I have a new entry at the Ide­aLab blog about people-funded jour­nal­ism and the rise of com­mu­nity– and foundation-supported news sources.

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The alt-rock band Weezer sends up viral videos — and goes viral in the process. (They’ve removed the embed­ding capa­bil­ity for this video, alas.) From BL Ochman: Does Viral Video Trans­late to the Bot­tom Line? Ask Weezer.

What made the video go viral? Virals! The video is a col­lec­tion of Inter­net memes from Numa Numa to Choco­late Rain, Evo­lu­tion of Dance,  Blendtec, Miss Teen South Car­olina Answers a Ques­tion,  and The Diet Coke and Men­tos Exper­i­ments. [Plus: Dra­matic ham­ster, Shoes and others.]

It’s a mar­ket­ing coup for the quirky band, and should also be a
wake-up call for all the agency types who are end­lessly scratch­ing
their heads (and other body parts) about metrics. …

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Just heard about FixYa: Tech Sup­port, Man­u­als & Trou­bleshoot­ing for Con­sumers. Says Mansha:

FixYa is an online des­ti­na­tion where peo­ple can find and pro­vide real-life solu­tions to any issue with any con­sumer prod­ucts with­out hav­ing to go through call­ing tech sup­port or vis­it­ing a repairman.

In the FixYa com­mu­nity, we have more than 800,000 con­sumer prod­ucts already addressed and more than 3 mil­lion solu­tions offered to the ques­tions. We also have more than half a mil­lion man­ual and trou­bleshoot­ing guides available.

With inno­v­a­tive crowd sourc­ing approach to solv­ing the issue, FixYa is only the player in this field. Addi­tion­ally, FixYa comes with a twist: Not only can users find  solu­tions, if they know how to fix con­sumer prod­ucts, they can join FixYa as an expert and pro­vide solu­tions to FixYa mem­ber. This means tech savvy peo­ple have cooler web 2.0 ways of mak­ing money.

Haven’t used it yet, but I will.

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Jere­miah Owyang of For­rester: Six Social Media Lists to Watch, touch­ing on the finance, insur­ance, auto indus­tries and more.

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Julia Boriss in the Indi­ana Daily Stu­dent: Love and Face­book. Excerpt:

Every time I log onto Face­book I become increas­ingly con­cerned about the
state of our world. The roman­tic fail­ings of my acquain­tances are
announced to me by an icon of a bro­ken heart, nobody gives a sec­ond
thought to reveal­ing their home address any­more, and I have appli­ca­tion
invi­ta­tions from peo­ple who want to numer­i­cally rank my per­son­al­ity and
attrac­tive­ness against that of my other friends.

And yet what
prob­a­bly both­ers me most about Face­book is when women fill their “About
Me” sec­tion with ran­dom facts about them­selves like “I dance in the
rain,” “I sing in the car” and “I’m totally clumsy but I know how to
laugh at myself.” These images would nor­mally be lovely and hope­ful,
but when they appear in Face­book pro­files they strike me as
uncom­fort­ably depress­ing. All of these pub­licly broad­cast facts could
be effec­tively replaced by the same one line: “Love me, please. Find me
endearing.” …

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The San Fran­cisco Chronicle’s Date­book colum­nists offer up lists of their Favorite YouTube videos, rang­ing from JFK’s 1960 I am a Berliner speech to the Yes We Can paen to Barack Obama. (Can’t find the main land­ing page so linked to search results of indi­vid­ual articles.)

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NY Times: Luis Suarez of I.B.M., who lives in the Canary Islands, says that with the
help of social net­work­ing tools, he has cut down sharply on his daily
e-mail.

It’s not that I stopped com­mu­ni­cat­ing; I just com­mu­ni­cated in dif­fer­ent
and more pro­duc­tive ways. Instead of respond­ing indi­vid­u­ally to
mes­sages that arrived in my in-box, I started to use more social
net­work­ing tools, like instant mes­sag­ing, blogs and wikis, among many
oth­ers. I also started to use the tele­phone much more than I did
before, which has the added advan­tage of being a more per­sonal form of
interaction. …

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I was invited to meet with Lin Dai, the CEO of Kiwi­box but couldn’t make it work. Still, sounds like they’re doing some inter­est­ing things with social net­work­ing, so wanted to pass along this update from Sean:

Kiwi­box is a social network/online mag­a­zine that was founded in 1999 and is quickly clos­ing in on 2 mil­lion users. Why is this unique?  All of the con­tent, writ­ing, pho­tos, etc on Kiwibox.com is com­pletely gen­er­ated by the teenagers themselves.

Tan­ta­mount to the “inmates tak­ing over the asy­lum,” the social net­work­ing capa­bil­i­ties of Kiwi­box are mas­sive. They cur­rently have over 30,000 teen con­trib­u­tors to the site, signed deals with major movie stu­dios and Capi­tol Records, and the com­pany is just about to launch their mobile application.

Hope they con­tinue their suc­cess. I’ll be check­ing in.

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From July 18–20, BlogHer, the Web’s top guide to blogs by women, will be host­ing its third annual con­fer­ence in down­town San Fran­cisco at the Westin St. Fran­cis. Draw­ing more than 1,000 blog­gers from around the U.S., BlogHer’s three-day con­fer­ence will fea­ture tech­ni­cal labs, edu­ca­tional work­shops, intense dis­cus­sion ses­sions, rel­e­vant spon­sors, speak­ers from every cor­ner of the blo­gos­phere and plenty of oppor­tu­ni­ties to net­work and social­ize with blog­gers, brands and media executives.

BlogHer has dubbed this year’s theme as “Reach!” and will give atten­dees the chance to dis­cuss key trends in the blo­gos­phere including:

* Mommy-blogging
* Blog­ging with a global per­spec­tive
* Oppor­tu­ni­ties in open source projects
* Build­ing traf­fic
* Cre­at­ing cred­i­bil­ity in polit­i­cal blog­ging
* Tools for online fundrais­ing and activism
* Mon­e­ti­za­tion with online advertising

I’ll be there on Sat­ur­day, July 19.

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The Soci­ety for New Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Research is look­ing for new mem­bers. (I’m a senior fel­low.) From their lat­est announcement:

As we con­tinue to grow and evolve, we strive to achieve our mis­sion of cre­at­ing a unique global col­lab­o­ra­tive of thinkers and lead­ers — a
vir­tual think tank ded­i­cated to the lat­est devel­op­ments in new media
and com­mu­ni­ca­tions. The Soci­ety cre­ates a bridge between the aca­d­e­mic
com­mu­nity and com­mu­ni­ca­tions prac­ti­tion­ers, a global net­work of
inter­est­ing and knowl­edge­able peo­ple rep­re­sent­ing a wide range of
exper­tise and per­spec­tives. By par­tic­i­pat­ing as a mem­ber of the Soci­ety, you’ll gain a bet­ter under­stand­ing of the impact of new and emerg­ing media and com­mu­ni­ca­tions tools, tech­nolo­gies and
trends, and their effect on tra­di­tional media and busi­ness mod­els,
pro­fes­sional com­mu­ni­ca­tions, busi­ness, and society.

You can join SNCR here.

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