Yeah, that's a problem. That's a big privacy problem.

Let me show you what I noticed when I received an email from the Hilton Honors program that had what appeared to be a very innocuous link within.

First, the message:

Innocuous enough, right? Notice within the link to "hiltonhhonors.com". I clicked on it and was surprised to see that the new tab opened in Firefox showed a Google URL for just a fraction of a second, rather than the Hilton URL which ultimately was displayed.

What the heck?

I tried a bunch of ways to capture it and finally just got a quick screenshot in. Here's the URL:

A second later, of course, the URL was as I expected:

Was Gmail rewriting the messages, I wondered? Turns out that's darn hard to ascertain because of how Gmail uses AJAX to present messages. I finally used "File" --> "Save Frame As..." to get to the source code:

As you can see, it's clean, there's nothing odd or suspicious going on. Therefore the logger must be associated with some sort of "OnExit" event, buried deep in the JavaScript of the Gmail system. I got lazy at this point, I admit, and didn't poke around any further.

Needless to say, this is highly concerning to me, as someone who has been using Google Gmail for years, and has brought literally hundreds of other people into the Gmail fold.

Google, can you tell me exactly what's going on here?

What you might not have realized if you haven't talked with me in person is that I'm actually a big huge fan of movies in an intellectual, business and purely visceral sense. Let's face it, a good film is a wonderful thing, a sheer delight and something that can impact your speech, thinking and even dreams for years to come.

Film also serves as a fascinating communications medium because it engages us on so many levels and with more senses than just about anything else I know. You can dabble with this by listening to a movie without watching it, or watching a movie without the sound, or even comparing the sensory experience of an evening movie in a packed, excited theater versus watching that same movie mid-afternoon at home while laying on the couch.

It's also the case, in my experience, that the more you know about editing, pacing, cinematography, soundtracks, and such, the more you can appreciate a brilliantly crafted film. Go watch the crowd scene in Alfred Hitchcock's master work North by Northwest (they're in the cafeteria at Mt. Rushmore) and freeze the frame. Then ask yourself "why are these people dressed in these clothes with these colors?". Remember, any good filmmaker composes every element in every scene of a film. From the cars that "happen to be" parked on the street to the skirt length of the lead actress, nothing -- nothing -- is just random coincidence.

Movie making is also a very unusual business because it operates on so many levels and seems to be such a crap shoot. $85 million to produce and market a film that collapses its first weekend in the box office? Is that a failure? Quite probably not, at the end of the day. You might be surprised how Hollywood can account for costs and recoup losses in many instances. From a business perspective, it's amazing to see the risks of moviemaking and the resultant risk averse strategies used by the major studios (hence, for example, the preponderance of remakes).

Click to follow
FilmBuzz

That's some lead in to my informing you that I've launched a new business called FilmBuzz that I call "movie news for the mobile generation" built entirely upon the popular Twitter service.

Here are a few recent messages that you could have received on your computer or even your mobile device yesterday if you were following FilmBuzz:

That's all. I just wanted to invite you, dear reader, to also subscribe to FilmBuzz and feel free to spread the word too, especially with your movie industry connections, if you have any.

And don't be surprised to see FilmBuzz live-tweeting some film festivals in the next twelve months...

You should start your adventure by glancing at his posting: Sponsored Post: K-Mart Holiday Shopping, Dad Style.

Back? Now, did you realize it was a paid, sponsored post to the weblog, and that Chris made some $$ for doing so? Yeah, I thought so.

Apparently, some folk got into a bit of a twitter-uproar and started assailing Chris and questioning his integrity and position as a thought leader in the social media space. As a result, Chris wrote a new blog entry about the situation, entitled Advertising and Trust.

One of the people who called Chris out for his sponsored posting was Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research. His Twitter message on the subject stated "Transparent, yes. Authentic? debatable. Sustainable? no." People had a strong reaction to Jeremiah's tweet and he ended up writing a blog entry about the situation, entitled Understanding Izea's Sponsored Blogging Service but it's really more about the Brogan brouhaha than anything else.

