This is Part 1 of a new series that explores the science of Social Media Measurement.
Much attention has been given to the Web 2.0 generation of social networks and websites. Deservedly so, this next wave of Internet properties has quickly acquired humongous user bases, rich valuations, and cultural buzz worldwide. Venture capital investors are clamoring to fund the latest spin on crowdsourcing, content aggregation, social networking, micro-blogging, video sharing, and other different takes on social media. Fortune 2000 companies are all trying to figure out how to respond to this …

With so much at stake, the future of video promises to be a most entertaining saga. Many players are trying to figure out how to navigate the shifting technological landscape. How video entertainment is created, delivered, and sold is changing with breathtaking speed. New competitors are entering the market and current leaders are scrambling to defend their turf.
Blockbuster (BBI), playing the part of copycat, will soon announce a set-top box similar to what Netflix (NFLX) unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year. The two companies have seen their …

 
Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft (MSFT) puts on his best poker face with this letter to the Yahoo! (YHOO) board of directors. Ballmer isn’t known all over the world as an innovator, but as a former lawyer and one of the architects of Microsoft’s monopolistic business tactics, I’m sure he can hold his own at the negotiation table. Of course, that hasn’t been the case lately with the outlandish premiums he paid for aQuantive and Facebook. So maybe he’ll back off of this hard stance:
Dear Members of the Board:
It has …

Tight US immigration forces outsourcing: Bill Gates – Microsoft (MSFT) chairman, and no longer the wealthiest guy in the world, makes some interesting points about our immigration policy regarding skilled workers. At SocialOptimize, we’ve been outsourcing some of our work to Guatemala and the Philippines.
Google could be superseded, says web inventor – Tim Berners-Lee shares some wisdom about the semantic web. He talks about how a new company in the future could exceed everything Google (GOOG) has done up to this point. Wouldn’t Google just buy that company?
Japanese government investigates …

Since my current work is in new media and social networking, I am keenly interested in the turbulence facing the newspaper industry. Clients, ranging from Fortune 2000 companies to small innovative startups, come to my team at SocialOptimize to gain an understanding of the new media landscape and to develop an actionable strategy for building a meaningful presence in social networks. They ask about their traditional marketing budgets and I tell them that we will see the disappearance of many old model newspaper, radio, and television companies as they struggle …

Advertising Age is reporting that U.S. media employment fell to a 15-year low in December 2007. The major driver behind this slump is the struggling newspaper industry. This is not surprising because nearly everyone is spending more time getting their news on the Internet and less with broadsheets. Exacerbating the losses is the disappearing classifieds business as online alternatives like craigslist, partially owned by eBay (EBAY) offer cheaper and more immediate classifieds solutions. The New York Times (NYT), also known as the Gray Lady to the cognoscenti, recently announced another …

News Corporation (NWS-A) and its Myspace subsidiary announced the formation of an incubator named Slingshot Labs. It will be seeded with about $15 million to hire a team of software developers. The goal of Slingshot will be to create new Internet technologies and startups to bolster News Corporation’s properties in Web media, especially social networking giant Myspace.
Myspace has witnessed a significant slowing of growth while watching archrival Facebook achieve healthy expansion over the past year. Even Microsoft (MSFT) bought into the phenomenon by investing $240 million in Facebook at a …