A friend of ours pulled her daughter off of MySpace after she discovered that the girl was publishing provocatively dressed pictures of herself labeled with "slut".

Now we learn of a prominent blogger who was forced to cancel an appearance at eTech in San Diego after receiving death threats. Programmer Kathy Sierra was guilty of no more provocative posts on her popular Creating Passionate Users blog than titles such as "Code Like a Girl" and  the "Hi-Res User Experience" might suggest.

Yet she was forced to stay "at home, with the windows locked, terrified” rather than attend the conference after she received death threats on her site — and even more alarmingly — on the sites of two other respected bloggers.

This is sobering for me. Two weeks ago, I spent two days at the Digital Media Summit promoting the role of media companies in the emerging social media and user-generated content revolutions.

The problem is, some of those users are going to be psychos. And others, like my friend’s daughter, are victims waiting to happen.

I’m not sure how closely the media giants at the vanguard of social media — companies like Fox (MySpace), Sony (Grouper) and Google (YouTube) — have thought through the implications of unleashing the public’s Dark Side. But I hope they spend more time thinking about it before people end up dead.

See Also

• Abuse, threats quiet bloggers’ keyboards

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If you have a school-age kid, chances are, they’re addicted to Runescape.

This isn’t just a game. It’s a universe, where kids play, socialize, have fights and exchange currencies.

My girl meets her friends there. My boy is into buying and selling gold. For a birthday present, my son bought his friend a Runescape account. (I made the mistake of getting him a check-card recently).

So pay attention to MTV’s announcement that it’s going "4D" — making recently launched sites like Virtual Laguna Beach and Virtual Hills an integral way it connects with its audience. Expect lots of other brands — and advertisers — to pay attention, too.

The audience has spoken. At least, at my house.

See Also

• MTV goes ‘4D’ with virtual-worlds push

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Walt’s story in the Wall Street Journal (see my blog earlier today) is right across from one about Sprint’s CEO searching for a way out of its woes caused by annual subscribers canceling. Bad service aside (and I can personally vouch for that), Sprint’s most interesting prospects for luring new customers may be in new branded services for cable and IPTV companies.

Time Warner, Cox, Comcast and Advance/Newhouse are  quintupling to 40 metropolitan areas the wireless customers they service through leased space on Sprint’s network, according to BusinessWeek. Each service will have the respective cable company’s moniker on the screen and Sprint’s name on the phone.

Sprint’s already is the most enthusiastic endorser of Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs), hosting the likes of Virgin, Movida and Boost.

There was an AOL Time Warner, once upon a time. Maybe soon there will be a Time Warner Sprint.

See Also

• BW: Sprint-cable venture expands to business
• WSJ (Subscription Required): Sprint’s CEO Seeks Stronger Connection

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Curious juxtaposition of music-enabled cellphone stories over the last few days.

Consumer tech guru Walt Mossberg’s Wall Street Journal column today gives a "nice try but…" to Samsung’s new UpStage phone being rolled out on Sprint. Seems the device has terrible battery life, synch issues and poor navigation — even though it’s better LG’s popular Chocolate music phone, sold to Verizon customers.

Meanwhile, an NPD report finds that  music-enabled cellphone sales accounted for 32% of all cellphone sales in the fourth quarter, vs. 18% in the second quarter.

Which begs the question: does anyone use these cellphones to listen to music? Or are cellphone makers simply making a lot of music-enabled cellphone flops? I’d be curious to read the latest research.

Hopefully, Apple will do a better job making a cellphone with the iPhone than cellphone makers have done making music players.

See Also

• ZDNet News: Mobile Phone Sales Ring In Strong
• WSJ: (Subscription Required): Latest Music Phone Marred by Big Flaws

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The music industry’s woes come from an inability to learn painful lessons

Last week’s news that CD sales for the first three months of the year had plunged 20% over a year earlier — far overshadowing gains in digital downloads — underscores how little the music business has learned over the last few painful years.

Collectors’ editions aside, CDs are a dying business. And paid digital downloads, in my opinion, will never make up for the loss in CD business. A majority of people will always favor unlimited free (illegal) downloads over paying for music-by-the-song.

But that doesn’t mean the music industry is any danger of going away. It simply means that many music executives are refusing to accept the obvious.

Music wants to be free. So make it free. Or to be more exact, a loss leader.

People don’t want to pay for a single download. But they could easily be persuaded (as focus groups at our conferences attest) for a service that would give them instant access to any music, any time, on any device.  If, as I’ve argued before, 50 million families could be persuaded to invest $20 a month for that that right, you’d come close to equalling the entire recorded music industry’s annual sales.

