A decade ago an acquaintance at Time Inc. told me the company–renowned through the generations for launching era-defining magazines–would never launch a new title again. Instead, the company would add new publications by acquiring small start-ups that had built audiences they couldn’t fully monetize.
It didn’t quite work out that way for Time, as the very [...]

On the heels of the still-unconfirmed deal to buy Photobucket, Fox Interactive Media’s MySpace is apparently making another widget move–acquiring slide show widget maker Flecktor for  as much as $20 million, according to Techcrunch, although FIM has declined to confirm or deny the deal.
Michael Arrington neatly lays out the logic of the deal:
It’s an odd [...]

Digg-hating has become a favorite pastime of the digerati. The sport hasn’t reached the proportions of Microsoft-hating yet, but it’s getting there.
Yesterday’s flap began when Neil Patel at Pronet Advertising wrote a post claiming to prove that Digg editors or algorithms are intentionally burying certain stories posted to the service in a kind of double-secret censorship.
Several [...]

Several pieces this morning got me thinking about the size and scale of the widget business. First, Matt Marshall at Venture Beat wrote about Slide–maker of a web slide show widget:

Slide, the maker of a Web slide show feature, has emerged as a major player, boasting 150 million daily slide show views and more than [...]

Social Media Club Phoenix had a meeting tonight devoted to discussing the influence of social media on politics. Among the major themes that emerged:
1)MySpace is going to vote candidates “off the island” between now and the primaries.  We figured out (roughly) that MySpace has 150,000,000 users, most of whom are in the US.  If that’s [...]

We have a couple of indicators this morning about how much a commercial social network can earn, and how inexpensive it is to build a profitable one.
At the top of the market is MySpace. New Corp, which announced earnings yesterday, doesn’t break out MySpace’s numbers in it’s SEC filings but during a conference call with [...]

Podcasting as we know it is a disaster.
Howard summed up a few of the problems in his post this morning:
Podcasts are still hard to get, find, and take with you, except if you have an iPod and are using iTunes. Even then, you have to search, subscribe, and regularly sync and remove old content. Microsoft [...]

My colleage Jason made a comment at the end of his Web 2.0 for Adults article regarding Podcasting. He noted the Pew survey data indcate 7% have “ever done this” - meaning downloaded a podcast. He suggested if podcasting were a stock, he’d “short it.”
But this Pew data is contradicted by Pew’s August 2006 [...]

When is a widget not a widget? That’s the question I find myself asking this morning as I read about Mpire’s official roll out today of 80 new widgets that variously package affiliate shopping and selling data from Amazon and eBay.
Writes Mpire CEO Matt Hulett:
Mpire’s collection of 75 widgets gives free access to packaged, historical [...]

I’m amazed by the wide range of reaction yesterday to the survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
Reading the reaction among the meme-makers I found out that the social web is a bust, with “far fewer participants than its architects would have us believe”,  that it is a playground for a small minority [...]

One of the things I have not written about much, but I talk about till blue in the face and running out of air, is this idea of a Knowledge Market, which is at the heart of my vision for Social Media Club.  It’s nothing overly odd, pretty much as you might imagine it based [...]

Welcome to our Co-Founders, SMB Members and Professional Members:
We’d like to acknowledge our new Co-Founders, Small and Medium Business Members, and Professional Members here. Thank you ever so much for opening your heart, and your wallet, to support the mission of Social Media Club.
SMB Co-Founders: General Mayhem, LLC (Sanjay Sabnani, Matt Cohn, Charles Turcich) and [...]

Social Media Club Local Gatherings:

Phoenix: May 10, 2007
Los Angeles: May 16, 2007
Boston: May 17, 2007
Austin: May 17, 2007
Dallas: May 17, 2007
London: May 17, 2007
Portland: May 22, 2007
San Francisco: May 24, 2007
Atlanta: May 30, 2007 (TBD)
New York: May 31, 2007
Washington DC: May 31, 2007
Denver: June 5, 2007

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Social Media Club Workshops:
Early Bird and SMC Member [...]

Events conspired this week to throw into high relief the core question for those who would commercialize social media: can a balanced be reached between user control and corporate control or will commercial social media always exist on a cliff’s edge over which either party can push it at any time?
In the Digg/HD-DVD fiasco, it [...]

Last month a Twitter comment from Chris Heuer led to a discussion here at Social Media Club about when social media would cross into the mainstream.
I was surprised by the question. At the latest, social media crossed over in July of 2005 when NewsCorp bought MySpace. In fact, social media is so deeply ingrained in [...]