Still with me?

Enter another friend of mine, Aaron Brazell, better known online as technosailor. For reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, Aaron has really gone after Jeremiah over this situation, notably in an aggressively titled blog entry Jeremiah Owyang Inserts Foot in Mouth (Again) Over IZEA Sponsored Posts.

Okay, now we're caught up. Now I'd like to add my two cents to this situation.

First off, as I insinuated earlier, I am a publisher through the Izea network and have posted a couple of blog entries that were sponsored by one of their advertisers. I have done this to see how it works, write about their service and, yes, make a few dollars in the process. I am not an idealist, I can't pay the mortgage off of good intentions and positive karma, and neither can you, dear reader. Even bloggers need to make a buck.

So fundamentally, I have no problem with Chris Brogan writing a sponsored posting on his terrific Dadomatic weblog. In fact, I'm already a subscriber to the blog, and I saw the post when it first came out. And didn't think twice about it.

Further, I have had a number of good conversations with Jeremiah Owyang, most recently over beers after the Thin Air Summit in Denver, and he's a very sharp industry analyst who understands -- and probes - the edges of the modern Internet and its intersection with commerce and business. That's his job.

I'm also friends with Aaron Brazell and find it highly ironic that as I write this blog entry, I'm also coordinating meeting Aaron for dinner while he's here in Boulder. I imagine we'll talk about this issue while we're gnawing on sushi together.

Nonetheless, this really is a tempest in a teapot and I'll say that a lot of the criticism comes from what I believe is a place of idealism, not reality. What I mean by this is that pragmatic people recognize that other people need to earn a living, so rather than complain about the ads on TV, for example, they pay to support public television or subscribe to a commercial cable channel (or skip it and go to Hulu, but that's another story).

Jeremiah was right to call Chris on this issue in the way he did. He didn't say Chris was a loser, he didn't say Chris was unprofessional, he didn't say that Chris had sacrificed his integrity and was forevermore a shill for K-Mart and he didn't say that Chris shouldn't earn money. All that I see Jeremiah said was that a pay-per-post model of online publicity is not sustainable. And I agree.

Aaron's the one I have the proverbial bone to pick with, and I started this posting by writing a comment on his blog, but realized that it was gong to be wayyyy too long and moved it here instead. So, finally, with all that said, let's get to what I want to say.

(does that qualify as the world's longest lead in to a blog entry?)

Aaron complains about Jeremiah's original tweet, saying that he "depart[s] from the typical role of an analyst, where neutrality and objectivity are key in providing unbiased advice, and instead insert[s] himself into a conversation as a subject matter expert on a topic he really knows nothing about."

Analysts analyze. And no-one is unbiased, which is why we have the "scientific method", among other things. But the fact is, Jeremiah's very job depends on him being able to both analyze and probe the edges of his area of expertise, and, yes, he is most certainly a subject matter expert on social media and marketing.

Aaron continues:

"Jeremiah is, as a representative of Forrester Research and in his function as a research analyst, expected to be a thought follower, not a thought leader. That is, his role is not to editorialize, or offer public opinion in such a way that exerts his influence outside of his Forrester client base."

I don't want to pick on Aaron, though, because these guys have all scuffled enough at this point, but I do want to highlight that as leaders in the social media space, it's their (can I say "our"?) job to push the edges, to test the boundaries, to "eat their own dog food", and that not only includes doing things that might be questionable, but also criticizing and analyzing what's been done and the community response.

What I haven't seen in this entire discussion, for example, is whether the original post by Chris on behalf of K-Mart was successful by their criteria?

Go back again and read Chris' sponsored blog post: was it worth $500 (or $1000) for the company?

Now also go back and read what Jeremiah actually said in his twitter messages on the subject (start here) and ask yourself: isn't it the role of media analysts to ask questions and make pointed observations about unusual occurrences in the social media space?

Frankly, it always amazes me that bloggers have these thrashing discussions around what I see as a sense of guilt over the incursion of capitalism into the blogosphere without noting that there are plenty of bloggers who are making good coin writing not just about what they want, but what they perceive their readers -- or advertisers - want them to write about. It's just part of the landscape.

