My Nashville friend, Jim Brown, started a new blog today. He’s been preparing for a half-marathon in Virginia Beach on September 2 and his blog will follow his training journey. His blog will also be following another journey. Last Tuesday, June 19, Jim’s wife, Dori was diagnosed with leukemia. She’s now receiving chemo-therapy at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Jim is keeping their friends and family up to date using the wonderful blog-like service called “CaringBridge.org”. Jim — who doesn’t believe in coincidences — had already received a solicitation to use his preparation for the half-marathon to participate in the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society Team in Training program. His training now has new and significant meaning. His new blog, called “Run for Dori,” is now more than a training blog.

Danah Boyd has posted an essay on her “ethnographic research” related to Facebook and MySpace.

Her synopsis:

“What I lay out in this essay is rather disconcerting. Hegemonic American teens (i.e. middle/upper class, college bound teens from upwards mobile or well off families) are all on or switching to Facebook. Marginalized teens, teens from poorer or less educated backgrounds, subculturally-identified teens, and other non-hegemonic teens continue to be drawn to MySpace. A class division has emerged and it is playing out in the aesthetics, the kinds of advertising, and the policy decisions being made.

For students of social media and networking, this is required reading. It’s without a doubt the smartest thing I’ve read on the topic of how (and why) Facebook and MySpace are different. (Admittedly, most of the comments I read on that topic are from teenagers and include words like “sucks.”)

I used to wonder why I was glad to be a human. Then I read the rexblog quote of the day from Dave Winer: “Twitter is all about trivial examples. It’s the stuff of no importance whatsoever that make us feel nice about being human.”

Observation: Despite being in my early 50s, like Dave, I’m a trivial-native.

By the way, Dave is referring to his work during the past few days on creating something he’s calling TwitterGram. It allows you to Twitter an audio message.

The New York Times covers the launch today of Corbis-owned SnapVillage, the latest entrant into the “microstock agency” arena. Like the Getty-owned IStockPhoto, the site allows amateur and “semiprofessional” phtographers to submit pictures and (in the case of SnapVillage) set their own prices.

The site is geared towards selling “royalty-free” rights. Some image rights can be purchased for as low as $1. While not exactly the same, it is similar to purchasing CDs of “royalty-free” photos — except you can purchase the images one at a time. (Downside: photos you use can be used by anyone else, so don’t build an ad campaign around photos that can also be used in your competitors ad campaign..)

Interesting quote:

“SnapVillage will also function as something of a farm system. Corbis editors will scout the site to pinpoint photographers who show potential and may become part of Corbis’s regular stable of photographers. Corbis generates stock photos for advertising and media clients.”

Last week, my friend and fellow photoblographer, Josh Hallett wrote that a photo he’d posted online hit the radar of a photo-editor working on a story for BusinessWeek. In essence, the photo-editor was using Google images or Flickr or however he/she discovered the photo as an auxiliary photo agency. I can understand why Corbis, Getty, et al, would see the threat — and opportunity — of creating a marketplace for the “semiprofessional” photographers.

From the New York Times: “In its April issue, Wired magazine, in partnership with Xerox, invited subscribers to upload their photographs to Wired.com. The first 5,000 who did so are now receiving their July issue with themselves as the cover art.”

So wouldn’t it be great if there was a service that culled and categorized good stuff from video sharing sites (blip.tv, Break.com, DailyMotion, Google Videos, Kewego, MetaCafe, MySpace, Veoh.com, YouTube) and then had one place where you could organize and watch all that instead of hoping back and forth between all of the services? That’s sorta the idea behind Chime.TV. It’s another creation of my young friend, Taylor McKnight, who also created PodBop.org, and with whom I hang out at SXSW each year in order to appear less clueless. I became a fan of Taylor several years ago when I went looking for a source for the little icon buttons one sees on weblogs and discovered his repository of all things buttony: Steal These Buttons. By the way, Taylor is 23.