The Australian and New Zealand edition of US style bible Nylon magzine has closed down, according to a report in the Australian.
Nylon is an very successful fashion, lifestyle and arts magazine that was started in New York in 1999 (one of the founders was model Helena Christensen).
The publisher of the Australian/New Zealand edition has blamed the availability of the US edition of the magazine on the Nylon web site and MySpace before the Australian edition even hit the shelves.
I know hindsight has 20/20 vision, but did the publisher really have spend several hundred thousand dollars to find out the bleeding obvious?
The US House of Representatives has voted to ban the use of social networking sites in publicly funded organizations, such as schools and libraries. The ban comes in response to several cases of predators using social networking sites, such as MySpace, to meet young people.
The proposed law will forbid schools and libraries from allowing young people to access web sites with chat rooms or social networking functionality. Adults will still be able to access these services, but will need permission.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will determine which sites will fall under the control of the new Act.
An interesting article in the New York Times argues that blogging fits naturally into a CEO’s working week, and should be a tool used to lead the company and to communication directly with the world at large.
Central to the article’s argument is the example of Jonathan I Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, who is praised for his use of blogging to promote Sun’s products, discuss industry trends, and engage with allies and adversaries.
Schwartz is quoted as saying: “My number one job is to be a communicator, I don’t understand how a CEO would not blog if committed to open communication.”
Take a dash of American Idol, add a few drops of YouTube and MySpace, and what you get is something pretty close to the newly launched Karaoke site SingShot.
SingShot provides Karaoke tracks to many popular songs and allows you to record your own voice over the top of these tracks. It even provides the words (a la Karaoke). You can then share your recording with other people, either at SingShot or by pasting code into your own site (be it MySpace or your own web site). A very clever interface allows you to do all of this online, in real time.
Wired has published David L. Sifry’s (founder and CEO of Technorati) top five tips for getting onto Technorati’s top 100.
They include:
- React quickly to mainstream blogs and other well-known blogs
- Make your posts easy to read
- Link to other sites
- Optimise for search engines
- Post as often as you can
Everyone wants to be MySpace, or more precisely, everyone wants to reach MySpace’s young and hip demographic.
Expected to launch on September 6, MTV’s new social networking service will be called MTV Flux, and will first be trailed in the UK to see how well it performs. It will target a 16 to 25-year-old audience.
MTV Flux will allow its members to exchange music and video clips via computer and mobile phone (similar to the way in which existing social networking sites work). The key difference is that members will also be able to influence what videos are shown on the corresponding TV channel.
A company selling nutritional and natural food products emailed me recently wanting to know how to market its products using MySpace. It’s a topic that a number of companies and individuals are probably thinking about, so I thought it would be useful to put some key points down in a blog.
First, you need to have a marketing strategy in place, so that means covering off the old 4Ps - product, price, place and promotion. You need a product that meets the needs of your customers, at a price the intended customers a willing to pay, available at the right place, at the right time, in the right quantities. And of course you need some way of informing your intended customers about what you have to offer.
While we don’t need any more proof that social networking sites can be used to start what Malcolm Gladwell calls social epidemics in his book The Tipping Point, here’s an interesting news item on sohh.com about Hip-Hop artist Grafh, who uses MySpace to promote his music.
Two days after posting his “MySpace Jumpoff”, a song for his MySpace fans, music stations around the US started playing the song.
Sure, Grafh is a known talent, but it is interesting how he’s used MySpace to generate interest in his music in the “real world” - without even intending to.
Steve Rubel made an interesting point about how the blogosphere, and its cousins vod casting and pod casting, are changing the talent marketplace in a post about Amanda Congdon, though most of his readers (at least according to their comments) seemed to miss this salient point.
Steve’s contention was that the talent marketplace is being flattened.
What I think is even more exciting is that the blogosphere and its cousins will not only make the talent market flatter, but also much larger. We are talking about a global market after all.
What’s stopping the creative industries from picking and choosing “talent” from anywhere in the world?
Yahoo is treating the blogosphere seriously enough to email anyone who has blogged about MySpace becoming the number one site in the US (see my blog post at www.myspaceismyplace.com).
Today I received an email from Yahoo’s PR agency, Outcast Communications, stating that the Hitwise report was misleading because it compared hits to myspace.com with hits to just Yahoo’s email gateway, rather than all of Yahoo’s online properties.
Outcast Communications has very cleverly, and in a very targetted way, used the blogosphere to counter a story that was damaging to Yahoo.