I have no strong conclusion, no great moral to this story. I just wish we'd have a bit more of a civil discourse when we are all discussing what does and doesn't work in the blogosphere.

How about you? What's your take on this whirlwind?

Like the email I got the other day from a company representing a really big client that started "Dear Brian". Ooops.

That's why I was so pleased to get a really good query email from Deana Burke of YouCastCorp.com on behalf of (troubled, but that's another story) client Macy's (NYSE: M).

She visited my Attachment Parenting blog and used my contact form to send her inquiry, a form that has some rather whimsical categories. Here's her message in its entirety:

Hey Dave!

I love your message choices! I wish I could've picked 'that crazy weekend in cabo' instead of 'something else, alas, not quite as exciting.' How boring!

I'm writing to you today on behalf of Macy's. This holiday season, Macy's wants everyone - from the most enthusiastic to the most cynical- to Believe in and embrace the holiday spirit of love and charity. As a parenting site, the Believe project may be of interest to you and your readers.

Writing letters to Santa Claus is an age-old tradition for children all over the world. Macy's is collecting these letters in a special Santa letterbox at all Macy's stores. For each letter received, Macy's will donate $1 to the Make-A-Wish Foundation. The Believe Meter will measure America's belief, based on our collective spirit -- including the amount of letters received and other current events that reflect the season's generosity.

We are asking bloggers to help draw attention to the Macy's Believe campaign. We are also sending out $20 Macy's Gift Certificates to interested bloggers as a thank you for considering the story.

If you do decide to post, all assets (including high res images and link to the Believe meter) can be found here: http://www.youcastcorp.com/macys/

I look forward to hearing from you!
Best,
Deana

It may not be much, but I think it's a great query, respectful, transparent, and for a good cause. In fact, I encourage you, dear reader, to click on the above link and consider adding a Believe meter to your site too if you have the space.

Oh, and the $20 certificate? I've written to Deana asking if the money or certificate can be donated to a homeless shelter instead.

I've actually written about this case before, on my parenting blog, muchly because I so loath the Bratz line and all it represents for young girls and its terrible impact on both their self-image and understanding of how their sexuality allows them to fail or succeed in modern society. See: Hey Mattel! Now you can put Bratz to sleep once and for all. (yeah, it's a bit biased)

After a few months of legal arguments and deliberations, let me quote the Wall Street Journal's report of the outcome:

"U.S. District Court in Riverside, Calif., essentially handed over MGA's pouty-lipped, hip-hop-themed Bratz franchise to Mattel, the maker of the iconic Barbie, whose sales have been undercut by the upstart Bratz in recent years. Judge Stephen G. Larson's ruling came several months after a federal jury found that the Bratz dolls were originally conceived by a designer who worked at Mattel and surreptitiously took the concept to MGA."

I'm really pleased at this ruling and hope that Mattel either completely shut down the entire Bratz brand or, at a minimum, retool these dolls to be a bit less pouty sluts and a bit more cute young girls that actually don't reinforce all that's messed up about our cultural view of girls and sexuality.

This can be done through Mattel ultimately licensing the Bratz line to MGA and requiring that they make it a bit more wholesome or bringing the brand in-house, but either way, now's your golden moment, Mattel Brand President Neil Friedman. Do what's right for your brand, your corporate image, and the millions of girls who enjoy the Mattel doll lines as playthings.

Joel asked me to write about the future of blogging, but the more I thought about that topic, the more it felt like asking an architect to write about the future of nails or hammers. There are small technological increments in metallurgy and even the shape of nails have changed in the last hundred years (not to mention the materials science that have made better hammers) but, really, I mean, they're hammers and nails and in a hundred years the Jetsons will be using the same basic tools to make Jane her art studio, right?

Blogging is the same way. A weblog, at its most fundamental, is just a tool, a slick way to organize and manage the content on your Web site, both that which you produce and content generated by users as comments. In the biz, we call blogs content management systems (CMS) to remind us that it's not Valhalla, it's not a Brave New World, it's just a software tool just as Microsoft Word is a tool.

