noted on Wed, 30 Jul 2003
Tim Bray on "How we talk to each other"
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/05/27/Discourse
Quote from the article:
The amount of money that is in aggregate routed into marketing, even in a niche like computer technology, is immense. While I, like many, tend to think that the marketing and advertising professions are dysfunctional, they’re not entirely clueless; if a credible human voice inside a big scary company (think Don Box) is a good way to get the message across, they’ll notice. If a smart writer with a long leash turns out to be more useful than a phalanx of conventional journalists (think Jon Udell or Dan Gillmor), they’ll notice that too.
And the currency generated by such discourse — the attention of people who spend — is, in the world of marketing, beyond price; diamonds are dust beside it.
This might be an interesting source when creating a business case for creating a social/human networking software package.