media+marketing business trend links

• How Borat Exploited Google - The hottest joke about the so-called Web 2.0 reads: "What is the difference between Google and Borat? The latter knows how to make money from YouTube." - Evgeny Morozov @ The Globalist
• IBM Says Yes to $10 MM In Virtual Multiplayer World Media Buys -  With the $10 million, IBM eventually wants to develop a private 3D world that employees can use to discuss private business information. - Adotas
• What exactly is web 2.0? Does it even exist? - Founders of some of the world's most successful websites talk to Ian Katz and Oliver Burkeman about how users reclaimed the web. - The Guardian Unlimited
• Social Networking Is Hot, but Research Is Hotter - "What addicts people [to a site] is feeling they're on the cutting edge," he said. "Something that makes users say I'm really glad to be here. But they're very fickle. What might be important to them this month could change next month." -Andrew Hampp & Abbey Klaasen @ AdAge
• Brands Produce Their Own Shows - [I'm not talking about soap operas here] Marketers have found a new way to try to keep viewers from tuning out: offer them TV shows, movies and online programming created by the marketers themselves, often with help from their advertising agencies. - Louise Story @ The New York Times
• State of the Blogosphere, October, 2006 - David Sifry and Technorati give us our annual update and checkup. - Technorati
• The Commerce of 'Second Life' - There are now more than a million virtual residents here. So many that advertisers and marketers want their real life brand names here too.  - KABC.com Los Angeles
• The Year's Best Inventions - It's been an interesting year in technology. Nintendo invented a video game you control with a magic wand. A new kind of car traveled 3,145 miles on a single gallon of gas. A robot learned to ride a bike. Somebody came up with a nanofabric umbrella that doesn't stay wet. But only YouTube created a new way for millions of people to entertain, educate, shock, rock and grok one another on a scale we've never seen before. That's why it's Time's Invention of the Year for 2006.  - Time Magazine
• Get out of MySpace - Media companies are in a tither about online social networking but Jonathan Weber struggles to see the point - Jonathan Weber @ The Times Online