A note of advice to parents of teenagers: Like me, Marianne Richmond has an in-house focus group of long-time Facebookers. And they think letting parents onto Facebook is as weird as I do. She writes, “According to my kids, MySpace is for weidos, businesses and other adults. Facebook is for normal kids to hang out with their friends in a place where their parents or any other adults are not permitted. According to my in-home panel of experts, permitting parents on Facebook diminishes the attraction exponentially for kids; a complete lowering of standards. Perspective is a wonderful thing.”

Unlike Marriane, I have not informed my focus group that I have actually registered on Facebook “for research purposes.” The 16-year-old has previously informed me that he will put himself up for adoption if I did so. (Of course, I said, “I will help you fill out the papers.”)

Here’s my suggestion for parents of teenagers. If your old stand-by disciplinary threats are growing stale, try this one out: “Listen to me young man: If you don’t start [fill in the blank], I’ll make you friend me on Facebook.”

Technorati Tags: facebook

Dangers of playing chess: Yesterday, I read an account of a woman who died after a chess-tournament related accident in Nashville last year. Today, the NYTimes.com has an article with the headline, “Bathroom Dispute Halts Chess Championship.” Trend story?

Conflicting social contexts: Thanks to Susan Mernit’s link to this post by Danah Boyd, I am now able to articulate why I think (and this is an opinion shared by teenaged members of my family) it is a mistake for Facebook to allow me to join. I can understand the desire for Facebook founders/backers to expand beyond their initial audience: college, and then, high school students. And with MySpace (who will also let anyone join) venturing successfully beyond its indie music roots, I totally appreciate the pressure the Facebook folks must be under from their VCs to blow the top off membership. So, the only way to keep charging towards a stratospheric valuation is to allow anyone with Internet access to set up an account.

Danah provides the term I needed to articulate why I think one social network can’t be all things to all people: “Conflicting social contexts.” I believe that in addition to our desire to have public personas and to be members of the community at large, individuals also need to be members of walled-off, defined communities, families and extremely finite networks. Yes, despite my previous rantings to the contrary, people sometimes like their silos. We associate ourselves with specific brands and groups and clubs and societies and all manner of institutions in all aspects of our lives — so why online should there be one massive social network that is all things to all people?

Having just read a few books on the history of Scottish Highlands clans and having traveled the past couple weeks through their now depopulated ancestral homelands, I know their ultimate demise occurred for a wide range or reasons, but two in particular: the greed of the clan chiefs and the chance the “members” of the clans saw in North America, Australia and New Zealand to own land rather than to be serfs at the whim of the ever changing business-plans of the clan CEO and his venture backers. Lesson: When clan chiefs attempt to redefine the purpose of their clans (grazing sheep generate more revenue than grazing people), the result can be a “conflicting social context” for members of the clan, and before you know it, members of the clan are looking for a boat on which to sail off to Prince Edwards Island.

Technorati Tags: facebook, social networking

A boom in magazine coverage of online video: Is this a “niche boom” leading indicator…or a lagging one? Wired does Eric Bauman of eBaum’s World and Forbes does a lot of stories about YouTube.

Quote from the Wired story about eBaum’s World:

“Viral media is all the rage these days, and Bauman runs one of the few viral sites actually making money. Without spending a penny on direct advertising, he’s turned the high school hobby he ran out of his bedroom into one of the Internet’s top-ranked humor sites, getting 1.2 million hits a day. There’s a television pilot in the can, a book deal in negotiation, and a potential pact to bring eBaum content to cell phones. Annual ad revenue has doubled over the past year to $10 million, and the only overhead is bandwidth and salaries: Bauman is becoming a rich man. He has 30 employees who handle the coding, marketing, financial affairs, and assorted office details. He drives a shiny black Porsche Carrera. Besides gobbling up real estate around town and gas wells in Kentucky, he sponsors heavyweight boxing champ Hasim “the Rock” Rahman.”

I don’t know. There’s just something dejavuee-sounding about all of this.

However, as I’ve noted, until some of these companies are in the publicly traded marketplace, we won’t get to witness any “bust” portion of this drama — at least as the term applies to the economic cycle of boom and bust. No doubt, there will be many, many failures of the 10th and 30th and 100th version of “YouTube” for pet owners, but early and venture money being blown by startups does not a bust make.

