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media file 9.28.09 | Collaboration 2.0: A new paradigm for sustainability

Collaboration 2.0: A new paradigm for sustainability

On the Harvard Business site, global outsourcing executive Vineet Nayar says that smart companies everywhere are recognizing the need to reinvent and realign their relationships with stakeholders along democratic lines, creating in the process a new ethic of shared vision, risk, and reward that will render obsolete traditional attitudes about competition. Nayar labels this new paradigm “collaboration 2.0.”

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports for business and non-profit executives, media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the emergence of social innovation as a driving force reshaping the process of creating value in global markets. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious.

more media file links for September 28, 2009:

Four rules for constructive competition

Observing the current political scramble to avoid real innovation in health care, Havas Media Lab’s Umair Haque offers four rules he thinks will increasingly define the competitive environment of the 21st century. These include: Innovation over protectionism; “thick value” over “thin value”; awesome products and services over clever business models; and ethics over expedience as the foundation for strategy. Haque writes in his Edge Economy blog on the Harvard Business site.

Introducing “web squared”

On the Forbes site, web 2.0 promoter Tim O’Reilly reaches into the future and names it “web squared”: a just-dawning era in which the building blocks of web 2.0--open platforms and social networks--are married to new technologies that provide a sense of place and belonging to users currently overwhelmed by the Internet’s undifferentiated abundance. Among these new advancements: GPS, which turns every smart phone into a place-based directory of friends and potential experiences; and the “smart grid,” which makes it possible to update one’s current and emerging interests in real time. The combination of these advancements, plus others, will geometrically increase the importance of digital technology in our daily pursuit of a fulfilling life.

Inside P&G’s new values-based strategy

On the Harvard Business site, professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter tears the wrapper off a new strategy that consumer giant Procter & Gamble has introduced to jump-start global growth. Taking a cue from the socially responsible business movement, P&G has adopted a “purpose-inspired growth strategy” with the goal of “touching and improving more consumers’ lives in more parts of the world... more completely.” As company insiders see it, the new strategy is not a departure from previous practice but an advancement of it, reflecting P&G’s 171-year effort to deliver superior customer value. What has changed? The company’s definition of “value.”

Change your mind, and the rest will follow

On Seth Godin’s blog, the marketing guru describes what comes first. Is it great execution, as so many business authorities have declaimed? No. It’s proper attitude, without which tactics and execution mean nothing. After attitude come approach, goals, and strategy. Then tactics and execution. Get the order of values right; you can make a lot of mistakes along the way and still come out smelling sweet. Start from the bottom of the hierarchy, and sooner or later your work will stink.

Emerging markets will surge post-crisis

Emerging markets will emerge from the global economic crisis in a position to put huge growth numbers on the board, according to a report by McKinsey Global Institute. While developed economies will still be recovering from the drop in global equities to almost 50 percent of their 2008 value, and the reduction in cross-border capital flows by almost 80 percent during the same period, emerging economies will have largely avoided the root causes of these problems, and as a result will be well positioned to gain share as markets rebound.

What both sides are missing in the pay wall debate

On MediaShift Idea Lab, Knight News Challenge winner Martin Moore pokes holes in the ideological barriers erected by both sides in the increasingly divisive “pay wall” debate. On one side, corporate media executives want to turn back the clock to a time when media profitability was driven by scarcity and control; on the other side, technologists, media activists, bloggers, and others seek to position information abundance as an emergent human right. Entrenched in their positions, neither side seems capable of recognizing the opportunities that exist to add value to both the customer experience and the public good by extending the findability and usefulness of content through enhanced metadata, mashups, and other readily deployable techniques.

