According to a report by Experian, the social networking phenomenon is set to continue booming. Newspapers better catch up with the Web 2.0 bandwagon, and develop more than simple user profiles.

Companies, including newspapers, will increasingly seek to tap this trend by developing services for niche audiences that will attract advertisers.

“Experian’s Tony Mooney said companies need to think beyond gimmicks such as setting up a Facebook profile, and need to understand the web 2.0 environment,” reported the Guardian.

“Just look at some of the marketing gaffes from last year when social network members spotted a hackneyed marketing campaign and tore it to shreds,” said Mooney.

But the report also predicts that leading social networking sites such as Facebook, Bebo and MySpace will significantly improve their organization and targeting methods, and be more attractive to advertisers.

New media proponent Jeff Jarvis has argued for the benefits of social networking for news organizations and users, and a recent study found that 43% of US journalists believe new media has affected news coverage - for good and bad.

Stay tuned for an upcoming interview with the CEO of Skyrock’s SkyBlogs, Europe’s most popular blog platform, which spun out of a traditional media company.

Source: Guardian

One Hundred Percent but Unconfirmed….hmmm

Facebook is “one hundred percent” buying Plaxo, we’ve just heard from a source.

Wow, starting your story with that sentence certainly grabs your attention, doesn’t it? VentureBeat’s managed to make a statement of “fact” without actually saying that it has confirmed the story. Nice!

Well, assuming it’s “one hunded percent” then I guess we can soon expect our Plaxo accounts to start sniffing around our business contacts and phoning home to the Facebook mothership. You see, part of the reason why Facebook would be interested in coughing-up as much as $200M for Plaxo is that the service has done a great job of convincing us to install its plugins and share our contact info.

That’s the type of info that would be very valuable to Facebook…

Mountain View, Calif.-based Plaxo could help Facebook gather data through its large user base, and through its plugins for email programs Microsoft Outlook, Mac Mail, and Thunderbird as well as a plugin for instant message service AIM, among others. Plaxo has developed technology to sync contacts through its home web site and its plugins, to create a sort of universal address book. It has also developed native mobile syncing technology for Windows Mobile and other mobile operating systems. Syncing between all of these different services is a very hard problem — that Plaxo has solved.

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  And if you would believe it, so are Japanese pop diva Ayumi Hamasaki, Bollywood queen Aishwarya Rai, US President George Bush and even Singapore’s Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew.If you type in Mr Lee’s name on the Find Friends function on the social networking site, you will find four profiles with his name - three with his photos.One of the profiles lists 13 friends - which include ‘Tony Blair’, ‘Mao Ze Dong’ and ‘Gregori Rasputin’ - the latter two being, respectively, a deceased Chinese leader and the infamous Mad Monk of Russia who was murdered in the early 20th century.An Eric Lee from Malaysia writes on this profile, ‘Err… who exactly are you ah?’, to which, ‘Mr Lee’ responds: ‘Go read your papers.’Facebook fake? Quite likely.And there are a slew of them. There is even one open profile of Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, where the only application added is an IQ test.Fake celebrity profiles made headlines recently after two bogus Facebook profiles of Bilawal Bhutto Zardari were found on the site.Bilawal is the 19-year-old son of recently-assassinated Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto. He took over his late mother’s position as party chairman of the Pakistan People’s Party.

This woman doesn’t know it, but she’s risking a lawsuit.

You, too, could be sued for thousands of dollars by the major record companies — even if you’ve never once illegally downloaded music.

That’s because at least one lawyer for the Recording Industry Association of America, the Big Four record companies’ lobbying arm and primary legal weapon, considers the copying of songs from your own CDs to your own computer, for your own personal use, to be just as illegal as posting them online for all to share, according to a federal lawsuit filed in Arizona.

Jeffrey Howell of Scottsdale stands accused of placing 54 music files in a specific “shared” directory on his personal computer that all users of KaZaA and other “peer-to-peer” software could access — pretty standard grounds for an RIAA lawsuit.

However, on page 15 of a supplemental brief responding to the judge’s technical questions about the case, the RIAA’s Phoenix lawyer, Ira M. Schwartz, states that the defendant is also liable simply for the act of creating “unauthorized copies” — by ripping songs from CDs.

Schwartz is a partner in DeConcini McDonald Yetwin & Lacy, the family firm of former Sen. Dennis DeConcini, R-Ariz.

“It is undisputed that Defendant possessed unauthorized copies of Plaintiffs’ copyrighted sound recordings on his computer,” the brief states. “Virtually all of the sound recordings on Exhibit B are in the ‘.mp3′ format. … Defendant admitted that he converted these sound recordings from their original format to the .mp3 format for his and his wife’s use. … Once Defendant converted Plaintiffs’ recording into the compressed .mp3 format and they are in his shared folder, they are no longer the authorized copies distributed by Plaintiffs.”

“I couldn’t believe it when I read that,” New York lawyer Ray Beckerman told the Washington Post. “The basic principle in the law is that you have to distribute actual physical copies to be guilty of violating copyright. But recently, the industry has been going around saying that even a personal copy on your computer is a violation.”

In other words, according to Schwartz’s logic, every single person who’s ever “ripped” a CD for portable listening on an iPod or other MP3 player could be liable for astronomical damages.

Apple itself estimated earlier this year that only 4 percent of music on iPods worldwide had been purchased through iTunes, implying that most of the rest had been ripped from CDs.

In October, Jammie Thomas, a Minnesota single mother, was ordered to pay the record companies $220,000, or $9,250 for each of 24 songs a jury found she’d shared online.

The RIAA’s own Web site is more conciliatory, but implies that the organization reserves the right to go after music “rippers” should it change its mind.

“If you make unauthorized copies of copyrighted music recordings … you could be held legally liable for thousands of dollars in damages,” it plainly states before adding that “transferring a copy onto your computer hard drive or your portable music player won’t usually raise concerns so long as the copy is made from an authorized original CD that you legitimately own [or] the copy is just for your personal use.”

However, Schwartz isn’t the only RIAA bigwig who’s recently implied that those concerns may be raised more often.

Copying a song you’ve paid for in CD form is “a nice way of saying ’steals just one copy,’” Sony BMG top lawyer Jennifer Pariser testified during cross-examination in the Jammie Thomas case in early October.

The Evolution of the Blog

by Andy Carvin

Julius Caesar’s Gallic War writings were a precursor to the modern military blog. Archive Photos/Getty Images

Martti Kainulainen

Tim Berners-Lee, developer of the World Wide Web and the first Web site, which included a “What’s New” page. AFP/Getty Images

David McNew

In 2001, Andrew Sullivan was one of the first big-name bloggers to emerge. Getty Images