I am sure that in the next few years blogging tools will continue to evolve, but what will happen is that the very concept of "blog" will continue to get more and more fuzzy as more and more ideas are embodied in the software systems, notably the popular open source Wordpress utility. In the software world, evolution starts with the addition of custom hacks, then those become standardized as "widgets", little plug-in applications that extend and add functionality to your site. Finally, the most popular widgets then become a part of a subsequent release of the main software application itself.

You can predict the future of blogging, therefore, by looking at what plug-ins and hacks are popular today, and those are almost all about spam control and the addition of social networking and social media capabilities. It's no surprise that the best spam control tool in the blogging space is from the same company that produces Wordpress either: Akismet, from Automattic. Sure enough, that started out as a separate application, then was a plug-in, and is now integrated into the Wordpress (and Movable Type) blogging applications.

Social networking is still a mess, however, with lots of duplicate functionality and many, many companies trying to solve a facet of the fundamental human question of How Can We Connect? From the shared bookmarks of De.licio.us to the popularity contest of Digg, the collegiate interpersonal networking of Facebook to the ceaseless stream of trivia big and small on Twitter, all social media elements are migrating into blogging content management tools, along with the ability to register users, rate them based on community feedback votes and number of comments, and allow your blossoming community to grow through interpersonal links and connections.

The future of blogging, in other words, isn't blogging. It's a grand web of social elements that will make sense and be wonderful on some well organized sites, but overwhelming and baffling on other sites. It'll be a foundational element of the new, more highly connected Web that'll be a pervasive part of our lives, be it on our mobile devices, our transportation or our homes and offices.

Are you ready?

Let me explain...

According to the Chicago Sun-Times, average modern retailers have about a 5% margin on products, be they a pair of sneakers or a flat-screen television. The same story explains that typical Black Friday discounts are now 40-50%.

I understand the logic, that one or two extraordinary deals will bring people into the store and they'll also buy non-discounted or lesser discounted products, thereby making up the difference in profit. But what if that no longer holds true?

Read the papers, you'll see that across the United States people who went shopping at all on Black Friday were very careful about their purchases and were much more likely to go into a store and buy the one or two super-specials than a basketful of goods.

The result? Instead of getting a nice boost on profits and a good jump-start on Christmas / holiday shopping, the entire experience was more likely a complete bust for retailers, losing them, rather than earning them money.

While some analysts will doubtless peg this to the 2008 recession, I suggest instead that it's the inevitable result of the increasing commoditization of our world, the reduction of everything to its cheapest possible manifestation.

This is what Linda Sanford and I wrote about in our book Let Go To Grow [aff], and it's fascinating to see how it's become a more visible retail phenomenon in the years since we wrapped up the manuscript.

Every time we shop at Wal-Mart or Target to get our product a buck or two cheaper, every time we pop online to save on sales tax, every time we research products to identify the lowest-cost outlet, we're all contributing to the problem.

With a retail economy built on the need for a substantial profit to cover overhead and costs, pay city and county taxes, health care for employees, and offset theft and so on, this trend towards an ever-more-commoditized world is a scary one. If followed to its logical extreme, we won't have any retail stores at all or we'll have to impose online store tariffs that offset the dramatically lower overhead of online drop-ship companies. What choice will we have?

Meanwhile, we'll have to see. I predict that retailers will report that gross revenue from Black Friday sales were okay, but that profit from these sales was down significantly from prior years. And next year, even if the economy is in better shape, won't jump back.

Summary: Gen Y's Opinion of Elders after Disaster

"How does Gen Y see the Boomers and X-ers in the wake of unprecedented screw ups (the economic meltdown, climate change etc.)? And how is this emerging generation poised to wrest control of our culture and rewrite badly warped rules?"

Understand that I'm not saying that we aren't in a troubling place in human history, but pick a previous era, dozens or hundreds of years ago, and there were also lots to be concerned about. Most people just didn't have the luxury of a) knowing about it and b) having time to contemplate it.