More proof that the Long Tail exists... only in Chris Anderson’s mind

Knowledge@Wharton gives yet another drubbing to Wired editor Chris Anderson’s much trumpeted, but still completely unproven, Long Tail theory. For a $1 million prize offered by online movie distributor Netflix, Wharton researchers analyzed whether or not Netflix sales data--which Anderson used to justify the theory in his 2004 book--could actually support the claim that the virtually unlimited choice made possible via digital commerce would lead consumers to select niche products in greater numbers than they do in the offline world. Not true for Netflix, said the Wharton wonks. Instead, the Pareto Principle--aka, the 80/20 rule--applied with a vengeance to the Netflix data. The problem with Anderson’s theory, said the researchers, is that products get into the Long Tail for good reasons... nobody’s ever heard of them, and nobody cares. Recommendation engines can only reflect tastes, not fundamentally change them.

media file 9.10.08: The semantic web, for real

Introducing Ubiquity

On the Mozilla Labs blog, Head of User Experience Aza Raskin discusses Ubiquity, a natural-language interface for Mozilla browsers that gives users the ability to create their own mashups on the fly, tapping existing open APIs that developers currently employ to create site-hosted mashups. Raskin says that the experiment promises to usher in a new era of “user-centric” browsing, in which users tell the browser what tasks they want to accomplish, rather than what information on the web they want to find.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports that shed light on the intersection between open media and global tribes, two phenomena that together are giving birth to a new kind of business: "social enterprise 2.0."

Hosted on Delicious, this repository is meant to be a resource for media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the impact of open media and social networks on global communications and business culture. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious. We publish media file links as we discover them.

Please suggest links to include in the database, and please also send your comments on how to make this resource more useful for you.

more media file links for September 10, 2008:

Six Degrees of Separation Is Now Three

TechCrunch reports on a study by French mobile firm O2 that updates the “six degrees of separation” meme. According to the study, the average person is now connected to others by three degrees of separation or less, via social networks of work, family, and friendship. When the “six degrees” concept was first promulgated in 1967, mobile phones, online social networks, and other fixtures of contemporary wired society had not yet been invented.

How the Music Business Spent the Summer Killing Itself

To read Advertising Age’s Simon Dumenco describe it, the music industry has formed yet another circular firing squad, placing streaming-music sites Muxtape and Pandora in the center. By securing rules forcing streaming-media sites to pay steep “performance royalties,” the music industry threatens to snuff out a venue that encourages users to sample a broad range of songs and artists, beyond the single-download mentality of iTunes or the narrow, hit-driven repertoire of most terrestrial radio (which is not saddled with performance royalties). The problem, Dumenco writes, is that music industry executives are delusional--clinging to a past that is gone and not likely to return, instead of exploring paths to future revenue.

Magazine Web Traffic Continues To Rise

Unique visitors to magazine web sites rose 8.5 percent in the second quarter of 2008 versus the same period in 2007, according to a report released by the Magazine Publishers Association and summarized on MediaPost. Based on site traffic data compiled by Nielsen Online on 314 consumer magazine brands, the report states that total magazine web site reach rose to 69.7 million people or 42.2 percent of the US Internet population, compared with 64.2 million people or 40.5 percent penetration in 2007. Average time per visitor rose 12 percent to roughly 29 minutes per month, said the report. This figure is meaningful because publishers typically report magazine usage figures in terms of minutes or hours spent reading per issue.

Participatory Philanthropy, Part I

In the first of a two-part post for MediaShift Idea Lab, Global Voices’ David Sasaki examines how so-called “crowdsourcing” strategies can give philanthropic organizations the ability to effectively vet a much broader range of charitable opportunities than is feasible through traditional project selection processes.

Participatory Philanthropy, Part II

In the second of a two-part post for MediaShift Idea Lab, Global Voices’ David Sasaki examines how so-called “crowdsourcing” strategies can give philanthropic organizations the ability to more effectively measure the social impact of their charitable activities than is possible through traditional project evaluation approaches. Crowdsourcing can supplement or potentially replace professional, consultant-driven evaluation methods with approaches that give the target beneficiary communities themselves the tools to judge the success of development and philanthropic projects.

CIA, FBI push ‘Facebook for spies’

CNN reports on A-Space, a Facebook-like, classified social network created for analysts within the 16 US intelligence agencies. The site was designed to ensure that crucial bits of intelligence data or analysis produced by individual analysts don’t get lost in the sea of information collected the various agencies. Analysts can highlight a specific piece of intelligence and share it with their “friends”--analysts working for the other agencies.

media file 9.2.08: Defining “social enterprise 2.0”

Enterprise 2.0: The Nature of the Firm

ReadWriteWeb says that the social web is destined to fundamentally restructure the way business is done--with consequences deep and wide for any for-profit or non-profit enterprise. A next generation of enterprises has emerged that is focusing on two main objectives: how to organize global scarcity into new, socially responsible markets; and how to organize business innovations into accessible solutions to today’s global social problems.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports that shed light on the intersection between open media and global tribes, two phenomena that together are giving birth to a new kind of business: "social enterprise 2.0."

