Two indications that the heyday of the “blogosphere” is over this week.
First came the rapid rise and seven figure sale of WallStrip. From an industry perspective this is vlogging’s “Dan Rather” moment. I expect a lot of heat around vlogs in the next few months. DIY Internet media always proceeds from easiest to produce/lowest bandwidth […]

Is DIY Internet video a new media type? Or just a minor league development system for traditional media?
The announcement that CBS is acquiring Wallstrip, a business group vlog covering stocks, sure looks like the classic minor league or indie rock development path. Wallstrip founder Howard Lindzon tells the rather unremarkable tale of the company’s development […]

James Au, whose pioneering beat for Reuters is Second Life, has a fascinating story this morning about the rise and apparent fall of Avatars of Change, one of the first native religious orders to be formed in SL.
The group was founded  as a Neo-Confucian “ecumenical religious and cultural order, united by the Avatarian Way.” It’s […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

 Live by the link, die by the link. Yesterday’s Digg user revolt was an object lesson in the power and peril of user generated media.
I won’t give a blow by blow recap of the events–Techmeme is already overburdened by links to recap stories. You can read a first hand account of how the snowball got […]

There’s not much news to be gleaned from the response to the Viacom lawsuit filed by Google/YouTube in federal district court in New York.
As predicted Google is pinning its defense on the safe harbor provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which was designed to shield ISPs from lawsuits when subscribers used their accounts to […]