This week, the New York Times revealed that the recent intensification of hostilities might have much to do with Google’s snatch-purchase of Ad Mob , the mobile advertising network it bought in November for a hefty $750 million, while Apple dithered over the deal. The social media adventures of fashion goddess ASOS are once again drawing admiring gasps: their ‘ASOS Follows Fashion’ Twitter aggregator gathers tweets from designers, photographers, fashion journos and brands, the better to inform their discerning fashion-forward followers. Welcome to eModeration's round-up of all that is intriguing, alarming or odd in the world of social media, compiled by Kate Williams.

This is called clustering (putting together different informal communities) or swarming (creating an attractor mechanism and seeing what comes). The first of those articles includes some original research in IBM (which we checked out elsewhere) which showed that the ratio of informal communities to formal communities was 1:10K or put another way if you half the number of staff then you can assume that is the capacity for self-organising spontaneous CoPs that you can expect.

One avenue that clearly intrigues them is the promise of the commons — a theme that was much in evidence at the Barcelona Free Culture Forum, which Wainwright and Berlinguer attended in November 2009. Wainwright is impressed by the “naturalness with which free culture movement treats information as a commons. Hillary Wainwright is one of the finest people I have met over the last few years, so I’m happy to share this profile, written by my friend David Bollier : “If you want to learn the nitty-gritty about social transformation in our times — What works and what doesn’t?