Hosted on Delicious, this repository is meant to be a resource for media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the impact of open media and social networks on global communications and business culture. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious. We publish media file links as we discover them.

Please suggest links to include in the database, and please also send your comments on how to make this resource more useful for you.

more media file links for September 2, 2008:

Building the Web 2.0 Enterprise: McKinsey Global Survey Results

The McKinsey Quarterly reports on its second annual executive survey on the use of web 2.0 technologies within the enterprise. While only 21 percent of executives polled were satisfied with their web 2.0 investments, respondents who did report high satisfaction stated that their organizations were leveraging these investments to change management practices, flatten organizational structures, involve customers in product development, and tap the external expertise of suppliers and partners.

Investor Advocates Creating Issue-Specific Networks

In a quest for greater effectiveness, the corporate social responsibility movement is starting to adopt the tools and strategies of the social web, says CSRwire. Investors, activists, trade associations, and NGOs are banding together into issue-specific social networks that share research, strategies, and best practices openly with each other and invite comment from all stakeholders. This “Open SRI” model is expected to lead to new online advocacy resources involving mashups of previously proprietary data sets.

Google ally T-Mobile looks poised to compete with Apple’s App Store

VentureBeat says that cellular phone carrier T-Mobile is adopting an open software model for its next generation mobile web phones. According to the post, this move will spur a new wave of VC investment in the mobile social web.

Cut your legal fees using Y Combinator’s funding documents

Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator has adopted an “open source” strategy of placing its library of standard deal documents into the public domain, writes VentureBeat. The firm believes that this step will increase the number of fundable startups overall, and will attract the best startups to itself.

Uh-oh, Where Did Those Newspaper Web Ads Go?

Although newspaper sites are expected to post double-digit advertising growth overall in 2008, some major publishers are experiencing online revenue declines for the first time, a worrying trend for an industry that is in transition from print from web. What separates winners from losers? According to Advertising Age, the strongest organizations are furthest along in an building online advertiser base independent from print, whereas the weakest organizations still rely heavily on upselling print customers to the web.

Yet Another Cool Digital Newspaper Product: The Wall Street Journal, For Free, On Your BlackBerry

Silicon Alley Insider enthuses over the new Wall Street Journal Mobile Reader for the BlackBerry device, suggesting that innovative applications like this, arriving even without a revenue model, represent the kind of thinking that could eventually put the newspaper industry back on track.

Social Networks Get Down to Business

Business-to-business ad spending on online social networks is starting to heat up, according to eMarketer. The market research firm announced a new report forecasting that b2b ad spending will rise from $15 million in 2007 to $210 million in 2012. According to the report, the audience for business social networks is exploding, including broad-based professional sites like LinkedIn, but also vertical sites geared toward IT professionals, lawyers, and other professional groups, as well as horizontal consumer sites like Facebook, which is experiencing big growth in usage by business executives.

What’s the Future of Brand Journalism? Collision Content

For companies focused on the social web, “brand journalism” (journalism-like content created by for-profit and non-profit enterprises) poses some special risks. Advertising Age offers a guide to risk mitigation in an environment where brand is decidedly not in control.

media file 8.13.08: Don’t calculate; innovate!

None of Your Business Model

On MediaShift Idea Lab, MIT Media Lab researcher Christopher Csikszentmihalyi posits that the current rush to find a business model to support professional journalism may be missing the point. The most disruptive trend in the recent history of information technology--the free software movement--succeeded largely in the absence of anything resembling a conventional business model. Instead, it began by reformulating the basic notion of how software development is done, and the business models that subsequently emerged inherited the transformative efficiencies that came with free software’s movement-based approach. Media could evolve in much the same way.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports that shed light on the intersection between open media and global tribes, two phenomena that together are giving birth to a new kind of business: "social enterprise 2.0."