What bugs me about the query is that there's such a big assumption that things are indeed broken, and terribly so, and that it's going to take an act of physical or psychological violence to "wrest control" of the situation by the next generation. I just don't believe that's true and it will be no surprise at all to me if the resultant interviews and story don't reinforce this clearly biased and skewed perspective.

The old saw about "dog bites man isn't news, but man bites dog certainly is news" is all too true. In the same vein "as with every previous generation, the next generation will have challenges and will be cleaning up some of the mess of previous generations. How do you feel about that?" is much less newsworthy than "next generation screwed by excess and idiocy of current generation. are we all doomed?"

And you wonder why news = bad news.

There are some very interesting speakers I'll be listening to, including restaurant entrepreneur and Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, Anita Burke of the Catalyst Institute and 42 presentations by Colorado startups and entrepreneurial companies throughout the state, all vetted by the Rockies Venture Club and other participating organizations. Finally, the Summit will end with a Town Hall Meeting entitled Disrupting the Recession: Colorado's entrepreneurial response to the financial crisis, election, energy and sustainability.

Note: On-line registration closes at midnight tonight, November 19. Walk-ins registrations will be available at the door. While we'll make every attempt to accommodate walk-ins quickly, please bear in mind that last year's Angel Capital Summit sold out, and some walk-ins were unable to register.

Entrepreneurial success is more important to our society now more than ever. Come to the Angel Capital Summit, and be one of those who "disrupt the recession" and build the future!

Cost: Town Hall Meeting only: $25.00. Angel Capital Summit (which includes the Town Hall Meeting); $129 RVC members, $159 non members.

For event info and registration, go to angelcapitalsummit.org.

I'll hope to see you there!

Let me start out with a confession. I'm about as plugged in to the computer networks as anyone you're likely to meet. I first connected to the Internet back in 1980, when it was the ARPAnet and commercial use was completely verboten. Yes, it's come a long way, and so has our society.

Nowadays professionals are just as likely to have their Facebook or LinkedIn URL on their business cards as a phone number, and entire conferences seem to be run simultaneously in the physical world and as a running, often snarky, flow of consciousness dialog on the Twitter microblogging service.

But all of this begs the question: are we really more connected? Do computer and social networks really make us more connected as human beings?

That's what I'd like to talk about in this article.

MYSPACE REDEFINED FRIENDSHIP

One of the first phenomena you notice when you start to connect with people through Web sites that are designed to memorialize connections is that the word "friend" takes on a different meaning. In the physical world -- what people in the virtual reality world of Second Life call "RL" or real life -- friends are generally defined as those people you have a personal relationship with, not anyone you happen to encounter, anyone at your college, company, or other organizations. The latter are colleagues or acquaintances or just people with whom you have something in common.

The first popular sites to delve into the world of friendship, of letting you quantify and identify your circle of friends, were Friendster (which is now essentially defunct, having long-since fallen out of the zeitgeist) and MySpace. On these sites every connection you made had a similar strength, so your best friend Mike is considered just as important in your life as Aunt Flo, to whom you've connected to stop her complaining at family gatherings.

In real life, of course, everyone has close, important friends, intimates who are privy to the highs and lows of your life, a larger circle of what we can call pretty good friends who can help out in a crunch but with whom you don't interact with regularly, and finally "almost friends" who are people with whom you feel an affinity, but geography, time or other logistical issues prevent from becoming closer. And then there are the decaying circles of acquaintances, colleagues, and so on.

ENTER THE KEVIN BACON EFFECT

Very little research in sociology has caught the public fancy as much as the early work by Harvard social psychologist Stanley Milgram, in which he hypothesized that we are all far more connected than we realize. His famous experiment of randomly choosing Midwesterners to hand-deliver letters to Bostonians they didn't know through a chain of friends produced the conclusion that people in the United States are separated by about six people on average.

There are a variety of flaws with this research, but whether we're connected through six hops, eight hops or seventeen, the basic idea that social chains are sufficiently all-encompassing that you and I can find a sequence of friends or acquaintances that connect us is fascinating. Make the end point well-known actor Kevin Bacon and you have "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" or "the Kevin Bacon effect".