And lest you think that’s impossible, the cable industry convinces those same families to pay a lot more for its product — which plays only on TVs.

People won’t pay? Then let advertisers pay. Embed ads for BMWs on classical music sites, let GM bankroll U2’s next album. and let Google embed ads on mobile music sites.

But music profits wouldn’t stop there. Preload a cellphone with 1,000 of a kid’s favorite songs and you’d better believe she will pick it over a competitor’s phone. How much is that worth in licensing fees to Cingular or Verizon? Or, for that matter, any maker of the more than 1 billion music-enabled cellphones in the world?

Stream any song a consumer desires over a broadband connection, and how much is that worth to AOL or Comcast?

As it turns out, nearly everything consumers do — from driving cars to clothes shopping– seems to go better with music. And nearly all of it can be monetized.

When will the music business stop its fixation on cranking out CDs and suing people, and get down to the serious business of making money?

See Also

• RIAA music sales statistics
• Apples’ Jobs Calls for DRM-Free Music (CNet)
• Sales of Music, Long in Decline, Plunge Sharply (WSJ)

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Hello? Anyone Ever Heard of the I-N-T-E-R-N-E-T?

While the L.A. Times was busy firing an editor this week for having an affair with Brian Glaser’s publicist and then hiring him as a guest editor, much more momentous things were happening in the newspaper business.

Billionaire investor Sam Zell was reportedly bidding $33 a share for the Times’ troubled parent Tribune Co.;while newspaper analyst John Morton and media economist Miles Groves were shutting down the 31-year-old Morton-Groves Newspaper Newsletter, the newspaper business bible.

"I’m getting tired of producing painful forecasts,” Groves told Forbes. "Recently, as down as they get to be, they never seem to be down enough.”

Well, that’s because Groves is looking through the wrong end of the binoculars. Yes, most newspapers will die. But news and journalists will not die. They will migrate to the web.

If you don’t believe me, precisely what are you doing at this moment? OK, my blog isn’t exactly news, but you see my point.

Just because newsprint dies doesn’t mean news dies, any more than NBC and Fox’s programs die when they migrate to the web (see NBC and Fox’s Online Deal: If You Focus on Google, You’re Missing the Point and What NBC and TV Learned from Music’s Mistakes).

The problem with the newspaper business is not declining sales. That’s just a symptom of the industry’s stubborn resistance to embrace the flight of readers to the web. Advertising, want ads, event calendars, auto buying — it’s all there, guys, and people are monetizing it. Why aren’t you?

See Also

• AP: Billionaire Zell bidding for Chicago Tribune parent company
• Forbes: Media Newsletter Closes

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Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, television used to be free. Three big broadcasters — NBC, ABC and CBS — gave away all their content for free. Everyone watched it. Advertisers paid billions. And everyone was happy.

Then along came cable and satellite. They introduced pay TV to the masses, who happily paid billions of dollars for subscription television and stole the networks’ market. The poor networks, bereft of viewers and advertisers, withered and died.

I think not.

Today’s deal between NBC Universal and Fox to slap free prime time shows and movies  Yahoo, MSN, AOL and MySpace – reaching hundreds of millions of viewers — is nothing less than a return to broadcast television’s roots.

Most newspapers are suggesting that the main rationale for the deal is to "challenge Google Inc. and its YouTube video-sharing service" and "blunt their incursion into the entertainment business," as the L.A. Times said.

That misses the point. The main rationale for the deal is to reclaim a huge chunk of advertising dollars from advertisers like Cadbury Schweppes, Cisco Systems Inc., Intel Corp., Esurance and General Motors, who will be supporting the venture.

Granted, that Google has slurped up a third of online advertising dollars, as research firm EMarketer says.

But hello. Remember online advertising is still only 10 - 20% of advertisers’ spend. Google has zero percent of the TV advertising market, last I checked. And NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox were doing quite well, even in a fractionalized universe.

Now, if you’re GM, and you want to reach millions of customers, what’s more attractive? A TV audience of tens of millions of people and hundreds of millions more online accessing full-length, rich streaming programming?  Or hundreds of millions of people who snip up pieces of their favorite NBC show and share it with their friends?

Gee, what do you think people who watch those little snippets will do? They’ll either go to the NBC Universal/Fox site or they’ll watch it on TV.

See Also

• L.A. Times story

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OK, we’ve been bragging for years that big deals get cut at iHollywood Forum events. Problem is that journalists, bless their souls, don’t usually say WHERE deals are made — just who made them.

But the San Fernando Business Journal kindly gave our venue a leading role in NBC and Break.com deal.

