social networking

Worth noting: The dopey DOPA legislation, which I previously described as a "war on social networking," is dying in a refreshed Congress.

We tend to think all this Web stuff, especially Web 2.0 stuff, is new, but it's not. Here's an example: Social networking. Online social networks existed long before the Web.

Despite the phenomenal growth and dominance of Myspace in social networking, there's still plenty of opportunity -- in the niches.

I think people play different social roles depending on whether they're interacting at work, with their neighbors, or in a Myspace-like global setting.

As a result, there's room for more social networks, and local social networking is an important opportunity that newspapers should be chasing.

In a recent report on Web 2.0, the Pew Internet & American Life project documents the performance of three participatory websites against their more conventional counterparts: Photobucket vs. Kodakgallery, Wikipedia vs. Encarta, Myspace vs. Geocities. The comparisons are compelling. I'll skip the thousand words and just pass along the pictures:

I've been tooling around on Vita.mn, the new youth-focused entertainment website from the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. It's good to see the Star Tribune back in the groove, breaking new ground.

There's a lot to like in this effort -- wiki-like collaborative "guides" authored by the community, a solid foundation of basic listings, calendaring, free tagging and social networking. And it's refreshingly fast. My only immediate complaint is that it doesn't do enough to celebrate its "people" functionality -- some of the cool stuff is quite buried.

So it turns out that Myspace s attracting older users than had been thought. That shouldn't be surprising; with the barrage of media coverage about the dangers of Myspace, every mother in America is trolling through Myspace for evidence of her children's activities.

We've rolled out a new design for BlufftonToday.com, visually aligning the website more effectively with the printed newspaper and fixing some usability issues that were identified in the site's first year of operation and through formal testing.

The changes include a number of new functions and features, particularly in the social networking area. User profile pages now include buddylist avatars and guestbooks.