Yesterday, I posted an updated Social Media Map on Flickr. mriggen commented on Flickr, “Man, that is one crazy Interwebs diagram!”. Over on FriendFeed, AcademiaConnect.org liked the picture and Bill Anderson commented, “A very intriguing diagram. It's fascinating to look at, but I'm not sure how to make any sense of it. What do you make of it, if anything?”

I suspect that Bill was looking for sense making of what is going on with social media, instead of a simple description of the graph, what the arrows mean and what the over all graph can tell us. However, I will start with the simple description, and go from there

At the very top of the graph is ‘cellvideo’. Coming from it are four arrows pointing to where I send videos from my cellphone, YouTube, Blip.TV, Utterz, and Facebook. Following the arrow through Blip.TV, you will see that Blip.TV is set up to send links to the video to Flickr, Orient Lodge, MySpace, del.icio.us, and Profilactic.

Looking at it on a macro level, a lot of arrows feed into the aggregators FriendFeed and Profilactice. I probably should have added some other aggregators like MyBlogLog, LifeStream and others. A lot of arrows come out of ping.fm. Other sites, like Utterz and Orient Lodge end up being key hubs in the middle of things.

It was actually Bill that got me thinking about this. A while ago, he complained about multiple duplicate messages showing up in my FriendFeed. If I send a message with ping.fm to fourteen different services, and each service shows up in FriendFeed (or Profilactic, Lifestream, or others), you can get some very annoying duplication.

This can get more complicated if I post something on Orient Lodge, which then feeds Twitter, Identi.ca and other sites, which all feed FriendFeed.

So this raises lots of questions. To what extent should you feed from one system to another? How do you decide when to feed and when not to? How do you decide when to aggregate and when not to?

I don’t think there are easy answers to any of that. On the one hand, you can view each system as completely separate silos. Blog posts go on Orient Lodge. Pictures go on Flickr, microblogging goes on Twitter. Videos go on YouTube. If you approach things like this, then aggregation to an aggregator isn’t a problem.

Some people adopt this approach because they are afraid of Google penalizing duplicate content. I think this fear is unfounded. I don’t know how Google penalizes duplicate content, but my content changes shape between different services, and it isn’t the sort of duplicate content that I would think Google is concerned about. Google is much more concerned about link spam. Copy the same block of 150 links to 150 blogs so each blog gets extra incoming links; I’ve seen blog posts like that and I can imagine Google being more concerned about that.

Yet content cannot easily be broken into silos. Videos are made up of pictures. The pictures tell stories. Beyond that, you may want to get your story out on as many sources as possible. Personally, I want people to be able to easily find my content, independent of which sites they prefer.

This leads to the next problem, as illustrated by the comments I received on the Social Media Map. One was on Flickr, two were on FriendFeed. None where on Orient Lodge itself, which is what I like my primary focal point to be.

Now, I have been working on bringing in comments from other systems. Currently, it works well with comments on FriendFeed about Orient Lodge posts, as well as with Disqus. This blog post consolidates some of the comments, but there is the issue of how to consolidate comments, and for that matter simply not to miss comments on one of the less frequently used social networks.

All of this brings me to my final concern, for right now. It is possible to feed content from one site to another via various APIs, feeds, protocols, etc. Some of these feeds can introduce latency. So, instead of sending something just to Twitter and letting other people pick up the RSS feed from Twitter, when they get around to it an hour or two later, I’m using things like ping.fm or posterous.com to send my messages to as many services at the same time as possible.

However, federation with the Open Microblogging protocol could end up being a step towards a better approach. If I can find one place that sends my messages, no matter what content or form, to all the different sites I would like it, that would be great. If I could find aggregators that would better manage duplicate content, that would be great.

These sort of tools still seem a ways off, and instead we have people building lots of similar systems, trying to get their part of the mindshare of people in social media, and I suspect things will only get more complicated before they start becoming cleaner.