After last week’s user rebel­lion that upended Facebook’s attempt to change its terms of ser­vice to grant itself a per­pet­ual license to all pho­tos, videos and copy­righted mate­r­ial posted by its mem­bers — some­how, Terms of Use Rebel­lion doesn’t have the same his­tor­i­cal ring as Whiskey Rebel­lion — the com­pany is angling to turn the inci­dent into a net pos­i­tive by call­ing on its users to help for­mu­late a “bill of rights” to gov­ern the social-networking giant.

It’s a bold, gutsy and unprece­dented move, the kind of envelope-pushing move we’ve seen in the past from founder-CEO Mark Zucker­berg. The pro­posed Face­book Prin­ci­ples cover top­ics such as the “free­dom to share and con­nect,” pri­vacy rights, “fun­da­men­tal equal­ity” and “own­er­ship and con­trol of infor­ma­tion.” Face­book users — there are about 175 mil­lion of us around the globe — are being invited to review, com­ment on and ulti­mately vote on the pro­pos­als in “a vir­tual town hall” over the next 30 days.

If more than 7,000 users com­ment on any pro­posed change, it would go to a vote. Trou­ble is, they’ve inten­tion­ally set the bar impos­si­bly high. The mea­sures would be bind­ing to Face­book only if more than 30 per­cent of active users vote. Based on Facebook’s cur­rent size, that would be nearly 53 mil­lion peo­ple. By com­par­i­son, a group cre­ated to protest Facebook’s new terms has roughly 139,600 mem­bers. (I’m one of them.)

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Earlier this week, I guest lec­tured on dig­i­tal PR at the Amer­i­can Uni­ver­sity and reported on the expe­ri­ence, Pub­lic Rela­tions and Com­mu­ni­ca­tions’ Future is Bright!. I said that I would not write any­thing nice unless some­one sent me a thought­ful email from the class.

Well, I received two nice notes, one from Juliana Ser­afini (who promises to email me again next week) and one from Kari Elam, who had a lot of great ques­tion.  I will not expose her ques­tions, but the long story short is that Kari is writ­ing for music, cul­ture, arts, and soci­ety blogs and won­ders if that it good enough as a way of writ­ing her­self into a smash­ing agency job in PR and I told her that while it couldn’t hurt, it is also essen­tial for her to go a lit­tle fur­ther. Well, here is the ’sage’ advice I give to Kari:

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The econ­omy is hit­ting every­one hard. And while we all fight for money, often chas­ing the same dol­lars, there’s one thing we can all col­lab­o­rate on, and that’s sav­ing money. Here are a few rec­om­mended sites, tools, and tips for sav­ing money.

Be a gourmet for a bud­get: While the top site for recipes is epi­cu­ri­ous, some blogs are going out of their way to deliver you the best din­ners on a bud­get. I rec­om­mend you check out Fru­gal Cui­sine, and just launched last week, the Broke Ass Gourmet, which promises that all its recipes for two cost less than $20.

Know when to refi­nance your mort­gage: Finance rates are drop­ping, or they were. They just bounced back up. But there’s talk of lob­by­ing the gov­ern­ment to drop them down to 4% to stim­u­late the econ­omy. And when the bank rate hits that rock bot­tom point, it’s def­i­nitely time to refi­nance. Just fol­low Bankrate.com to see up to the minute mort­gage rates.

Gad­gets that save money: Sim­ple Dol­lar has put together a great list of the 25 gad­gets that will save you money. For each gad­get they give you the cost sav­ings it offers and the time it will take for you to break even on your invest­ment. Love the advice about get­ting the game “Dance, Dance, Rev­o­lu­tion” to replace your car­dio work­out. Assum­ing $25/month gym mem­ber­ship fee, they cal­cu­late you’ll break even in 8 months.

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Too often in the world of social media, we con­nect with each other vir­tu­ally but hes­i­tate to actu­ally get off our duffs and inter­act in per­son. Yes­ter­day was one small vic­tory for face time.

At the first East Bay Social Media Break­fast, 35 of us got together to schmooze, swap ideas, dis­cuss busi­ness and con­sider how to advance the social good. (Above is a photo I took of the gath­er­ing.) I was hon­ored to be the first guest speaker.

I talked about social media and the rise of the Shar­ing Econ­omy, begin­ning with a trip back on the Way­back Machine to Feb­ru­ary 2005 — just four short years ago — when Glenn Fleish­man, a tech­nol­ogy jour­nal­ist in Seat­tle, was hit with a $10,000 monthly bill from his ISP because one of his videos became pop­u­lar. (I’m not sure of the amount and couldn’t find it in a search but remem­ber that an online fund-raiser was held to pay it was.) That was the way it was: cre­ate a video peo­ple want to see, and you were penal­ized for it.

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As part of my explo­ration of brand­ing and com­mu­ni­ca­tion around the world, I am start­ing a series of inter­views with as many Euro­pean and world-wide movers-and-shakers as are will­ing to sub­mit them­selves to my bar­rage of prob­ing questions.

I was inspired to start this series of inter­views while at lunch with today’s inter­vie­wee, Mar­tin Oet­ting, part­ner and direc­tor research at trnd. We met at a bistro in Pren­zlauer Berg, a trendy neigh­bor­hood in Berlin, where Mar­tin lives. We ate and talked and real­ized we had both a lot of thing and a lot of peo­ple in com­mon. After we both ped­aled away on our bikes, it occurred to me that it would be super cool to be able to share all of this great stuff with you – and it would be great to be able to ask a bunch of ques­tions to as many peo­ple in the brand­ing, new media, and com­mu­ni­ca­tions as possible.

