In his cartoon, above, B is the marketplace / conversation (see Cluetrain) for your product. A is the conversation within your company about your product. X is the membrane separating the conversations. When X is porous, the more the conversations in A and B resemble each other. That’s good.

“The things that A is passionate about, B should also be passionate about. This we call alignment. A good example would be Apple. The people at Apple think the iPod is cool, and so do their customers. They are aligned.”

Blogs poke holes in the membranes, he says, like “Swiss cheese,” so that the internal conversation is communicated to the public, and the company hears the public conversation.

(One quibble: Does he need the letter Y? What does it represent, the outer limits of the conversation?) Hugh also sells limited edition T-shirts with his cartoons.

Feeding the blog

Also, as Hugh notes, management guru Tom Peters has discovered blogging is an all-consuming pastime and that after three months, he needs a break. Yes, the journey of a thousand posts has already taken its toll on countless bloggers. Even Scoble had to take a break a couple of months ago.

I have a couple of suggestions to reduce the blogger mortality rate: First, don’t venture into the blogosphere unless you’re committed to keeping the dialogue going for six months or more. And, how about if -- to reduce the number of blogs Technorati and the rest of us have to keep track of -- we declare a blog dead after three months of inactivity? Bring us fresh meat.