Or, perhaps a true, small business, cottage industry can emerge where videographers and niche media firms can generate healthy margins without having to reach a mass scale. I think that’s the more interesting possibility — and story. That a company like Bauman’s can generate that type of revenue with such a low overhead is a big deal. From my in-house research, I believe eBaum’s World is to a 12-15 year old boy today what Mad magazine was 40 years ago. Except Mad paid the talent…and then owned the content. I’m sure that means nothing to Bauman. He’s going “what, me worry?” all the way to the bank.

Technorati Tags: ebaum, video, youtube

Blogging means you can’t pretend bad stuff isn’t happening: My “best practices” role-model whenever asked at conferences, “What magazine uses blogs most effectively?” is BusinessWeek. I’ve blogged here many examples of how the magazine has integrated the tools of blogging into its editorial process and how many of its reporters have discovered stories from their blogging or helped to interpret and correct stories after the fact. However, BusinessWeek and its parent McGraw-Hill, face macro challenges that can’t be solved merely by allowing its reporters to use blogs. However, when the company takes steps in facing those challenges, Bloggers like Steven Baker must comment on what’s taking place or they’ll lose their credibility. Last night, he posted the following on the blog maintained by Heather Green and him:

“I got word that something was up in an e-mail. Then I called a friend, who it turned out had just gotten fired. This is 21st century life in our branch of mass media. Twelve staffers are gone. Many of them I’ve known and worked with and admired since arriving at BW nearly 20 years ago. It’s grim, and I don’t have new analysis on the throes of mass media, at least nothing that Jeff Jarvis and Tim Porter haven’t already written. I just didn’t want you to think that we were pretending the cuts hadn’t happened, or that we didn’t care.”

I will be blogging more in the coming weeks about where I see all of this heading.

Technorati Tags: magazines

No, I don’t have a Facebook account: Just because they’ll allow anyone to sign up and you can go here and “friend me” doesn’t mean I have broken any promises to teenagers to whom I may be related. It is merely a research project in which I am participating. Really. For the record, I also don’t have a MySpace account at myspace.com/rexhammock either.

Memories: In a couple of weeks, Hammock Publishing will begin celebrating its 15th anniversary. However, Bill Hudgins has already started to get nostalgic about the good old days.

Technical announcement: During my vacation, rexblog director of hackery Patrick Ragsdale did some major behind-the-scenes overhauling that I’ll be rolling out over the coming days. Note to those who know what the following means: If you’re reading this via an RSS newsreader or anything like MyYahoo, please make sure you have subscribed to the current source of the rexblog feed (one that has “Feedburner” in the URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/rexblog_all) — visit any page of rexblog.com and click on one of the helpful links you’ll find there. I’ve been using Feedburner for many months, so if you’ve updated the feed lately, you’re fine. I’ll be making this announcement a couple of more times in the next few days.

Back in Nashville: A swell vacation was had by all. As noted in the previous post, I spent the past week-and-a-half in Scotland. (Photos: St. Andrews, Highlands and Skye, and Edinburgh.) However, I’m back now and enjoying the temporary advantages of the body-clock thing that makes one want to wake up at 4 a.m. and go do something. Speaking of travel, apparently Amanda Congdon is in Nashville this evening as part of her tour of America. I hope to drop by the 6 p.m. (at Wolfy’s) get-together (details somewhere on Nashville is Talking) but my current Greenwich Summer Time internal clock has that calibrated for a midnight party, so I don’t think I’ll be there long. Also, I’m resting up for that big Saturday morning Hands-On Nashville Blogger Team event.

