A Best of the Web
Business Week publishes its Best of the Web edition, including its readers' picks for a dozen anointed bloggers, favorite social networks, news, humor, gossip and sports sites, etc...
It's a good list, though a little gear-headed (the very good Techcrunch wins best blog) and a little mass-market (iTunes is the favorite music destination).
And the way the magazine divides cyberspace into what you can do at work and what's verboten is sort of wishful: no reading about games, gossip, humor, music social networks, trip planning or video at the office. Ok?
But if you want a window into that world zipping by, this is a good one.
There are some common sense features - the market power of the MySpace generation, copyright woes for video-sharing sites like YouTube, why big advertisers don't realize the potential of the Internet as a hang-out place, how that picture of you playing beer pong on your Facebook page might come to the attention of college officials or your next boss.
And stuff - big stuff - I'd managed to miss completely. Business Week readers' favorite social network is Bebo, the San Francisco-born site, most-popular in the UK, and recently courted by Viacom. You knew that, though. Right?
A piece that begins with Monster.com's founder obsessing over the number 50, reports how each day 10,000 U.S. boomers turn a half-century old, and no Web site has figured out how to capture the fancy of this generation that will live longer and more actively than any before it. (Note to Eons.com - if you really want me to join, lose the longevity calculator and the obits database. Remember, 50 is the new 30.)