When Shel Israel co-authored Naked Conversations with me we interviewed about 180 companies about how they were using blogs and how that usage was changing their business.

Today I’m watching companies and political candidates and seeing a new trend that I’ve written up as the “Social Media Starfish.” I just did two videos, one that defined the social media starfish and all of its “legs” and another that explains how Google is going to disrupt many pieces of that starfish tomorrow with its Open Social announcement tomorrow.

Some things in text. What are the legs of the social media starfish?

1. Blogs.
2. Photos. Flickr. Smugmug. Zooomr. Photobucket. Facebook. Et al.
3. Videos. YouTube. Kyte. Seesmic. Facebook. Blip. DivX. Etc.
4. Personal social networks. Facebook. BluePulse. MySpace. Hi5. Plaxo. LinkedIn. Bebo. Etc.
5. Events (face to face kind). Upcoming. Eventful. Zvents. Facebook. Meetup. Etc.
6. Email. Integration through Bacn.
7. White label social networks. Ning. Broadband Mechanics. Etc.
8. Wikis. Twiki. Wetpaint. PBWiki. Atlassian. SocialText. Etc.
9. Audio. Podcasting networks. BlogTalkRadio. Utterz. Twittergram. Etc.
10. Microblogs. Twitter. Pownce. Jaiku. Utterz. Tumblr. FriendFeed. Etc.
11. SMS. Services that let organizations build SMS into their social media starfishes. John Edwards is one example.
12. Collaborative tools. Zoho. Zimbra. Google’s docs and spreadsheets. Etc.

It’ll be interesting to see how deeply Google will disrupt the Social Media Starfish tomorrow.

What do you think?

Here’s the two videos:

Part I of Naked Conversations 2.0: defining the social media starfish. 22 minutes.
Part II of Naked Conversations 2.0: how Google will disrupt the social media starfish tomorrow. 18 minutes.

[kyte.tv appKey=MarbachViewerEmbedded&uri=channels/6118/67564&embedId=10008713]

Five minutes. Around the globe. November 1st at 3:30 p.m. Pacific Time. Participate.

[podtech content=http://media1.podtech.net/media/2007/10/PID_012931/Podtech_BlogLines.flv&postURL=http://www.podtech.net/home/4477/bloglines-makes-reading-feeds-more-fun&totalTime=917000&breadcrumb=debae654dbef4dadb9ec215a1f903433]

Eric Engleman, general manager of Bloglines shows me the latest in what Bloglines is doing for RSS Feed Readers. Geeks might not care, but this is a good video to pass to people who haven’t yet gotten on the RSS bandwagon. I mention that the BBC does the best job of explaining feeds to its readers.

I use Google Reader, but still have my Bloglines account and if you’re going to read feeds in a folder-by-folder approach Bloglines is better than Google Reader in managing your feeds. Anyway, it’s good to see that Bloglines is still there coming out with new stuff for people who read feeds.

Oh, and over on ScobleShow is a bunch of videos from last week’s CTIA show. Tons of mobile gadgets and services.