With no fur­ther ado, here’s my inter­view with Mar­tin Oet­ting:

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Last month at the DLD con­fer­ence I had the oppor­tu­nity to speak to Con­stan­tin Bjerke, founder of TheCrane.tv.  TheCrane.tv is a new online video mag­a­zine all about con­tem­po­rary cul­ture that is set to launch in March and plans to fea­ture high cal­iber con­tent on the top­ics of Cul­ture, Art & Design, Fash­ion, Lifestyle, Travel, Ideas and “Green”/Ecology around the globe.  TheCrane.tv hopes to raise the bar for supe­rior video con­tent on the Web with what they are refer­ring to as ”Tal­ent Gen­er­ated Con­tent.”  Con­stan­tin describes Tal­ent Gen­er­ated Con­tent by say­ing that all of the site’s con­tent ”is pro­duced by peo­ple that actu­ally know what they’re doing, both in terms of qual­ity of the film and in terms of the con­tent.”  Cre­atives from around the world are invited to share their films, videos and ani­ma­tions on any of the fore­men­tioned top­ics.  TheCrane.tv is a unique mag­a­zine because it is com­pletely video based.  You don’t have to read arti­cles but can sim­ply “sit back and enjoy the ride” as Con­stan­tin puts it.

Aside from offer­ing high qual­ity, high cal­iber con­tent, TheCrane.tv will also serve as a plat­form for tal­ented video and film­mak­ers to show­case their tal­ent and advance their careers.  Con­trib­u­tors can use the site to find an audi­ence, net­work with like-minded cre­atives from around the world, share ideas, col­lab­o­rate and inspire one another.  Addi­tion­ally, the site is cur­rently in nego­ti­a­tions for a mobile video dis­tri­b­u­tion deal via 3G net­works and has sev­eral TV and other dis­tri­b­u­tion deals in the works as well.  TheCrane.tv also offers con­trib­u­tors the oppor­tu­nity to make money through rev­enue share.

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The advance guard of the blo­gos­phere were afraid that they missed the blog­ging and social media wave back in 2006 when I wrote Surf­ing as a Metaphor for the State of the Blo­gos­phere and Don’t Worry You Didn’t Miss the Height of the Blo­gos­phere, which assured folks that the height was nowhere in sight (for­give me, I am from Hawaii):

Truth is, in terms of the height of the blo­gos­phere, it isn’t even a wave yet. A few peo­ple have caught the wave already, but it is just form­ing. It cer­tainly hasn’t crested! It is far from curl­ing. The wave is still only acces­si­ble to the top 10%, but the real mar­ket is always in that 80%.

Well, maybe we have come upon the tip­ping point, accord­ing to Jay Der­agon in his arti­cle, Has McK­in­sey Cre­ated A Tip­ping Point?

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When I real­ized that I could down­load the OPML file from the Power 150 site and then hack it around into a con­tact list of over 900 of the top adver­tis­ing, mar­ket­ing, PR, and SEO blog­gers on the planet, I did so.

Ever since, I have been sched­ul­ing calls with all of the folks I have been admir­ing on a daily basis. Two days ago I spent an hour on the horn with Lee Hop­kins, “one of Australia’s lead­ing thinkers on com­mu­ni­ca­tion strat­egy in an online envi­ron­ment,” who is, in fact, one of the World’s lead­ing thinkers on com­mu­ni­ca­tion strat­egy in an online envi­ron­ment.  We had a great chat — and amaz­ing talk!

At the end, Lee asked me if he could blog the con­ver­sa­tion and I jumped at the oppor­tu­nity and late last night Lee pub­lished Is email mar­ket­ing still rel­e­vant in a 2.0 world? which is not only the most com­plete descrip­tion of what we at Abra­ham Har­ri­son LLC do on a daily basis but it is said in a bet­ter, more com­pre­hen­sive, way than I could even con­ceive of doing myself.  Here it is, in full.  Be sure to visit (and sub­scribe to) Bet­ter Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Results, Lee Hopkin’s blog.

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We think of Socialmedia.biz as a work in progress. As we build out the site over the com­ing months, we have a vision of where we want to go, but there are lots of dif­fer­ent routes we could take.

So we wel­come your thoughts and input. What would you like to see on a site devoted to news and analy­sis of social media? Here are some possibilities:

• inter­views with indus­try leaders
• resources, tools and how-tos that explain how to use social media
• wid­gets that pull up social media head­lines from around the Web
• case stud­ies of how social media is used inside companies
• suc­cess­ful mar­ket­ing cam­paigns using social media (and oth­ers that have flopped)
• guest posts or videos by other experts show­cased here
• other ideas?

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Welcome to the new Socialmedia.biz blog!

I’m happy to announce that Socialmedia.biz is now a group blog, with a wealth of tal­ented con­trib­u­tors, as well as a net­work of busi­ness strat­egy con­sul­tants who under­stand the social media needs of large and mid­size companies.

I started blog­ging in May 2001 when Dave Winer, the father of blog­ging, gave me a free User­Land Manila blog. Since then, I hopped to Mov­able­Type and Type­Pad, chang­ing the name from New Media Mus­ings to Socialmedia.biz in 2005 because of the fast-paced changes in the medi­a­s­phere. (Thanks for the 1 mil­lion page views, Ben, Mena and SixApart.)

Today we’re throw­ing the switch on this new Word­Press blog, and I believe this will be the last blog­ging plat­form I move to, bar­ring some unex­pected sur­prise. Word­Press has become an aston­ish­ingly rich open source plat­form, with new advances, tools and wid­gets com­ing at a rapid clip from a global cadre of vol­un­teers. (And, if you’re won­der­ing, we’re using wordpress.org and host­ing it our­selves at Blit­zLo­cal.)

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