I’m contemplating opening a Facebook account, but frankly I’m wary of creating yet another opportunity for porno spambots to invade my invitation box. Besides, how many great friends do I really have on any of these social network sites? I’m afraid there are too many (sites) to keep up with. There is just too much virtual networking, mostly of little consequence. I’m totally done with MySpace. I’m wondering if the social web is making me anti-social. I don’t know. The price of being technohipocrati is awfully high on productivity. But I’m holding out hope. I guess I feel a bit like the SETI project trying to find intelligent life in the off-world, except they may be more successful than me searching the universe.

As for Facebook, I’m still taking a wait-and-see approach but I have a feeling that I will cave into hype-pressure and set up an account so I can connect with someone meaningful. I feel a bit like Tracy Sheridan who has been writing at LongBlondTail and The Daily Galaxy, when she wonders if Twitter+Facebook+Jaiku+Pownce = Social Network Fatigue:

Danah Boyd’s theory, “users aren’t going to tire of their friends but they will tire of problematic social spaces that make hanging out with friends difficult.” The question I tend to ponder, however, is one first posed by Read/WriteWeb’s Richard MacManus: “Could social networks prove to be anti-social?”

Anyhow, here’s the dope:

Facebook Is Traffic Jam of Young (and Old):

Since Facebook opened up its doors to the general public last September, the site’s traffic has exploded. And its been invaded by tons and tons of old people.

The social networking site – which until last September was restricted to students – saw its unique user base soar to 26.6 million users as of May 2007, up a hefty 89 percent year over year and more than double the 14 million users the site claimed prior to the lifting of all registration restraints, according to a new report issued by comScore. And perhaps most surprisingly, close to 40 percent of Facebook’s audience, or 10.4 million uniques is now 35 and over. That’s nearly 3 million more users than the 7.8 million 18-24 years olds that frequent the site.

Update: OK, so a good friend of mine who is not a porno spambot has invited me to Facebook. I guess I’ll take the plunge…

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Is Content Still A Business? » Publishing 2.0:

It seems in recent years that as the music industry goes, so goes the rest of the media industry. Is there reason to believe that other forms of content will suffer the same fate as music? There’s one critical commonality to what the Internet and digitization has done to all content that would support this theory: disaggregation

All the focus on the digitization and online distribution of music — and now video — has been on piracy. But what if that’s just a red herring?

You could argue that the most striking consequence of digitizing media and distributing it online is that all content is now available in a discrete, granual form. Music file. Article page. Video clip. Podcast. Photo. There are very few places on the web that require you to buy a whole package in order to get one item.

This is a radical transformation of the content business. Think about it.

As the creative producers of content we artists and makers already know what it’s like to never get paid. So I cry crocodile tears when I read that corporations can’t sell what they have been stealing for years (think about Disney visa-vi brothers Grim). Moreover, content has come to mean many things. I remember about ten years ago the standard freelance journalism contracts started to identify writers as “content providers.” That meant that publications could resell or reuse the work of the author endlessly through various back channels on the Web without compensation. These days it’s hard to tell how money is made with the way in which news proliferates through syndication. Essentially writers became “work-for-hire” and the idea of intellectual property, held in such high esteem with corporations, is not a matter of real estate, but a channel of flow.

So the idea now is that people will make money from performance and “merch”- t-shirts, buttons, and who know what. Great for musicians, but refrigerator magnets for the next Picasso? Fridge poems for the Vonneguts of the world? For me “performance” comes in the form of teaching and giving talks. I like it that way. I find the live setting much more engaging and invigorating than blasting info bits into the datasphere. What do you think?