Hosted on Delicious, this repository is meant to be a resource for media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the impact of open media and social networks on global communications and business culture. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious. We publish media file links as we discover them.

Please suggest links to include in the database, and please also send your comments on how to make this resource more useful for you.

more media file links for August 13, 2008:

The innovation imperative

KMWorld interviews innovation guru John Kao on the moral imperative to introduce the concept of innovation to all aspects of the US economy. Why? A focus on innovation puts all stakeholders on an equal footing--and thereby advances a more just, equitable, competitive, and prosperous society.

Managing Corporate Social Networks

Here’s the news you don’t want to hear, courtesy of Harvard Business Review: When left unmanaged, corporate social networks inhibit innovation, rather than enable it. Company executives shouldn’t expect informal, interdivisional networks to spontaneously produce innovations; they must consciously manage the structure of these networks to promote innovation at all its various stages.

Japan’s super-advanced mobile web: Too unique to serve as a global blueprint?

Why has the mobile web taken off like wildfire in Japan, while in the US it’s still mostly found in Powerpoint presentations? Techcrunch identifies the key conditions that have resulted in 70 percent penetration in that market: Superior mobile web technology; great content; and a tech-savvy, demanding consumer base.

CondeNet Positions to Better Compete With Ad Networks

Feeling the hot breath of niche advertising networks like Glam Media close behind it, Conde Nast is unifying its CondeNet web holdings under a set of content-specific buys, according to Advertising Age.

Censorship: Yahoo, Microsoft, Google Agree on Code of Conduct

In the aftermath of civil liberties scandals that have tarnished their reputations in the global marketplace, ReadWriteWeb reports that the world’s three largest Internet content providers have agreed on a global code of conduct that focuses on three core components: adherence to the principles of freedom of expression and privacy; a set of common implementation guidelines; and a shared governance and accountability framework.

Green business: Scandinavia’s lateral thinkers

The Guardian dissects Sweden’s knockout success in creating a green economy with a double-digit growth rate. The keys: a consensus society that includes all stakeholders; and a commitment to profit.

media file 8.6.08: CNET founder adopts open media strategy for new content venture

Questions for Shelby Bonnie

ClickZ interviews CNET founder and former CEO Shelby Bonnie about Whisky Media, his new online media company that specializes in vertical content sites targeting young males. Whiskey Media uses open-source wiki software that allows small development teams to build community sites that can scale rapidly in size and reach by providing a structured framework for managing user-submitted content.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports that shed light on the intersection between open media and global tribes, two phenomena that together are giving birth to a new kind of business: "social enterprise 2.0."

Hosted on del.icio.us, this repository is meant to be a resource for media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the impact of open media and social networks on global communications and business culture. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on del.icio.us. We publish media file links as we discover them.

Please suggest links to include in the database, and please also send your comments on how to make this resource more useful for you.

more media file links for August 6, 2008:

P&G Changes Its Game

BusinessWeek reports on what it calls “one of the most intriguing change management efforts going on in Corporate America today”: The introduction of “design thinking” into Proctor & Gamble’s business strategy. Design thinking involves applying design principles to business problems, developing several creative approaches to a problem and testing and refining these approaches with stakeholders’ feedback.

It’s Time for a Revenue Revolution

MediaShift Idea Lab’s Dan Pacheco proposes that local newspapers look beyond advertising--which typically attracts less than half of a community’s businesses--to “business marketing,” which all businesses need and online media are well suited to deliver.

Helping the Almost-Journalists Do Journalism

The Center for Citizen Media’s Dan Gillmor discusses the renaissance of so-called “advocacy journalism”: journalism-quality reporting, done by non-profit advocacy groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, among others, which is showing potential to fill the information gap created by the implosion of traditional journalism.

NAA: Newspaper Sites’ Q2 Traffic Up 12.2 Percent Over 2007; Numbers Are Flat Compared To Q1

paidContent reports on Q2 2008 newspaper web site audience statistics from the Newspaper Association of America. Newspaper sites now reach more than 40 percent of all Internet users, but growth has cooled off in reach, page views, and advertising, a trend that is complicating efforts to transition online.