It was this question of how to gain access to your friends' friends, or, more accurately, the connections of your connections, that has become the basis of LinkedIn, a social network that lets you answer the question "I wonder if any of my friends know someone who..."

The numbers quickly grow at an extraordinary rate. I have 705 connections on LinkedIn. Take one step out onto that social network and that gives me over 330,000 people in my immediate network. One further step out (we'd call this friends of friends of friends, I suppose) and the number is a staggering 8,392,600 connections.

What does that mean? Am I obligated to send holiday cards to them all or keep track of their birthdays? I sure hope not!

In fact, they're not friends. While they offer up a tremendous professional resource, they don't in any fundamental way expand your social or personal network. They don't connect you with the greater humanity.

Since I know you might be wondering, Facebook isn't any better in this regard. You can certainly join many, many different circles of common interests through mailing lists, applications, etc., but it's still a very abstract, intellectual world. I have 358 Facebook friends and at least 25% of those I wouldn't recognize if we bumped into each other at the local Starbucks.

DO ANY SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES SOLVE THE PROBLEM?

If we're trying to ascertain what helps you become less isolated rather than gaining the appearance of more friends while still leaving you just as disconnected, perhaps the answer lies in dating sites? After all, those are sites where you connect with others because of either an existing or desired personal connection. No, still, that's not right because, with the exception of novel sites like Ignighter.com, they are focused on who you want to know, not who you know.

Another possibility are lightweight social networks like Twitter, to which I admit a personal addiction (you can follow me at @DaveTaylor). The idea behind sites like Twitter are that it'd be useful and interesting to be able to keep tabs on your friends as you all go through your day. Spontaneous meetups, collaboration, and mutual support all easily flow from this sort of connectivity.

Twitter indeed fulfills some of these daily needs for people to be connected, especially with its great strength as a mobile application. It's interesting to see how this evolves too, however, particularly in light of our quest for online tools that help you truly connect with humanity: I keep track of just over 100 friends, all of whom I would recognize at a party, but over 3000 people keep track of what I am saying and doing. It's kind of weird, actually!

IS IT ABOUT MEASURING FRIENDSHIPS?

As we've traveled through the landscape of social media and social networks, whether it's the immediacy of Twitter or the business-like utility of LinkedIn, what has become clear is that these tools need to let us differentiate between close friends and acquaintances, to rate the strength of our connection. Without that capability, everyone's in the same proverbial pool and my connection with my close friend Richard is identical to my new connection with PKP magazine editor Margaret Lisi.

That being the case, you need to make a decision, preferably before you proceed to enmesh yourself in a social network, regarding whether it will capture everyone you know and have more than a passing acquaintance with or whether you will reserve it to your closest friends.

In the social network world we refer to this as quality versus quantity, and there are strong arguments for each approach. But what I want, predictably, is both. The quality gets me the connection with humanity, the ability to stay in closer touch with my intimate friends, and the quantity offers me all the benefits of our modern, highly-connected world. How to attain both? Well, we're still at the veritable infancy of social networks so I'm pushing their edges and watching it all evolve on a weekly basis.

How about you? How will you choose to utilize these many online tools to expand your own social and professional circles?

My main point in the talk was that modern public relations is about getting journalists and the media (which of course includes us bloggers too) excited about products, services and companies, but while also recognizing that we need our autonomy. It's not about control, it's not about being the gatekeeper for corporate info and communications. I can't really summarize a 50 minute presentation in two sentences, but that's the gist of my main idea, at least.

In this modern world where there are thousands more "journalists" than ever before, there are nonetheless similar challenges that have faced PR since the profession was created: standing out from the crowd.

That's why I'm so amazed by the release I got this afternoon entitled "***Worlds Collide as Midway Unleashes Eagerly-Awaited Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe***".

So, with that title, you expect something at least mildly visually interesting, don't you? And yet, here's what I got:

This is so boring it's painful to even get in my inbox. We're coming into the second decade of the 21st century, guys, isn't it time to start creating communiques that are visually engaging already??

