The death of email meme is completely absurd. Email is NOT going to die because, as Charlie O’Donnell points out, EVERYONE HAS EMAIL. That’s why we all get so much spam and other useless email — because it’s a guaranteed way to reach us.

A whole mythology is emerging around the idea of “users” — consumers, fans, regular average folk — creating content that media companies and brands can leverage. It’s a compelling idea — but it’s a myth.

The reality is that “average people” don’t create a lot of content — at least not the commercially viable kind. […]

When I argued that Facebook is NOT for business, that assertion was roundly dismissed by Facebook’s tech fan club, determined to prove (with Mark Zuckerberg gleefully rooting them on) that Facebook is a serious business tool. In today’s NYT, a more authoritative voice weighs in — one of Facebook’s original college student users, who speaks […]

Ok, so shame on me for writing so much about the iPhone without actually having used it, but I fixed that today by spending a couple of hours in an Apple store playing with the iPhone. Granted this is much more limited than the experience of long-term use, but it was enough for me to […]

The discussion about Facebook Platform being the new AOL, i.e. redundant to the platform we already have called the Internet, has rung true for me, despite my initial enthusiasm. I finally figured out exactly why — Facebook Platform applications are appended, not integrated.

For example — why can’t I use Twitter IN PLACE OF the […]

A backlash against “new media” ideology and disingenuousness seems to be simmering at this year’s We Media conference. From Mark Glaser at MediasShift:
My personal definition of “we media” is the movement toward an empowered audience, who can customize their media experience and create their own media, leaving behind the old model of the mainstream media […]

Last summer, in It’s The Users Calling…They Want Their Money, I wrote:
User-generated content is going through a novelty phase, where most “users” are content with attention as a form of recompense for their efforts. But for savvy “users” — or in this case video production artists, let’s get real here — getting paid in attention […]

There’s something about the “social” in “social media” and “social networking” and “social” everything that keeps raising my hackles, no matter how much I believe in the best elements (and intentions) of those much hyped phenomena. And it seems that I’m not alone.

From Richard Siklos at the New York Times, who objects to both the […]

According to SEO Todd Mailcoat, getting three stories to the homepage of Digg puts you in the top 1% of Digg users, and it takes “months” to build up a what Todd calls a “reputable” Digg account. Those statistics struck me as stunning, so I decided to dig into Digg’s top user data (which loads […]

The Cluetrain guys had their hearts in the right place when they said that markets are conversations, but, unfortunately, when corporations try to do the conversation thing, they typically end up making a mess and a mockery and looking utterly clue-less. You’ve got fake blogs, undisclosed paid blog posts, and bloggers who “lead conversations” receiving […]

Time magazine has made “you” the “person of the year because “we” are now in control of the media — a “link bait” ploy that deconstructs itself because “we” did not choose to put “us” on the cover of Time. Doh! How do I emblazon “SILLY HYPE” on “my” cover of Time? (Hat tip to […]

Turns out that the vast majority of “users” who “generate” video content don’t share it online (via MediaPost):

IN A FINDING THAT UNDERSCORES the potential of a vast, untapped market for user-generated video, new research conducted by interactive agency Sharpe Partners indicates that more than half (54) percent of adult Internet users currently create their own […]

The widely-used and much reviled term “user-generated content” implies that somebody is making something. But the dirty little secret of “user-generated” sites like YouTube and MySpace is that much of the content is not made by the users themselves — it’s appropriated from someone else.

So while everyone was watching Google engage in “frantic” negotiations […]

It’s easy to embrace the New York Times hype about Web 3.0 — Web 2.0 hasn’t built that many successful businesses yet, so why not drop it already and mover on to the next big thing so that we can keep pumping up start-up valuations for bigger exits? Rapid software releases may be the new […]

Richard Edelman and Steve Rubel have final responded to the Wal-Mart flog incident with an appropriate mea culpa. They both insist that they could not respond to the storm of criticism sooner because they didn’t have all of the facts — and without all the facts, they couldn’t CONTROL the conversation. Both Richard and Steve […]

It’s inevitable that a PR firm like Edelman would create a phony blog for one of its clients (in this case Wal-Mart — see Shel Holtz for a great analysis). For all of the hype over “conversation” as the new media paradigm, no one has yet figured out how to use conversation to reliably achieve […]

Google is the new Microsoft, and therefore direct competition with Google should be avoided at all costs — that is Paul Graham’s takeawy from the news that Kiko, a web calendar play done in by Google Calendar, is autioning off its assets:
The best solution for most startup founders would probably be to stay out of […]

In a desperate attempt to shelter advertisers from its community, MySpace is creating walled gardens where advertisers can feel like they are advertising on MySpace, even though they’re really not.

To publicize the contest, Disney built its own “page” on MySpace and bought an ad on MySpace’s front page. But it steered clear of the profile […]

Seth Jayson at Motley Fool takes a scalpel to Google’s soft underbelly with a fascinating deconstruction of Google’s business model, the effect it’s had on the web, and the prospects for the future — or lack thereof. Some of the my favorite passages:

Whether or not you believe that the junk sites out there peddling AdSense […]

Guy Kawasaki held a focus group with six teenagers — this is a small sample, of course, but their view of MySpace is telling:

Two panelists were MySpace users. The others expressed a certain backlash and purposeful resistance to the addiction of MySpace. One 14 year old used to be an active MySpace user but stopped […]

It’s happening again — the numbers just don’t make any sense. Facebook turns down $750 million, hoping to hype themselves up to $2 billion. And why? Well, just look at that CASH COW MySpace — it’s making…how much money? I’m on the edge of my seat for News Corp’s first 2006 earnings release, but “in […]

How deeply ironic that, despite thousands of blog pages devoted to Web 2.0, it took stodgy old Newsweek to bring the hype to the masses — and they had to re-brand Web 2.0 as the “Live Web” to make it comprehensible to the average person who doesn’t understand version-speak:

The generic term for this movement, especially […]

It took me a while to put my finger on why I didn’t share the excitement of the masses over Edgeio — not surprisingly, it was Umair Haque who showed me what the problem is:

Will Edgeio be Craigslist 2.0? Maybe, maybe not. I haven’t seen it yet, so I don’t know for sure.

But I can […]