The traffic to my site has quadrupled since just six months ago.  My RSS subscribers have tripled in that same time frame.  The feedback I get is almost always positive.  I don't state these facts to boast at all.  I say them to myself often, because I am proud of what I have accomplished.  These numbers make me work harder to continue trying to bring you one person's view of his small world.  I will most likely never be able to thank you enough for helping make myself proud of what I have done.

Blogging and maintaining this site takes time.  A lot of time.  Perhaps there are opportunities I have missed due to this damn site, and the time I take logged into it.  But on the other hand, it has also created opportunities.  I have met many people through my blog who I am now happy to call my friends.  My blog has even made me money.  Significant money.  I am not talking about Google AdSense money.  I am talking about opportunities for my services.  It has landed me contracts and jobs.  Some might look at a blog and wonder why someone would take such time to write what seems like wasted words.  I tell them, "No, my friend, a blog is much more than that."  My blog has opened doors, and none of that would have been possible without you.

Thank you for taking the time to read my blog.  I truly am grateful for your time, because I know just how valuable it is.

Sure music and my favorite podcasts help, but it takes more than that to get me going.  So over the past week, I think I have found something that will keep me going... combining my love for technology and statistics to keep me active - even when I don't want too!

Using my Palm Pre smartphone and a series of mobile fitness applications, I have found a new passion for getting out and exercising.  I am testing out the different applications to find which ones work best for me, but the overall goal of getting out there and pushing harder and harder each workout is working!  The other day, I used the "JogStats" mobile application which measured all the vitals to my run and then tweeted the results to my Twitter feed:

I am using an application called "Absolute Fitness" that helps me track my caloric intake.  "Fit23" gives me the opportunity to enter softer data on my health, like how much water I drank, how I feel about my overall health on a particular day, etc.  "iStayFit" helps me in the gym by showing me different workouts to do to focus on different areas of my body.  Finally, I use "Pedometer" to measure all of my steps I take during the day.  All of these together give me a statistical look at my progress, which for me, helps keep me motivated.

Because of the power our phones have now-a-days and with the endless supply of mobile applications, there is so much potential to do new things or get better at things we like to do.  While I always knew that technology could better my life, I never knew it could make my experience working out better.

Here are the top five most popular posts on RobertStanke.com for the month of February:

1. Class is over... let's get back to execution and implementation (Posted on: February 18, 2010)

2. The two main types of online communities - Part 1: Organic Communities (Posted on: February 2, 2010)

3. The (possible) abuse of social networks by consumers (Posted on: February 17, 2010)

4. The two main types of online communities - Part 2: Branded Communities (Posted on: February 4, 2010)

5. I want to know about your blog! (Posted on: February 10, 2010)

Here's to March, warm weather, and the coming of baseball!

If you follow my blog on a regular basis or know me well, you know I can't pass up trying a new online tool or service!  Sure, I might sign-up with one, play around with it for a week, and then never log in again... but hey, you never know when one is going to catch on fire (i.e.

* If you are familiar with Friendfeed, then you will immediately get Cliqset.  The concepts are pretty much identical, even down to the being able to connect up with others, see their social stream updates from multiple services, and can even join groups to see related streams around a certain interest.  I love Cliqset, but in a lot of ways it is a Friendfeed knock-off.

* The Cliqset interface is awesome.  Visually appealing, colorful, and the stream is easy to read and follow.

* Finding others to connect with has been difficult.  There doesn't seem to be the capability (or at least I have not been able to find it) to access your contacts list from a service like Google or Yahoo to be able to see if any of your friends are on Cliqset.  You are merely just given a search box to search by name and a complete directory of everyone.  I can't seem to find a way to connect with people in my area either.  Kind of a bummer.

* You can connect your stream to over 80+ services, including Evernote, which is how I found out about Cliqset in the first place!  From what I can tell, just about every service you would want to connect to is there.

* Sharing is easy on Cliqset, and I like how you can even share files, photos, and even reviews where you can even give star ratings.

Cliqset is basically a Friendfeed clone but with a few extra things that might intrigue some people.  Give it a look and if you are interested, you can connect with me on Cliqset by clicking here!

What I am interested in though, is whether or not community management and better moderation practices could have prevented this whole ordeal.  There are reports that the video in question did get some complaints filed with Google, but the video was not taken down until authorities informed Google of the possible issue at hand.  Now there are many questions currently out there about content moderation in general and what does it take for one item to come down but not another?  I could put up a piece of content that offends one person but not 99 others, so do I need to take it down because of the one offended person?  Could I be breaking the law because of one person?  What are my liabilities of being a publisher versus that of a host of possible questionable comments on my blog that were created by others?  The list of questions can go on and on and all of the answers boil down to terms of use, moderation, and common sense.

Could Google have prevented this through better moderation?  If you think the answer to that is yes, consider this...

Google's video service, YouTube, gets 20 hours of video uploaded every one minute (the video in question in the Italian case was actually hosted in Google Videos, not YouTube, but this puts the whole moderation argument in context).  That means if we were to expect Google to examine every video uploaded, they would have to hire 30,000 new employees and spread them out across three non-stop shifts of doing nothing but watching video.  Great for the economy?  Sure.  Realistic?  No.  Some would argue, "fine, if Google can't control the content that is uploaded and that they are responsible for, then they should shut it down."  Really?  That is your solution?  So a couple of questionable things get through, offend a limited set of individuals, and you are just going to shut the service down?  Then you don't understand the web and I feel sorry for you."

Let's change the laws, not the natural growth of the most powerful tool mankind has ever created.  It is time to start to think differently and not live by old, outdated laws.

Flavors.me is an extremely simple and straight forward approach of telling others where they can find you.  Whether this is good or bad is up to you, but Flavors.me keeps visitors on that portal to view your content as well, so they never have to leave as they flip back and forth to see all that you are up too.  You can see by the way I have mine set up, the links are on the left and as you click on them, the content shows up on the right.  My design is very, very simple - black and white - but you do have the option to add some color and upload images.  There is also a premium service that costs $20 a year that gives you some additional options as well.

The services to connect to was easy, although connecting some services timed out and just produced error messages.  I have not added all of mine yet because of these errors.

Overall, it depends what your strategy is for having people find your content or where they can connect with you.  I still like to drive all my visitors to one central location (my blog) because I can have maximum control.

Shared values is what ties everything together.  Just like the image to the left depicts, the shared values of a company tie the other six components together.  Like a chain, a company's shared values are only as strong as the weakest link.  While components can work together between "Hard S's" or "Soft S's" - they must cross through shared values to interact with each other.

The shared values are the guiding concepts, fundamental ideas around which a business is built.  It must be simple but have great meaning inside of the organization, even though outsiders may not see or understand them at all.

New community and social practices will hopefully strengthen each of these components and make the shared values stronger between internal and external audiences.  That is part of the transparency that social provides.  But it cannot be provided if the existing elements inside the different components do not accept social for what it is.

Social has to fit in, yet challenge current processes.  It needs to shake things up a bit, without knocking the components out of alignment.  This is why proper staff needs to place, systems must help rather than hinder, and style has to be understood.

Community and social may just be the elements that push business to the next level of value.