I catch myself walking down a crowded street, searching the faces of the people, wondering which of them know what social networks are, if they've ever used one or where they are at with the whole 'Power of Us' culture.

We're all so different. So unique. We all consume for our own reasons, based on our own experiences...but social networks are almost always present at some stage of the transaction.

I had a near-yelling debate with a friend of mine last night (both of us had too much to drink) where her and I were speaking entirely different languages. If you asked both of us separately what we were discussing, you would end up hearing two versions of the conversation that didn't seem congruent at all. The strange thing is, though, we kept arguing.

Where it stemmed from was that a student was staying with her neighbour who was working on his Ph.D. in Mass Media. He and I connected strongly because I basically live what he studies. The conversation with him got me quite excited and all of a sudden, I was on the runaway 'Cluetrain'. This would be fine, but I had spent the day drinking in the sun and was tipsy and tired and scrappy.

So, when my girlfriend started questionning the Cluetrain logic, I sputtered a bit. But here's the thing, I don't know if she was really challenging what I was saying at all. She came from a position of not being an online person, never having read the Cluetrain and starting her own business (neighbourhood video store). In fact, she's already used collaborative social networks in her early phases of starting her own business. She sent an email out to her list of friends asking for their 'top 50 movies of all time' (theres another tag...) to help her with her collection for the store. The difference came when she defined this email as 'target marketing to a specific demographic' and I was defining it as 'collaborating with her social network'.

I, personally, never like to think of my friends as a target market. Certainly, they may seem to fit a certain demographic. They are generally urban, 30-45, and middle income. But rather than picking my friends because they fit in a demographic (I certainly don't meet someone and think, "Gee, this person fits into my demographic profile of who I would like to hang out with"), it's because we share common interests. And that is where many of my friends differ. I have feminist friends, partying friends, online geek friends, arts and culture friends, work friends, funk/club culture friends, jazz friends, old friends, fashion friends, friends through Ken friends, queen street friends, etc. etc. And some of these friends have many various cross interests with me (i.e. many of my partying friends are also club culture friends).

[Nor could I rely on my email list of friends exclusively to actually build a business. I tend to find it easier to charge acquaintences than I do friends. I'm a generous friend. If I built a business on my friends alone, I would go broke.]

Friendships and interests are more akin to folksonomies and tagging than they are to demographics and psychographics. What's happening online is just an extension of how we sort our own lives offline. Back to Jay (and thanks for clarifying on that other post), we have very individual ways of sorting what we understand to be the world, our lives, our likes and dislikes, our observations, our theories, our beliefs, etc. We also are influenced by the ways our friends sort these things, and what I'm finding more and more is that tagging can both be an individual thing and a network thing. In order to connect with others, we find similar classifications or tags (i.e. doyourworst, 10blogs, 10shows, etc.). Sometimes these two versions of tagging crossover, sometimes they don't.

This doesn't render demographics or psychographics null, it just means that demo and psycho-graphics become another social network classification. And these types of classifications are both based on interests and not based on interests. Confused? So am I. I just don't believe that that demographics and psychographics are very personal. Tagging gets closer to being personal and it more closely aligns to what happens offline when we organize our own lives.

Now...back to the long tail. Folksonomies aren't new, but they certainly aren't widely known (or, more likely, widely recognized) beyond the confines of our online networks (and the people who study them). This means, to me, that as the word spreads and as more people get 'hip' to the terminology, folksonomies will take on new meaning and uses to many other people. Perhaps my girlfriend will reframe her own marketing strategies for her business in the years to come. Then we can have these discussions in the same language.

The long tail of the Cluetrain may be longer than any of us can ever imagine...I wonder what it will look like at the end of it?