Newspapers Think Locally for Online Ads

The Wall Street Journal reports that newspapers’ struggles to replace declining print advertising revenue with online ads is being thwarted by competition from Google, Craigslist, and other pure Internet plays. Newspapers saw their share of the online market decline to 27 percent from 36 percent in 2006.

Craigslist CEO: Our Real Estate Listings Are Booming

Silicon Alley Insider talks with Craigslist’s Jim Buckmaster about the state of the business. Top line: Worldwide, Craigslist now draws 50 million users and 12 billion page views per month; 2008 is the first year where compound annual growth has not exceeded 100 percent.

EBay Launches Dedicated International Ad Division

ClickZ reports that EBay has launched a London-based group to manage multinational advertising campaigns across the company’s international portfolio of sites, with a combined global reach of 80 million users.

Brandstreaming: What Is It & Who’s Doing It?

ReadWriteWeb discusses “brandstreaming,” a new marketing methodology that takes advantage of so-called “lifestreaming” applications such as Friendfeed and Twitter to deliver what it calls “a consistent flow of content created by a brand.”

could mashups be the silver bullet that saves old media?

I spent the last few days at the NetSquared conference in San Jose, discussing and blogging about the intersection between the social web and the emerging community of non-profit and for-profit social enterprises that are delivering new, media-rich solutions to problems of social justice, government transparency, and environmental sustainability. As it has become clear over the last few years through this conference, many of the best solutions from this sector are coming in the form of mashups—aggregations of disparate data sources into applications that provide new views on social problems. Most of the mashups featured at this year’s conference involved merging multiple sources of publicly available, government-produced data—frequently, in tandem with Google Maps, whose API has proven wildly popular for visualizing the real-world effects of legislative decisions or governmental incompetence, for example.

In the middle of all this richness, we learned this week that the New York Times is planning to release an API to make it possible for third-party developers to access its vast database of original content. It made me wonder what these talented developers at the NetSquared conference would be able to do with such a repository. And what would it mean to the New York Times specifically to have such talent set loose to figure out how to unlock the undeniable value hidden away in its vaults?

Setting aside the Times for the moment, for most publishers currently the idea of techies extracting the juice out of their archives might seem like the final straw—the last insult and injury that puts them out of business. That’s because—for print publishers specifically—their main acquaintance with concept of APIs is via RSS, which is a very low-level specification that nevertheless allows people to get pretty high value out of their content. Because they have added no value on top of this spec, RSS has played a central role in driving down the value of copyrighted content, making it virtually impossible for topical information providers—say, the Times—to charge users for anything at all for their expensive talent and labor.

But real programmatic interfaces that allowed third-party developers to create innovative, automated mashups from different, high-value content sources would undoubtedly lead to a breakthrough in media creativity that would be worth real money, and would spawn an entirely new class of killer media applications that would revitalize the case for investing in professionally produced content. When people drop the phrase, “Web 3.0,” they are referring precisely to this—content databases with programmatic interfaces that talk to each other. What they don’t say, though, is just how revolutionary this development could be for anyone who believes in the content business and has the imagination to reach outside of the four walls of their own enterprise to embrace new partners who can help them create new and exciting products that people will want to pay for.

live blogging at NetSquared, Day 1

I am live blogging this week at the NetSquared conference in Santa Clara, May 27-28. NetSquared's tag line is "remixing the web for social change," and its mission is "to spur responsible adoption of social web tools by social benefit organizations."

This year's conference is being attended by about 400 technologists and changemakers within nonprofit organizations and social enterprises. So far it has featured some amazing presentations, including one by Cesar Castro, research director for the Institute for the Future, entitled "Open Innovation in Civil Society." I will blog more about this in a few days.

A key aspect of this conference is something called the "NetSquared Mashup Challenge," where nonprofits compete with each other to create the most socially impactful aggregations. This year, 21 mashups have been selected for peer review at the event. According to the smart money, this year's mashup-to-beat is something called Social Actions, an aggregation of over 29 peer-to-peer social-change campaigns.

If you are living in Silicon Valley, and you are looking for a good cause to support, then check out NetSquared.

media file: may 27, 2008

media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports that shed light on the intersection between open media and global tribes, two phenomena that together are giving birth to a new kind of business: "social enterprise 2.0."

