Facebook’s recent announcement of a new marketing product that allows businesses to join Facebook and users to become their fans is according to Facebook representative the Holy Grail of marketing. Lets do a quick reality check to see why this may not be quite accurate.
First, for those who do not know or can’t see [...]

To build awareness of Free Culture movement a collection of best free books, free movies, free audio and free software has been made available to download. This DVD shows what value free culture has to offer and many issues around it. Some excellent videos on it are Mix Tape, Who Owns Culture? and Trusted Computing. [...]

Recently the HD-DVD copy protection scheme was hacked and a 16-bit decryption key was published on a forum. This is very similar event when the DeCSS code was released that could decrypt the DVD encryption. The code was published on multiple sites within days and eventually ended up being printed on t-shirts and mugs. Now [...]

There is a very insightful article on New York Magazine on a very important impact the social media has created. Parents often have romantic ideas of providing their kids an ideal innocent dream childhood. One that closely resembles their own, except the time has cleaned away any bad memories and painted everything in washed tones [...]

Noka sells extremely expensive chocolate. The brand promise is based on exclusivity and purity of their product. And then this article came out on dallasfood.org questioning their misleading marketing and revealing how these products are actually created. Shortly after it was referred to on Boing Boing and the word-of-mouth quickly stormed on the internet.
It appears [...]

Blogging and community contributors will peak in the first half of 2007. Given the trend in the average life span of a blogger and the current growth rate of blogs, there are already more than 200 million ex-bloggers. Consequently, the peak number of bloggers will be around 100 million at some point in the first [...]

Here is a piece of good writing from Danah Boyd on social networks and how they model, or fail to, relationships between people. How can someone have over 10000 friends? Who are their best friends? Why people create fake identities? The real question is do the social networking sites actually work in the intended context [...]

Here is a good essay written by a daily newspaper reader who recently canceled her subscription of 37 years. In her life the value of the newspaper has declined to a point where it no longer has a useful role. It is a great example of how a stale media became a victim of cultural [...]

There is one definite outcome from the YouTube acquisition: The collision of modern consumer media consumption and the content business models of the past century quickens. YouTube was a startup who would never been able to go to court for copyright infringements but Google could. Every media company has been rather waiting to see what [...]

The entertainment industry is taking steps towards understanding the value of the online digital media and communities. Recently ABC (owned by Disney) announced the availability of free viewing of their hit shows ‘Lost’ and ‘Desperate Housewives’ starting May 1st. They clearly understand the value of creating media viruses and allowing people to freely express their [...]