Thanks to tech journalist Mathew Ingram for flagging a post by Ethan Kaplan that laces into the received wisdom about DIY media, “user generated content” and big media’s attempts to adapt to this new environment.
The essence of Kaplan’s argument is that thinking about media created outside of the corporation as “user generated content” presupposes, and [...]

Maybe it’s time for Blogspotting to change it’s name. In the Newsweek online column of that title, Heather Green takes a closer look at numbers provided by Dave Sifry at Technorati. The numbers, first reported early this month in Sifry’s State of the Live Web, suggest that the practice of blogging has plateaued.
Picking up threads [...]

Bits and pieces this morning from around the world of social media.
First, in the wake of the mysterious end to the MySpace/Photobucket war, comes an interesting quick piece by one of my favorite bloggers, Andrew Chen, entrepreneur in residence at Mohr Davidow Ventures, on the subject of monetizing widgets. Widgets=ad networks, Andrew argues. And that [...]

The blogosphere is full of cynics. And there’s plenty of cynical response on the Net to Forrester’s report on adult social media behavior. The report, which is geared to helping marketers integrate social media into business strategies, proposes a “participation ladder” as a metaphor, with six rungs stepping up from “inactives” at the bottom to “creators” [...]

The digerati’s first impressions of MySpace’s social news venture, which launched in beta yesterday, was anything but positive. Well undercooked was the general consensus, even for a beta launch.
No one was more harsh, or more scatological, than Rex Dixon who called MySpace News nothing more than a clipping service linking the kind of of generic [...]

StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp spent yesterday afternoon denying rumors that StumbleUpon had agreed to an acquisition by eBay.
If that purchase, or one by any of StumbleUpon’s other rumored suitors, goes through its implications for social search will have been predigested. It’s funny and fascinating, seeing out pundits reacted to the reported price of $40 to [...]

Reports coming in from the National Association of Broadcasters offer an interesting look at the evolving relationship between traditional media and DIY media. On the one hand you had David K. Rehr, CEO and President of the NAB, kicking off the conference by suggesting that broadcasters are being challenged by the Internet not because anything [...]

Coverage of yesterday’s horrific massacre at Virginia Tech was hardly a showpiece for semi-pro and citizen journalist.
Contrary to the reports of boosters, like Amy Gahran at Poynter Online who called it “Another Sad but Seminal Day for CitJ,” those who would denigrate the whole idea of citizen journalism got plenty of ammo from bloggers who [...]

CBS’s Online Video Network Targets Advertisers, Not Audience: One of the big differences between new media circa Web 1.0 and new media circa Web 2.0 is that this time the big boys get it, or at least the big boys get that they need to do something different quickly.
Consider the CBS Interactive Audience Network–a cross-platform [...]

Yesterday’s MySpace/Photobucket flap was the latest skirmish in the ongoing war on widgets led by Fox Interactive Media, the News Corp division responsible for running MySpace.
It’s funny watching the digerati contort itself in an effort to explain why MySpace is wrong both morally and financially. Jon Fortt at Business 2.0’s The Utility Belt, probably went [...]

This isn’t going to help Photobucket with its efforts to sell the company. Late last night MySpace moved to block its members from posting links to videos hosted on Photobucket.
Photobucket had been trying to expand it’s business from photo hosting to video hosting by offering users a suite of editing and production tools to spur [...]

It’s tempting to dismiss the social commerce survey published today by iProspect as just the latest missive from the Duh! Department.
The survey, conducted by JupiterResearch, found that 33% of Internet users had relied on sites with user-generated recommendations to make buying decisions.
Frankly that number is surprisingly low, particularly considering that Amazon–by virtue of it’s user [...]

There are few things worse than media self-examination. It’s freighted with the kind of navel-gazing self importance that turns off all but the most egotistic insiders.
The mishugas surrounding Tim O’Reilly’s attempt to get a bloggers to adopt a code of conduct (his is modeled on the guidelines adopted by the BlogHer group) smacks a little [...]

Spanning the Blogosphere: I’m not too fond of the phrase “Live Web.” First, I’m not convinced that the so-called static web era was all that static—links were live, after all, and pages were updated regularly, and message boards and other sorts of multiway communication platforms existed. Second, even as multifaceted as it has become—with widgets [...]

It hardly signals the end of the line for social networking hubs like Facebook and MySpace, but it may be the beginning of the end. I’m talking about the potential impact of a Mozilla skunk works project to embed social networking functionality directly in the Web browser.
There’s a lot of buzz among the meme-makers. At [...]