Mostly I'm just so struck that this major media news for the gaming world that's built upon dozens of very well known comic book figures has been boiled down to the most boring, uninteresting, unengaging press release possible.

Do they really expect any pickup at all??

I'll share my notes post-event.

Oh, and if you think PR is just completely dead because "we are the conversation" or whatever, or think that PR's just as essential as it has been for the last 100 years, I'd like to hear from you too!

Thanks.

But is it the right product at the right time? I don't think so. Let me explain why...

As we have seen again and again with the introduction of new media formats in the consumer electronics industry, there's a classic chicken and egg problem when it's released. That is, the industry won't release lots of music on this new format until there are lots of players, but people won't buy players until there's lots of music available. The slow adoption of Blu-Ray and demise of HD-DVD are both examples of how this expensive problem plays out in the marketplace.

Clearly there needs to be a compelling reason for anyone to adopt a new music format like SlotMusic and while the vendors talk about simplicity and ease of use, the true key feature is that the music is available in the common MP3 format without digital rights management (DRM) restrictions.

Market penetration of MP3 players demonstrates that people really like digital music, but having a collection of tiny, fragile chips as your music library? Doesn't seem like it's going to work.

Further, there's a classic pricing error in the positioning of SlotMusic too: at $14.99 suggested retail, it's compared to the suggested retail of CD music, but a quick glance at someone like Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) shows that in fact almost all of the most popular CDs are $9.99. Why that price point? Because that's exactly how much an album's worth of music costs on the Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) iTunes Store too.

SanDisk's SlotMusic player. Notice the tiny card: that's the MicroSD device.

The only place I can find online that's selling SlotMusic music is consumer electronics powerhouse Best Buy.com (NYSE: BBY), for, yes, $14.99/gizmo. (Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) is supposed to come online with SlotMusic material within a week or two).

To be fair, while it appears that you need to buy a new SlotMusic player to enjoy this new medium, each actually includes a USB adapter, making it easy to read them on your computer or laptop device (and then, presumably, copy it to your Mp3 player). There are cheesy low-end SanDisk (Nasdaq: SNDK) players that are cheap at $19.99, but do you really want to buy another player?

Nonetheless, even with the included USB adapter, it's hard to imagine why anyone who is sufficiently plugged in to care about copying the material to their computer wouldn't just use one of the many online music stores, skipping the MicroSD device entirely. (and note that while many users are unhappy about the DRM limitations of music downloaded from the iTunes Store, there are plenty of alternatives)

I'm not alone in being down on the future chances of SlotMusic either. A quick spin through the blogosphere will reveal that GigaOM, The NY Times, NewsOK and Technologizer and Engadget all agree that SlotMusic is destined to fail, not succeed.

I can only wonder why savvy tech company SanDisk even bothered with this half-baked technological effort that doesn't address the cost of music, the percentage of the sale that goes to the artist, or the extraordinarily inefficient distribution channels and costs imposed therein. A way to distribute and sell CDs for $4.99, where $1 would go to the artist would be revolutionary.

A SlotMusic MicroSD physical distribution device for music in the age of digital downloads that retains the $14.99 collection of songs from popular artists is dead on arrival.

"What sites do you use / recommend using to promote content (i.e. blogs, articles, etc.)? I'm re-tooling our business website and blog, and want to make sure I get the most effective (popular?) ones, along the lines of Technorati, Digg, etc. Your answers will help me pick the buttons I'll use..."

There are definitely some people who say "you should just do it all" and some of them even have a presence on dozens of social media sites. To me, that's not a viable answer because most people -- myself included -- want to focus on their core business, not the promotional tools. It's like someone who forgets that in addition to nice print ads, their restaurant still needs to serve a good meal. Not a good long term strategy, needless to say!

My view of things is that you need to have both a "destination" and pointers to that destination in the online world. Further, I believe that each of the major social networks (e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc.) is its own little universe and that you need to have some sort of presence on each of these where your potential customers participate. (let me explain that a bit further: if you have a restaurant, yes, you should have a presence on MySpace. If you're a lawyer, however, LinkedIn is more likely to be your core constituency).