"Matthew Evans and Keith Richman spent nearly an hour on a Digital Media Summit panel discussing the future of the Internet video market but it was what the two men talked about afterward that was most important," author Mark Madler wrote. "Two hours after the discussion ended during the March 13 event, Evans, vice president of digital media for NBC Universal, and Richman, chief executive officer of Break.com, knocked out a deal at the historic Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood to sell an original NBC-produced show for Richman’s Web site."

Thanks, Mark. In return, I’ll attribute the news to you!

See Also

• Mark Madler’s San Fernando Business Journal story
• Digital Media Summit

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Fox wants to protect media content and grow MySpace at the same time. Tough job!

MySpace’s apparent attempt to prevent users from embedding tools such as music, video players and ecommerce engines in their site doesn’t make compute financially or logically.

At stake, the New York Times reported today, is the ability of MySpace and parent News Corp. to ensure that only they  capitalize on the 90 million visitors to MySpace each month.

According to the Times, MySpace is already alienating some of its users, who are attracted to MySpace by its free-wheeling community. They don’t take kindly to an entertainment giant’s attempts to protect intellectual property, whether its copyrighted or not.

So when MySpace shut down popular MySpace blogger and singer Tila Tequila’s web store and music player on Sunday, it undoubtedly annoyed a lot of people.

The risk is that these users will flee MySpace for another site where these restrictions aren’t imposed. That’s not a far-fetched proposition. How many people visit the legalized Napster site today compared with a few years ago?

And of course, if MySpace’s visitors flee, so will advertisers.

That’s the financial piece.

The logical piece is this: embedding a tool on MySpace is as much an infringement of copyrights as embedding it on your own site. That is, not at all. The embedding only becomes a problem if you start playing uncopyrighted material. Presumably, Tequila was only playing her own work on the music player.

Is MySpace really going to prevent people  from getting creative on its site?

You could argue that Tequila may have had the right to play music on her site, but she had no right to sell it. Maybe not. But doesn’t it make a lot more sense for MySpace to approach her (and others) and work out a small "usage fee" than to banish them? That, in fact, is exactly what mobile carriers in Europe (and a few in the U.S.) do with people who want to sell using the carriers’ bandwidth: they charge them. And trust me, they’re making a fortune.

If News Corp. doesn’t want its MySpace asset to evaporate, it  needs to ensure that MySpace’s freewheeling community stays freewheeling.

See Also

• NYT: MySpace Restrictions Upset Some Users

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The Role of `Citizen Journalists’

Citizen journalists are creating quite a stir. Leonard Brody, CEO of NowPublic, says his network of thousands of amateurs around the world represent the biggest news gathering team in the world.

My friend Andrew Keen, meanwhile, believes that many of these people are hacks who give journalism a bad name.

"If we keep up this pace, there will be over five hundred million blogs by 2010, collectively corrupting and confusing popular opinion about everything from politics to commerce, to arts and culture," he writes in his book scheduled for release this spring, "The Cult of the Amateur: How the Democratization of the Digital World Is Assaulting Our Economy, Our Culture and Our Values."

I disagree with both. I think these amateurs are an entirely new animal. Call it the Fifth Estate.

Recall (from high school U.S. gov class) that there are four "estates" that serve to maintain a balance of power in the American democracy: the executive branch, the legislative branch, the judicial branch and, more informally, journalists. Congress nails the President, the President vetos bills, the Supreme Court overturns Congressional votes and the news guys  turn up dirt on everybody. (If they go too far, they get nailed by the courts, too).

Amateurs reporting on events or writing blogs are no more "journalists" than civics teachers are congressmen or Bush critics are Presidents. They’re something else. But they serve as a great check on the other four estates, as the growing influence of blogs suggests.

The reason people get away with calling amateurs "citizen journalists" is because there’s no licensing board to create journalists, as there is for the lawyers who dominate the first three estates. But most of these citizens could no more become reporters for the New York Times than I could practice law. At its best, journalism has clearly defined standards of impartiality, writing style and reporting — scandals and Fox News not withstanding.

Anyone who was at Digital Media Summit last week probably thinks I’m a hypocrite. I moderated a panel called "Confronting the Citizen Journalist" that included Brody and an exercised Keen in the audience.

Hey, a guy’s allowed to change his mind.

Exactly what to call the Fifth Estate I don’t know. CBS MarketWatch columnist Bambi Francisco, who also sat on the panel, has a blog (which this week also focused on confronting citizen journalists), and she’s certainly no amateur. So what do we call these citizen bloggers? I vote for cloggers.

See Also

• Bambi’s column
• Digital Media Summit
• Now Public
• Andrew’s website

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