News Corp is close to releasing “myspace china”. Check it out. Myspace China

IBM has been impressive in their decisions to take advantage of open source technologies and now they are showing a big sign of support for virtualization of content and online communities and, because they are the current leader in the field, for Second Life. Last week IBM announced that they would soon have 12 islands in SL and this week they announced that Second Life will be part of an "Emerging Business Opportunity" within IBM which will seek to define opportunities for IBM and their various businesses.

The New York Times ran this story on Monday. Here are some out-takes and ideas...

directly quoting the above linked article:
"In another striking example of the divergence in forecasts for the traditional and new media, Mr. Coen, whose agency is part of the McCann Worldgroup unit of the Interpublic Group of Companies, predicted that ad spending on the four largest national broadcast television networks would increase just 3 percent next year from 2006.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/micro-markets/?p=703

Michael Arrington is on to some thing good in this post on all the hype around how online video will work with or against traditional broadcast media. In this case online video is represented by YouTube and traditional broadcast is represented by CBS. The bottom line, from my perspective, is that we do not know how this is going to work out so CBS is smart in getting into the game now – being in it allows them to adjust strategies based on experience.

Over the past six months I've been involved in conversations on Second Life with a few corporate marketing execs and ad agency CEO's. All these conversations have a few things in common which I think are important for all communications pros to understand. 1.) Virtualization Will Be a New Form of the Web 2.) The Big Consumer Opportunities are Not Clear. Yet (But Here's an Idea). 3.) Private Groups are Important to Think About.

In the past six months we've built functioning prototypes of web-based apps for Nike, Dell and Merck. These prototypes go well beyond what presentation boards or words are capable of. They create a situation where the client is in the shoes of the end user.

In my post last Friday I recommended that agencies not become enamored with the idea of paying people to blog about their clients' products & services. An equally bad idea is creating fake blogs – I am defining 'fake' as having a distinct purpose that is shielded from or lied about to your audience. Look at how it's working out for Edelman.