Reno Social Media Think Tank

Papandreou called for an end to "state, federal, and local land use policies that are literally forcing people to have to drive" and told Wired.com we're on the cusp of an inevitable "mode shift" away from individual car ownership toward a greater reliance on mass transit and sustainable transport.

"cars have a right to housing and people don't."

It's brought us to the point where most Americans consider automobile ownership an essential key to a productive, fulfilling life.

Looking inside of those numbers, it’s not surprising that the bulk of content creators are simply social networking users that do things like post photos or links, but there’s also a quickly-growing number of people participating in more involved activities like blogging or uploading their own videos.

As you can see in the above chart, 71 million people created content on social networks last year, while 21 million posted blogs, 15 million uploaded videos, and more than 11 million participated in virtual worlds. Overall, eMarketer arrives at the 82 million number – which counts everyone who generated content at least monthly - by accounting for the overlap within the respective categories measured.

ensuring easy access to its market-leading search engine.

Content isn't king: culture is. The reason we go to the movies is to have something to talk about. If I sent you to a desert island and told you to choose between your records and your friends, you'd be a sociopath if you chose the music.

Because if copying on the Internet were ended tomorrow, it would be the end of culture on the Internet too.

If culture loses the copyright wars, the reason for copyright dies with it.

The results are dramatic: most online video viewers watch mere seconds, rather than minutes, of a video.

For starters, it is clear that post-roll ads are of limited effectiveness.

This will create a huge influx of unfiltered material, and create a significant demand for filters and editors who can find/sort/select and recommend contextual quality content within verticals.

the core resource required to building a high-quality curated experience is not capital, but knowledge.

Apple has created a safe, trusted micro-payment economy around iTunes and the fact that only software that is tested gets into their iTunes systems is evidence that the Curation Economy is at play here too.

is such an unusual magnet for consumer attention and recall that it is worth every penny.

Consumers want to see the ads; they're akin to entertainment.

In my six years of monitoring game spots, there's been no question that brands that "prime the pump" around their Super Bowl spots get far bigger buzz dividends than brands that don't.

Strategy Analytics said fourth-quarter handset sales were off 10.5 percent compared to the same period a year ago -- dropping from to 329 million to 295 million.

But it's easy to forget that Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) and RIM (NASDAQ: RIMM) fans represent only a sliver of worldwide mobile phone users -- and they can't offset a larger decline.

"We have been seeing a consolidation by users down to one device rather than multi-devices for e-mail and voice in the enterprise segment," Susan Welsh de Grimaldo, a senior analyst at Strategy Analytics, told InternetNews.com

I’ve been devoting much of my time of late to exploring Web 2.0 possibilities in the last few weeks… services, sites, widgets and ways to integrate them. Now that we all have profiles all over the place (Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, YouTube and countless others) keeping them all relevant can be pretty time consuming. Fortunately developers appear to be aware of this and are doing something about it. Here’s a cute little example of my most recent Web 2.0 chain reaction (websites updating other websites and profiles automatically)

This is a pretty neat development, and can be handy both socially and professionally.

In this case, my goal was to proliferate my online video, and share the awareness of it as broadly as possible.

What we're trying to say is that as a technology for delivering the news, newsprint isn't just expensive and inefficient; it's laughably so.

So here’s the observation. If you manage a brand online, get ready for people to leverage it — both professional and personal — for their own gain.The big question is whether to grease the skids and enable it, stand by and watch it happen, or send in the clowns and get all legal. The question is this: should I be giving product to bloggers and twitter users to activate this sort of self-managed promotion/contest or am I on shaky legal/ethical ground? I did rip into the “Blog Slut” phenomenon and don’t want to demean the Lenovo brand name by getting into any kind of payola arrangements. That aside, @moon has pounded the word Lenovo and gotten other people to Tweet it far more than the usual organic flow of the conversation would have. So should I shut up and be happy for the free branding?

Customer care and PR are blending as consumers use social media to demand service

The media is in a constant state of reinvention as it transitions from atoms to bits

Gorging on media is out. Selective ignorance and friends as filters are in

"That's the biggest scam in the Bay Area," John said. "It totally felt like a blackmail deal. I think they're doing anything to make a sale."

Meanwhile, some travel suppliers are providing social networking products, and others plan to later this year.

Plus, everything in your community is video-enabled, including message boards and blogs.

Viral Widgets Members can syndicate their favorite content from your community to some of the Web's most trafficked sites, including MySpace, iGoogle, WordPress and Blogger, with a simple mouse click. Or, they can easily copy/paste the embed code.

Essentially, media in Habari is about unifying all of your media sources inside your blog software so that you don't have to go running from place to place to assemble a post. In other words, making it easy for the user. I have a pretty common scenario that I use when I start into my diatribe about Habari media.

I am really excited about the progress we've made on the silos in the past week or two. I've managed to finally connect uploading to the simple file silo so that you can upload photos to your own server. With the back-end worked out, the Flickr upload should come very quickly next, and then shortly afterward, the Viddler embedded recording functionality.