Hosted on del.icio.us, this repository is meant to be a resource for media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the impact of open media and social networks on global communications and business culture.

You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on del.icio.us. We publish media file links daily as we discover them, and once per week in digest format.

Please suggest links to include in the database, and please also send your comments on how to make this resource more useful for you.

media file links for may 27, 2008:

It's Time To Rethink Copyright Law

Michael Arrington from TechCrunch reflects on the complicated issues behind the YouTube-Viacom copyright infringement lawsuit. YouTube--owned by Google--is clearly applying the Google success model to video, a strategy that could damage the market, but...

Internet Businesses Adopt Social Sigma

Analyst Mary E. Shacklett blogs on Internet Evolution about "Social Sigma"--an online quality assurance strategy pioneered by Forrester and others that methodically employs user feedback to shape product development and customer service.

Mass Mag Exodus Continues as Brands Follow Men Online

Advertising Age Digital reports that, as young men continue to abandon special-interest magazines in favor of online entertainment sites like Heavy, marketers are shifting their budgets forcefully into digital media.

Everywhere, JPG - magazines for the future

SF Gate reports on 8020 Publishing, a startup funded by CNET's Halsey Minor that marries traditional print publishing with user-generated content and online community--presenting a new business model for special-interest media.

New York Times API Coming

ReadWriteWeb reports that the NY Times is planning to open up its archive to third-party developers via an API that it plans to release this fall.

CNN, Newsweek editor starting international show

The AP reports that Fareed Zakaria is launching a weekly international news program on CNN that is geared toward a US audience, and designed to fill a "huge gaping hole in American television, which is 95 percent of the rest of the world," Zakaria says.

Facebook To Open Source Facebook Platform

TechCrunch reports that Facebook is planning to turn its developer platform into an open-source project, a "nearly inevitable response" to OpenSocial, an open-source platform backed by Google, MySpace, and Yahoo.

Chinese local review site Dianping: A lot more than a "Yelp for China"

VentureBeat reports on Dianping, a review site in China that offers features not found on Yelp or other US-based review sites. Dianping also takes advantage of the ability to buy top rank in organic search results from search engine Baidu.

Social Networks' Sway May Be Underestimated

The Washington Post reports on new research in medical sociology showing that traditional social networks--families, friends, co-workers--can have a profound impact on individuals' behavior, extending as far out as three degrees of separation.

media file: may 18-25, 2008

media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports that shed light on the intersection between open media and global tribes, two phenomena that together are giving birth to a new kind of business: "social enterprise 2.0."

Hosted on del.icio.us, this repository is meant to be a resource for media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the impact of open media and social networks on global communications and business culture.

You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on del.icio.us. We publish media file links daily as we discover them, and once per week in digest format.

Please suggest links to include in the database, and please also send your comments on how to make this resource more useful for you.

media file links for the week of may 18-25, 2008:

The Importance Of A Competitive Search Market

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch warns that long-term domination of the search engine market by Google would likely put the health of the entire Internet ecosystem at risk.

Electronic Arts buys Hands-On Mobile Korea

VentureBeat reports that Electronic Arts has purchased mobile gaming company Hands-On Korea for an undisclosed sum, furthering its global push into the mobile gaming market.

Online video co. Brightcove expands into Japanese market

VentureBeat reports that the online video platform company Brightcove has launched a Japanese subsidiary.

What Does Popular Culture Have to Do With Civic Media?

Henry Jenkins, the author of Convergence Culture, reflects on the differences and similarities between ideologically motivated online communities and those brought together through a shared interest in some aspect of popular culture.

Greendex: Survey of Sustainable Consumption

National Geographic announces the results of its global tracking study of sustainable consumer behavior among 14,000 individuals in 14 countries in both the developing and developed worlds. US consumers ranked last in the study.

Consumers Want Brands To Solve Climate Crisis

LOHAS Weekly reports on a Havas Media study that shows consumers expect global brands to take responsibility for solving the climate crisis, and by a large margin would rather buy from companies that are taking credible action in this area.