Your destination is where you tell the story, where you sell your product or service (gently, please), where you actually try to close the sale. My recommendation for this is a weblog (not surprisingly) where you can create search-engine friendly content and retain control of its design and presentation. I also recommend that you have a standalone blog, rather than using, say, the "notes" section on Facebook or the crude blogging tools available in MySpace.

Once you've created the destination content, it's time to think about what additional sites can help you promote and gain traffic. There are two categories of these: bookmarking sites like Digg and Delicious and separate universes like Facebook and MySpace.

For the former, there's a never-ending wrestling match between having them be valuable and having them be polluted by people trying to game the system. In particular, Digg has had a lot of growing pains in this regard and I've spoken with "top diggers" who candidly say that they sell their popularity: you want visibility on Digg? Pay them.

Nonetheless, if your audience is sufficiently tech savvy to know what these sites actually are, then there's no reason not to include a few of those bookmarking buttons. I suggest you include Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon, or use a consolidation bookmark tool or widget like Socialtwist, which I'm using on my busy Ask Dave Taylor site.

Don't go crazy and list ten or more of these. There are sooooo many me-too bookmark sites but listing too many causes confusion for readers, the old "embarrassment of riches" problem. It's not going to gain you additional visibility.

In terms of separate universes, of the social networking sites (as opposed, as I said earlier, to bookmarking sites), I think almost everyone should have a meaningful presence on Facebook and if it's a professional product or service, LinkedIn. If your target demographic includes the under-18 crowd then you also need to be on MySpace.

On many of these sites you can automate things so that when you post a new blog entry it shows up on these sites too (for example, see my article about How to hook your blog RSS feed to your Facebook profile) which certainly makes life easy. Automation is good.

The problem is that I don't think that every single blog entry I write is appropriate for every social community within which I'm a participant, so my suggestion is that if you write something really good, manually promote it on the other sites too.

That's a perfect use of Twitter, for example: not to think of Twitter as a purely promotional channel (which will fail) but rather to intersperse an occasional pointer back to your core content with your other Twitter comments. This is exactly applicable to, for example, your Facebook status updates (ditto MySpace, LinkedIn, etc).

If your material includes video, YouTube can drive traffic, and if you've photographs or still images, putting them up on Flickr can produce yet another traffic stream.

Finally, after this crazy long entry, I will say that my plan for promoting this particular blog entry is to mention it on Twitter with a clickable URL link included, to post the same status message on Facebook and to write a brief summary - with "read more" link - and post it to my MySpace blog area. And, hopefully, a few of you will bookmark it too, but I don't pre-bookmark my own entries.

...and the fact that you're reading this shows that the strategy works, at least at some level. :-)

I'm also going to be moderating a (recorded) panel discussion for Blogger & Podcaster early next week, with author Michael Webb, ClickBank Director of Marketing Bob Dunlap, and blogging affiliate marketer Miles Baker, which I'm looking forward to quite a bit: they're just the right people to discuss the challenges of commodity marketing. (the discussion will be made available through Blogger & Podcaster magazine a few weeks later)

In the midst of all of this I'll have a complete change of pace by accompanying my delightful 4yo daughter on her class Martinmas lantern walk. If you don't know what that is, the holiday is based on the legend of St. Martin of Tours, who was born in 316. He's honored for having apocryphally sharing his cloak with a beggar and represents brotherliness. According to custom, as the days become shorter and the stars appear earlier, children would walk with lanterns through the streets singing. As the world grows darker, the inner light of man wants to shine forth. That's what I'll be doing mid-week.

Then it'll be right back to business and social media and the online world, 2008AD. Kinda Jekyll/Hyde, actually. Everyone who is a parent and businessperson, however, knows what that's like!

Sheesh. I think today I should just stay in bed and sleep, so I can be caught up for what's going to be a fun and exciting, but tiring, next seven days! I hope to see you at one or more of these events.