If the thinking behind a liberal approach to web content sharing is driving traffic back to your original content source, what happens when the benefits of doing exactly that – i.e. bumping up traffic for potential advertisers – fails to generate the hoped-for commercial return?

To all those (un) lucky souls who will NOT be joining our early-adopter friends in Austin this weekend ...

A reminder to please join us at Google, this coming Tuesday March 17 at 12:15pm for Media Future Now’s March 2009 brown bag lunch. (DETAILS AT BOTTOM)

Our discussion this month will be “Tough Times: Finding Talent, Advancing a Career, and Building Diversity in New Media in a Troubled Economy”.

Guests:
Onica Makwakwa, UNITY (Executive Director).
Chris Murphy, Atlantic Media Company (GC & Executive Director for HR).
Harry Weiner, ON-Ramps (CEO and Founder).

When David Carr wrote recently in his Media Equation column that “there is a rational argument to be made that the part of the [newspaper] apparatus that has a working business model, declining or not, should receive the resources”, he was talking about the print side of newspapers.

According to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, the internet has now surpassed all other media except television as a main source for national and international news.

Crossposted on K Street Cafe. Randall Lane wrote a provocative piece in Monday’s New York Times suggesting a “ballot buddy system” among the states to permit apportioning of electoral votes among counties or congressional districts.

Check out the Obama transition site change.gov and read this piece on it in today's Post by Dan Froomkin "You Mean We Can Talk Back." This represents the shift I've been discussing from e-mail to web-based grassroots and every member of Congress and interest group should follow suit.

I’m not a gamer, and at a recent Social Rockstar Workshop with Chris Melissinos, Chief Gaming Officer of Sun Microsystems, when the question was asked “Who in this room identifies themselves as “gamers”, maybe a quarter of the Social Media Rockstar group raised their hands. Melissinos surveyed the room and laughed, “Well, that’s great, and the rest of you are and you don’t realize it yet.”

Our friend Tim Hartman of Atlantic Media’s Government Executive Media Group is seeking a Manager of Online Products. If interested in the position, please contact Atlantic Media, via www.atlanticmediacompany.com, or contact Tim directly at THartman@govexec.com.

Here’s the position description:

Last week, Alan Rosenblatt of the Center for American Progress (a fellow Tufts alum, I might add), hosted another terrific round table on the impact of technology on this election and what the future might hold. His panel included Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifray who I quoted in my last blog post and Jose Antonio Vargas of the Washingon Post who covered the election from a tech perspective. Much has been written about how Obama used technology so successfully in his campaign to organize his constituents and raise money, but two questions came up that bear much discussion going forward:

There is terrific article in today's Politico on the impact of the Internet on the 2008 election written by Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry of Personal Democracy Forum entitled The Web: 2008's Winning Ticket. This is a must read for online political operatives.