Flock More Than Doubles Its Funding

TechCrunch reports that Flock, the so-called "social browser" based on the Mozilla open-source platform, has raised $15 million in venture funding, bringing its total institutional investment to about $28 million.

VC investment in China increases by 46 percent

VentureBeat analyzes a Dow Jones VentureSource report on the growth in VC investment in China in Q1 2008. Growth is being led by deals in the media and advertising space.

News unfiltered: YouTube embraces citizen journalism

Ars Technica reports that Google property YouTube has launched Citizen News, a channel devoted to video content from citizen journalists from around the world.

Statistics on Google's OpenSocial platform end users and Facebook users

Results of a recent Rapleaf study that shows that Facebook and other social networks are used disproportionately by women vs. men.

The Social Media Gender Gap

Rapleaf CEO Auren Hoffman analyzes the results of a study his firm conducted that shows that Facebook and other social networks are used disproportionately by women vs. men.

Current TV: Ad Revenue Drops At Al Gore's Network; Losses Widen En Route To IPO

PaidContent reports that Current TV suffered a decline in ad revenues in Q1 2008 over the prior-year quarter, and more than doubled its operating loss.

YouTube Launches Site for India

PC World reports on Google's launch of a localized version of YouTube in India.

Sulekha merges Facebook and Craigslist in India

VentureBeat reports on a social network that reaches 6 million people of Indian descent around the globe, making it India's largest social web play.

Facebook's New Friends Abroad

BusinessWeek reports on Facebook's international expansion. The social network is foregoing a conventional localization strategy in favor of an approach that globalizes the site in multiple languages.

When Tech Innovation Has a Social Mission

John Markoff of the NY Times covers the phenomenon that < rm > calls "social enterprise 2.0": a new kind of organization that merges the social purpose of a traditional non-profit with the business model of a for-profit web enterprise.

A digital dodge for piracy

Variety reports on a speech given by News Corporation president Peter Chernin. He emphasized that media companies should be spending their time developing new business models, rather than protecting the old.

Local News Site Outside.in Gets $3 Million, New CEO

Silicon Alley Insider reports that hyperlocal news site, aka "place-based blogging site," outside.in has raised a new venture round and is launching a new set of tools and features geared toward local bloggers and publishers.

Blogs: Raking In Ad Dollars. Sort Of, Maybe, We Think

Silicon Alley Insider analyzes a recent eMarketer forecast that blog advertising will grow by 30% next year to $531 million.

New News Corp ad network to court financial sites

Reuters reports that News Corporation plans to launch an international online advertising network serving about 30 online financial publishers.

Why old media is running scared of Google

CNET quotes Piper Jaffrey analyst Gene Munster saying that Google has forced traditional media companies to realize that they must act immediately or lose relevance on the Internet.

Why Facebook Is Even Bigger than You Think

Fast Company interviews Stanford professor BJ Fogg on his theory that Facebook is ushering in a new era of "mass interpersonal persuasion," which will rewrite the rules of marketing as we currently know them.

Google's Search Share Rises To 67.9% In April

InformationWeek reports that Google earned 67.9% of the US search engine market in April 2008--an increase over both the prior month and prior year--while competitors Yahoo and Microsoft experienced declines to 20.3% and 6.3%, respectively.

AOL seeks growth in shift from mass site to niches

The AP reports that AOL is shifting its programming strategy away from a few broad, mass-reach offerings to multiple niche content sites. So far, the strategy is paying off in growth in page views and unique visitors, but not in ad dollars.

Hit Pause On The Evil Button: Google Assists In Arrest Of Indian Man

TechCrunch reports that a 22-year-old Indian professional was arrested for making a post on Google-owned Orkut that allegedly disparaged politician Sonia Gandhi. Google assisted Indian authorities in tracing the post to him.

live blogging at NetSquared

I am live blogging this week at the NetSquared conference in Santa Clara, May 27-28. If you don't know about it, NetSquared is a project of TechSoup, the much-loved non-profit technology support organization founded by Daniel Ben-Horin. NetSquared's tag line is "remixing the web for social change," and its mission is "to spur responsible adoption of social web tools by social benefit organizations." If you want to learn about the merger of social media and global social values, this is the organization to check out.