colleagues of Sheffield Hallam University, online users say they have about the same number of close friends as the real-life average person. Furthermore, face-to-face encounters are still the most important factor in close friendships.

Why is this?
From www.sciencedaily.com:

Making friends can be costly, according to behavioural ecologists. While it might not be a very romantic view of friendship, making new friends involves an investment by committing time and energy to another person in the hope that they will provide reciprocal benefits in the future.

According to Dr Reader, face-to-face encounters are necessary in order to gather honest information about the individual. This honest information helps us decide whether that person merits the risk of our investment of time, energy, and trust into that friendship.
From www.sciencedaily.com:

The importance of honest signals is a fundamental concept in behavioural ecology. For example, a female song bird invests in a mate based on the quality of his voice, as this is an honest signal indicating the fitness of the bird. In the same way, people choose friends based on their “quality”, and this can only be assessed when there are honest signals being given.

“It’s easier to spot honest signals when meeting someone face-to-face using facial and bodily cues,” explained Dr Reader, “whereas it’s harder to spot dishonest signals online.”

The truth is, people present themselves very differently online than in real life. It’s hard to know if your cyber-friend is indeed who he or she claims to be. The Web allows you recreate yourself in whatever fashion you choose, so many people adopt multiple personalities and create a multitude of avatars. Companies routinely create profiles and join networks in order to seed forum discussions with buzz about their products. Six of your virtual friends may, in fact, really be one person.

In a Web 2.0 world, friendship abounds. The social web has lowered the bar to friendship, allowing anyone to add anybody for any reason as a “friend”. However the more time we spend online in a race to acquire the most amount of friends (whoever dies with the most friends wins), the less time we spend cultivating authentic, real-life relationships. I believe that this can ultimately hurt us as individuals, and a society as a whole.

Why?

Friendship is a Component of Human Happiness

During my lunch break, I recently asked a co-worker Kay, who happens to be 90 years old, what she found to be the key to happiness in life. She immediately said, “Friends and family.” Then she went on to grumble on for the next hour how her friends have let her down.

People matter in life. Human beings are social animals, and thus the presence of rewarding friendships and family relationships bring a real quality of happiness, love, connectedness, joy, gratitude, fulfillment, etc, into our lives. These experiential qualities fail to traverse the vast barrier of cyberspace that separate us from our online connections, since, we, in truth, are relating more to our computer screens than the actual person beyond it.

Social networking sites don’t allow us to engage in acts of generosity, indulge in shared laughter, experience tenderness or love. Online communities and virtual friendships will never substitute real-life communities and face-to-face relationships.

Even social networking sites like Dogster, Catster, and Hamsterster - which enable your pet to make online friends - will never truly replicate the beauty of inter-species friendships.

Effective Social Design Can Strengthen Real-Life Communities

We run the risk of spending far too much time online indulging in virtual interactions with fake people. Because our legion of online friends require so little maintenance, we run the risk of reducing the amount of effort we spend cultivating lasting, authentic relationships with real people. For this reason, social networking sites can serve to emphasize the social problems we are facing, such as loneliness, isolation, and lack of trust.

However, social networks can enhance our lives and happiness if used skillfully or designed skillfully. By bringing people together in real-time, based on shared interests, social networks that have been designed to include an offline component, like Upcoming.org or Meetup.com have a real ability to strengthen local communities and create new, real-life friendships.

Facebook and LinkedIn communities are made up of profiles that overwhelmingly represent real people. Their user agreements mandate that in order to participate, your profile must be you. Both Facebook and LinkedIn ask friends and connections to validate each other which makes it hard to maintain a fake persona for long. For this reason, these social networks have attained a high degree of trust, which in turn, enhances the sites’ stickiness and growth.

What is “True Friendship” in a Web 2.0 World?

Thanks, to the social media revolution, never before have I had so many friends, indeed, friends who’ve I’ve never even met, friends I don’t need to meet, call, or email. Yet, amidst the abundance of friends, the question arises - who are my true friends?

In order to answer this question, I needed to come up with a definition of true friend. For this I turned to my friend and close confident Vanessa Silva, whose relationship skills, generous nature, and warm, welcoming presence tend to make her central hub for a wide community of diverse individuals.

She said, “True friends show up when you need them.”

I think a really good litmus test for true friendship would be the drop-dead factor.

I wonder, if I were to suddenly drop dead, who would know? Would my online friends even notice? My Facebook profile certainly would carry on by itself as if nothing happened.

Who is engaged enough in my life who would wonder why I have suddenly disappeared from the scene and moreover, care enough shift their routine to check up on me? The only people who would know would still be my family and close confidants - relationships that thrive entirely offline.

Now in answer to your question, Brian:

A true friend will take you in at 11pm when you’re having a day from hell and let you smoke his last cigarette.

Technorati Tags: friendship, web 2.0, social networking sites, social networks, social web, social networks redefine friendship, stowe boyd, anne truitt zelenka, steve rubel, lorna li, lornali

Claiming your blog on Technorati establishes that you are the author or co-author of the blog, which allows you to use other Technorati services that can help increase its visibility. Claiming your blog is fast, easy, and can send more traffic to your site.

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If not, click on the “Claim your blog now link.”
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The Third Annual Symbiosis Gathering, an arts, music, and conscious lifestyle event much like a mini Burning Man in the mountains, took place approximately 15 miles up a one-lane dirt road from the town of Angels Camp, California, from 20-24 September 2007. Getting there was a journey. The scenery was spectacular. And I had no idea what I was in for.

It did not really sink in until 4am Saturday morning as I was lying in our tent feeling the bass reverberate from the ground, that I had, in effect, signed up for 4 continuous days of deadly good music. From Thursday until Monday noon, outdoor live and electronic world grooves, downtempo, hip hop, breaks, psy and psybient trance took place on three stages nestled amidst foothill pines, manzanitas, and blue oak trees. In between, you could peruse full-scale art installations, listen to guest speakers, attend workshops, learn about comprehensive greening initiatives or relax in healing spaces.

Efforts to make Symbiosis a zero-waste, green event were commendable - given the festival’s distance from civilization.

Programs were printed on 100% post-consumer recycled paper, using a wind-powered printer and non-toxic inks.

Vendors provided 100% organic food using re-usable dishes that were washed onsite, for a $1 refundable deposit. In addition, Symbiosis provided basic recycling and composting services, as well as biodiesel generators and fuel. Environmental education was made available through the Renewable Energy Showcase presented by the Sustainable Living Roadshow, and other performances.

My favorite eco-experience was taking a much enjoyed, $5 steaming hot low-impact shower courtesy of the creators of the “Purification Portal - an Integrated Water Experience.”

The lineup was stellar: Hallucinogen in Dub, Shpongle, Eat Static, Symbiotic Orchestra (feat. Steve Kimock, members of SCI, Zilla, the Glitch Mob, & Special Guests), Bassnectar, Bluetech, Chris de Luca vs. Phon.o, D-Nox & Beckers, Entheogenic, Flying Lotus, Kelpe, Lotus, Mala, Ott, Pnuma (live PA) , Rinkadink, PatchBay, Pedro, Solead, SOTEG, Spoonbill, Telefon Tel Aviv, Ticon, TranceZenDance, Triptych, Zilla, and more.

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