Stephen O'Hear reports that according to Hitwise, the US market share of the top 20 social networking sites grew by 11.5 percent from January to February 2007.

Pretty impressive numbers over 2 months, and the list of the top 20 Social Networks was interesting. However after talking with Stephen, I discovered that the Hitwise definition of a social network is horribly flawed. Their definition limits the study to sites that are broad friend-based social networks. It omits sites like, Flickr, Last.fm, 2nd Life, or Project Opus which are deemed "social software".

This is absurd! Social networking is a feature of almost any media publishing service. A friend based social network like could easily be called a mailing list social network. is a roll-a-dex social network. Last.fm is a music recommendation social network. Flickr is a photography social network.

Other conversations on:
Social Networks, Hitwise

The default Movabletype theme (circa 2004) has run its course.

I am upgrading my look thanks to Donat Group designer Ross Howard-Jones, and I am switching to Drupal. The switch to Drupal is not a slag on Movabletype in anyway. We are just looking to standardize our company's internal and external blogs on one system, and considering our extensive experience and existing code base we went with Drupal.

The Drupal mod for converting from Movabletype to Drupal was antiquated, so James updated it and will be posting it back to the Drupal community shortly.

Update: Here's the link to the scripts we used to migrate from MT to Drupal.

So in the the next 24-48 hours you will see a "new me". You shouldn't need to re-subscribe to the RSS feed.

Many artists enable a number of their songs for free listening and download. They make it available on their site, but they also upload them to a number of services like:
Project Opus

Garage Band
The Internet Archive
plus dozens more...

Some forward thinking labels like Magnatune make their artists' music available through a CC License.

Although the music is freely available for download and listening, fans have to hunt around looking for the music on all of the thousands of individual sites hosting legitimate free-to-listen music. Project Opus has decided to use the music sharing features built into the Opus Player to make the discovery and sharing of "web music" easy.

Copy a URL, XSPF, M3U, or Podcast.
Paste it into the Import Tool.
Paste your Opus Player anywhere on the Web.

Check it out.

Donat Group just developed a public beta of a new Drupal site: Opportunity Alert.

Opportunity Alert is a partnership matching tool for New Media businesses. It provides a forum where companies can present their projects, search for the best business partners, and begin a discussion with companies from around the world. It's an interesting twist on Social Networks in that it is not intended as a place for hanging out; it is very task focused. Extended or detailed conversations are expected to be taken off-line once a connection has been made.

There are two modes of finding a potential partner:
Active - go search for what you need and introduce yourself.
Passive - submit your partnering needs and get notified when an appropriate partner becomes available.

What I like about this site is the focus. It's industry specific and it has one purpose: facilitate new media partnerships.

I was going through my CD collection. MC 900 Ft. Jesus! Three great albums. Each totally different. Influential. Ahead of their time.

I saw him live in Munich in 1995. Great concert. Jazz. Hip Hop. Spoken Word. Rap. Dance.

Then he was gone.

What happened?