Technorati Tags: amanda congdon, blogging, nashville

A world without wi-fi? For years, I kept an Earthlink dail-up account in order to connect to the Internet from hotel rooms. Then, post wi-fi and ethernet connections in hotels, about two years passed and I realized I’d never used it. I don’t even know if my computer has a modem anymore and, I’ve discovered, I wouldn’t know what to do with it, if it does. When I first started writing this post, it was last Thursday or Friday (I’ve forgotten) and I was in a wonderful little villiage in a remote part of Scotland — the beautiful Isle of Skye where every direction one turns appears more staggering than the previous. However, the whole ubiquitious wi-fi thing hasn’t hit Skye yet. Perhaps they are the wiser for it as it is definitely a holiday place — a desitnation one travels to for one purpose: getting away. I was in the little village of Portree, which is big as Isle of Skye villages go. Portree was the place my Inn keeper suggested I head for to find Internet access when he appeared dumbfounded that I’d even ask for such. I drove slowly around the few blocks of town and Macstumbler pinged some wi-fi signals, but they proved weak or restricted. So, I decided to go straight to a coffeeshop at town centre. The waitress suggested I try a store called Island Outdoors or the library. The library, of course, was my choice and, sure enough, there are six or so Dell work stations with free Internet access. I filled out a guest form and signed on. However, the computer informed me the library was closing in 8 minutes, and the Internet access was cutting off in three. So I tried Island Outdoors. A block away, I was ready to spend roughly $4 for 30 minutes of Internet access when the clerk says, “Sorry, we close in 3 minutes.” Where else should I try? I ask. The library, he says.* Hey, who needs it anyway?

(Fast forward five days.) I have been offline for longer than I can recall in the past several years. By the fourth day, I didn’t even take advantage of the keeper of another Inn’s offer to use his access to check e-mail. It’s Sunday, I thought to myself, Why bother? I am now in Edinburgh — a very, very modern wi-fi’d spot — and preparing to fly home. I just logged on to the Interent and discovered a clogged RSS newsreader. I decided to pretend the last week hasn’t happened and start all over on Thursday. It’s hard, but I’m even going to skip expressing my opinions over typically ridiculous actions of Apple lawyers during my web holiday. I’d prefer, rather, to share a few photos I’ve posted on Flickr: Dropping my daughter off at the University of St. Andrews and some photos from the Scotish Highlands and Isle of Skye.

*For future wi-fi seekers who may google upon this page in search of connectivity, I later learned I should have swung by the Bosville Hotel and Merchant Bar.

Not just a base hit, a homerun: (Pardon me while I interrupt my blogging interruption.) As I blogged earlier, Google Base has an easier way for small companies to upload their inventory list so their merchandise can show up on Google searches more reliably. Amazon has that topped: Don’t just upload a list of your merchandise: send them the merchandise and they’ll handle everything:

“Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) is a new program that makes delivering your Pro Merchant Program and WebStore orders a snap. You send your new and used products to us, and we’ll store them. As orders are placed, we’ll pick, pack and ship them to your customers from our network of fulfillment centers.”

By the way, this recalls a bit of blogging history that involved two bloggers on my favorite list, B.L. Ochman and Steve Baker.

(via: Dave Winer)

Quote of the day: (From the Official Google Base Blog) “As part of our ongoing effort to make Google Base easier to use, we launched a redesign of the Base homepage today. This doesn’t change any functionality, but will make Base easier to understand.”

Observation: Last week in blogging about the Intuit/Google “parntership,” I alluded to my belief that small businesses, which I think are the primary audience Google is trying to reach with “Base,” have been confused by exactly what it is. While the page continues to offer a simple explanation (”Google Base is a place where you can post all types of content and have it show up on Google.”), it now provides examples of how others are using it and does a much better job of holding the hand of a new user.

Technorati Tags: google, small business

Magazine notes: I’m stlll offline for a few days, however, here are a couple of magazine items.

Buy Laura’s uncle’s book: Laura Creekmore is touting her uncle’s book and graphing out her one-degrees of separation from a couple of U.S. presidents. Wait a minute, I’m one of the one-degrees. That’s a rather weak connection. However, if weak connections are what she’s after, I’ve got some more: In addition to that chat a few years ago with the current President, I at least shook hands with four other Presidents who were working a “rope line” or at some function (not fundraisers) where they did some ceremonial greetings: Carter, Reagan, Bush I and Clinton.

Sidenote: I attend the same church as two other Presidentially-related politicians: One (Lamar! Alexander) really wanted to be President a few years ago and the other (Bill Frist) still seems to fancy that notion in the near future. I don’t really know either of them, but have chatted several times with each. Oh, and how could I forget? Al Gore lives a few blocks away from me and we attend the same Apple store.

Technorati Tags: nashville