Reading through the LA Times, as I do before The Oscars every year, I came across a fantastic Op-Ed written by a respected Hollywood author by the name of Neal Gabler. The opinion piece, titled “The Movie Magic is Gone”, explains how Hollywood is losing its place as the epicenter of cultural products and how movies are losing their relevance as the “barometers of the American psyche”.

And what is culprit? You guessed it… the rise of social media! As Gabler elaborates:

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There has been much debate about the merits of Viacom’s recent decision to demand the take-down over 100,000 of its copyrighted video clips on YouTube, which included video assets from MTV, Comedy Central, and other Viacom-owned brands. Well, ‘debate’ is probably not an accurate word to use here, as there seems to be an overwhelming consensus within the blogosphere that Viacom did a very dumb thing.

As only he can, Jeff Jarvis eloquently summarizes the general consensus in his latest Guardian column, echoing the prevailing sentiment that Viacom’s move against YouTube represents yet another ill-fated attempt by the old media guard to regain command & control in the ever-elusive new media world.

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As we all know, one of the biggest stories in 2006 was about a deal that never happened. Despite multiple rumors of buyout offers from various suitors, Facebook rejected them all and decided to stay independent. Now, whether that was a smart decision, or a stupid one, is likely to be one of the big stories of 2007. In either case, the key-determining factor will rest on how well Facebook monetizes this year.

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A former mentor, and a very smart man, once told me that the greatest invention in this democracy and capitalist system we live in and know as the United States is, of all things, bankruptcy. Yep, bankruptcy… the opportunity to fail.

I mention this because I believe Jeremy Liew, venture capitalist at Lightspeed and subsequently, James Hong of Hotornot.com, posted some “must-read” thoughts and observations on this topic. In fact, I would encourage every entrepreneur to read what Jeremy and James just blogged.

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The title of this piece is a quote from Nancy Robinson, VP & Consumer Strategist at Iconoculture (from this recent CNET article). Now that’s a great quote! It’s right up there with something a very close friend/mentor used to say in the early ‘90s… “let’s put the Me back in Media!” (That was the late John Evans, former right-hand exec to Rupert Murdoch.)

I consider the remote control, first commercialized in 1956, one of the greatest inventions in electronics. It’s so ridiculously simple, yet that little device was powerful enough to dramatically impact the evolution of the TV & cable industries. Think about it… without the remote control, there would be no interface to manage hundreds of channels, no serendipitous discovery of new shows enabled by channel-surfing during commercial breaks, no watching two or three shows simultaneously by clicking back and forth between channels.

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Lately, I’ve been thinking through an oft-discussed scenario involving MySpace… one that I have good reason to believe is now highly likely in 2007. What if MySpace suddenly decided to put up tollbooths and all the players within the MySpace third-party ecosystem had to start paying the mothership access fees?

Without doubt, a strategic shift in policy by MySpace along such lines could cause significant ripples, if not outright panic, among many of those vested in the MySpace economy.

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The most important market challenge for social networks in 2007 can be summarized in three words: monetization, monetization, and monetization.

Regardless of whether social networks will splinter into niches and verticals (e.g. sports, pets, moms, teenage girls, etc.), regardless of whether social networks adopt interoperability (e.g. OpenID), regardless of whether individual profile pages morph into widgetized and personalized start-pages, regardless of whether 2007 will be the year that social networking goes mobile… all such market development activities will prove secondary to a much more fundamental issue.

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