There are many ways to measure a bubble economy. As a journalist, I look at media coverage of companies as one indicator. The more gee whiz stories that appear covering little-known companies with little skepticism quoting executives gushing unabashedly about the most obvious facts, the more inflated the bubble.
Yesterday’s orgy of coverage regarding image hosting […]

Good reviews across the blogosphere for the 2.0 revision of social music recommendation site MOG. Kristen Nicole at Mashable has the best recap of the features of the relaunched site   : 
This free service offers a personalized channel of streaming music videos, all based on your tastes. MOG cross references music from your computer and your […]

A fascinating Social Media Club meeting in NYC last night, covered well by Jason who led the discussion after Jay Rosen’s discussion of NewAssignment.net. Thanks to Jay for coming and for sharing what’s going on in this groundbreaking experiment.
I don’t have much time to do a full recap, but thanks to posts by Joshua Mack […]

Who Knows What’s Best for Citizen Journalists? ….I was fortunate yesterday to help lead a fascinating discussion about trust, journalism and pro am media at the New York Social Media Club meeting. NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen provided the jumping off point by presenting and discussing his mini-empire of experimental, participatory journalism. That empire includes […]

Last night I got the chance to help Annie Heckenberger of the
Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation and the team from the Bravo Group kick off the Social Media Club. I know Annie is going to blog more, but I wanted to acknowledge the close to 30 folks who showed up from sites like Phawker, Phillyist, […]

Bits and pieces this morning from the world of social media….At Mashable Pete Cashmore tells us about the launch of Spinlets, a service that offers an API to allow users to widgetize social websites. The service is the first product from a company called urSpin. Cashmore cites a number of already launched or soon to launch […]

Has anyone seen what is happening to Kathy Sierra? (http://www.headrush.typepad.com)   It turns my stomach not only for her, but for the entire social media movement. How can we spawn a citizen journalism society, or, indeed, any kind of civilized society, if people continue to threaten bloggers with death?
This is not “social,” nor is it […]

Yesterday’s reaction to the News Corp/NBC NewTube announcement ran the gamut from typical big media hating (Thomas Hawk’s headline: NBC Universal, News Corp YouTube Killer Will Fail) to typical big media cheerleading (Mark Cuban’s headline: Why the NBC/Newscorp Video Venture is a Great Idea).
Sure, there are plenty of reasons for any 50/50 JV between competitors […]

The London experiment with weekly media-making meetups continued this evening with another member getting his first taste of videoblogging. Guy West has been a regular at our discussion groups and kindly recorded some audio at one of the meetings.
We sat in the brand new foyer of the British Film Institute/National Film Theatre which only […]

Today, March 22, 2007, Podcasters, podcast listeners and independent music enthusiasts are going to do something new. They’re all buying one song, for $.99, at the iTunes Music Store. The intent? Show the major labels and main stream media that podcast listeners, netizens, the rest-of-us, are an audience that wants something different than what is […]

Last November VC Fred Wilson asked an interesting question of the blogosphere: Can you fake authenticity?
It’s an enormous question of course–the stuff of a thousand dissertation–particularly for Americans. After all, our culture is based on the artificial invention of identities that project authenticity.
But Fred was asking specifically about social media businesses–can the sense of community […]

People who attended the Business Wire Breakfast in New York this morning may find slides of Howard Greenstein’s talk linked here as a pdf.
The event covered mostly Search Engine Optimzation and Search Engine Marketing from the PR and News perspective, and I learned a lot from my fellow panelists Rebecca Lieb of ClickZ, Greg Jarboe, […]

Let’s assume that the future of social media is all about widgets and places where people can put them. Let’s assume a universe where all media is distributed by users to other users through widgets that stream audio,
video, text, conversations, personal messages, everything.
We already live in a universe in which every Internet user is also […]

The global war on widgets launched by MySpace since its acquisition by News Corp made the New York Times today in a piece about MySpace blocking the Hooka music player a few days it was put to use by MySpace’s most visible user, a singer named Tila Nguyen, whose professional name is Tila Tequila.
Ok, so […]

I am really looking forward to tomorrow’s Social Media Club meeting here in San Francisco. Raines Cohen will be leading a conversation around the topic he just wrote about on DailyKos:
“how do blogs, vlogs, petitions, podcasts, bulletin boards, email lists and forwards, chat, Content-Management Systems (CMS), and even Twitter help us communicate, organize, inspire, […]