AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

I launched this “Media and Technology” blog last year as a more efficient way of sharing information about the subjects that AFI staff and other interested parties should know about in the expanding world of online media, social networking, nonprofit management, and related topics. The AFI “Media and Technology” blog is more a record of [...]

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Red Herring
Facebook on Monday announced a new friend: Marc Andreessen, who has joined the company’s board.
“Marc is an industry leader, and we’re fortunate to have him join our board,” Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement.
The Ning chairman and co-founder was added to tap his experience with social sites and in growing [...]

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The Long Tail
I’ve argued before that social networking should be a feature, not a destination, and that the one-size-fits-all model of Facebook and MySpace will eventually give way to a multitude of narrowly focused sites with social networking built in, such as the 220,000 niche networks hosted on the Ning platform.
It turns out that it’s [...]

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The Wall Street Journal
Firms to Compete With Social Sites That Host Them
The start-up companies that create games and other popular applications for big social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace are trying to break into a new business: ad selling.
Backed by venture-capital money, these companies, including start-ups such as RockYou and iLike, are under pressure to [...]

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TechCrunch
As we wrote last week, Facebook is turning parts of its application platform open source, the company announced today. It’s available here for download.
This comes a little more than a year after Facebook Platform first launched to allow third party developers a way to get their applications directly onto Facebook. The company says more than [...]

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Reuters
Second Life has been touted as a place to market real-world brands, as a teleconferencing tool, and as the future of social networking. But increasingly, Hollywood has been eying the virtual world’s potential as an inexpensive film studio.
Gossip Girl, the CW television network’s popular show about teenagers on New York’s Upper East Side, is filming [...]

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NewTeeVee
Josh Catone over at ReadWriteWeb has an interesting suggestion for Warner Bros. to get folks interested in the upcoming superhero feature, Watchmen: Take a page from Trent Reznor’s book. The Nine Inch Nails front man has been experimenting with innovative distribution and marketing schemes ever since his band said farewell to Universal Music, giving away [...]

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The Los Angeles Times
The website is now less of an online community and more of publication platform that aggregates users’ pages for free.
Los Angeles-based artist Glenn Kaino’s gigantic sculptures have been installed in such prominent places as Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum and New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art.
The 35-year-old Cerritos native also has designed [...]

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Tech Crunch
More details on Steven Spielberg’s upcoming ghost and UFO based social network, which we first wrote about in early March and followed up with additional details a week later. The site will reportedly be called “Rising” or “The Rising” (our understanding is that they have acquired both .com domain names), and the logo above [...]

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BusinessWeek
Can the fledgling microblogging service become a social media powerhouse to rival giants like Facebook—or will it be gobbled up?
It’s easy to laugh at nonsense on Twitter, the microblogging rage. “My nose is leaking,” writes someone called Zapples, “so imma go to sleep now.…” But I’ve heard lots of similar drivel (and even produced some [...]

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