The Social

In a couple of hours, I'll be off to Chicago to cover a different kind of social media: the third annual Second Life Community Convention (SLCC), a gathering of over 800 enthusiasts of the virtual world. It's a phenomenon that saw a dramatic rise and subsequent backlash in the past year, touted by media and business first as a revolution in communications, marketing, and socialization and then as an enormous three-dimensional ghost town.

So what's going to happen at the first SLCC to take place in Second Life's "post-mainstream" age? We'll see. I'… Read more

Throughout Facebook's recent and meteoric rise, one of the detractors raised by skeptics has continually been the social networking site's failure to show concrete proof of a strong revenue model.

But that all might change very soon.

According to a report on the Wall Street Journal's Web site, the social network is "quietly" assembling a new advertising model that will take advantage of the copious personal information that its members post on their profiles. These new advertisements would not be in the form of traditional graphical advertisements but would rather pepper the "news feed&… Read more

In an appeal to the coveted youth vote in the upcoming presidential elections, MySpace and MTV announced Thursday that they have joined forces for a series of "one-on-one dialogues" with all the major candidates from both political parties--televised and Webcast events in which presidential hopefuls will answer questions from MySpace members and MTV watchers. Formally, it's a collaboration between MySpace's "Impact" political channel and MTV's "Choose or Lose" election effort (which it has been operating since the dinosaur days of the 1992 election), and it's the first collaboration that the … Read more

Could this finally be what breaks Twitter out of the early-adopter geek set and into the population at large? The microblogging service has partnered with the inarguably mainstream MTV for its upcoming Video Music Awards (or VMAs), according to an e-mail sent to Twitter members by founder Biz Stone.

So far, the partnership isn't totally clear. A Twitter account has been set up for the VMA "Moon Man" mascot, the pop-culture awards' equivalent of the Oscar statue. In Stone's e-mail, he elaborated that the VMA Twittering will expand, too: "(MTV has) some fun ideas which … Read more

Social networking site Bebo, with a 36-million-strong member base centered primarily in the U.K., announced Tuesday that it has partnered with Microsoft on a new instant messaging initiative. The Windows Live Messenger service, formerly known as MSN Messenger, is now the fuel behind Bebo's new internal IMing operations.

Bebo users who have hooked their Windows Live usernames up to the service have an "IM Me" button on their profiles that they can use to communicate with other members in-browser if they're online, but Bebo's IM is also open to members without Windows Live Messenger. … Read more

Despite the obligatory missing vowel, bacn (pronounced "bacon") isn't a hot Web 2.0 start-up. It's "the middle class of e-mail," the stuff that isn't really spam because it's not totally unwanted, but isn't really wanted either. Case in point: Pownce messages, Facebook friend requests, Amazon "recommendations."

Unlike many dorky tech terms, the origins of bacn aren't especially apocryphal; we've got a real (electronic) paper trail. The term arose during a discussion at Podcamp2 Pittsburgh earlier in August and slipped onto my radar via Twitter feeds from … Read more

TechCrunch, the industry blog run by Fixture 2.0 Michael Arrington, is a decidedly Valley institution, but its hardware sibling CrunchGear skews toward New York--if only because that's where its writers are based. Last night, the gadget blog threw its first-birthday bash on the upper floor of the bi-level Manhattan watering hole Red Sky, located a stone's throw away from CNET's offices on the outskirts of the afterwork-bar-heavy Murray Hill neighborhood.

The whole event had the feel of a tech-media mixer--like a more casual Founders Club or a less businesslike Meetup--to the point where it was … Read more

Facebook, according to a post on the company blog, has added new functionality to its internal messaging service that allows you to share select content and send messages to e-mail addresses rather than just other Facebook accounts. This means, effectively, that Facebook junkies can do all of their e-mailing through the social network's interface without needing to open up their e-mail accounts at all.

The person with the e-mail address in question will then be able to read the message and respond without needing to sign up for a Facebook account. Members can also use the enhanced messaging to … Read more

Comedy house National Lampoon, which has brought the entertainment world everything from Animal House to the more recent Van Wilder, is courting the babes. A Media Week article details the brand's impending launch of 8228, the latest addition to the online National Lampoon Humor Network, which is a network of gossip and entertainment sites for a female audience.

We're guessing the tone will be a little different from TeamSugar or iVillage.

Expanding its Web presence is inherently a good move for National Lampoon: Van Wilder was a hit on DVD among the college crowd, but the once-iconic comedy … Read more