For years now the exhibitionism of Gen-Y seems to have been boundless. It’s ironic that the place we’re finally seeing its limits is Facebook, the original home of the embarrassing drunken college photo. Seems that their latest monetization strategy went a wee bit too far, and now they’re backing off.

The lesson I’d draw from this isn’t that people have limits to what they will share online - they do, but that’s not why they’re against Facebook’s strategy. The reason Beacon backfired is that it took the control of what information is shared away from users. Posting pictures of me drunk and half-naked at a party is ok, as long as it’s done by me or a friend. For a corporation to publicize what I’m doing - a little too Big Brother for everyone.

Welcome, wilkommen, bienvenue, irashyaimasu.. this blog will hopefully bring you a nugget or two, every now and then, about the wild and wonderful things going on out there on the Web, Internet, Metaverse, or whatever you call the virtual space between your computer screen and everybody else’s.

Back in 2002, a lot of us thought the whole Internet thing had been overhyped.. shards of the burst bubble crunched under our shabby shoes as we searched for new career directions.. but we despaired too soon. Just as we couldn’t have imagined 1999 back in 1996, we couldn’t have imagined 2007 back in 2003.

Who knows what 2010 will bring, but we can at least try to peer through the fog and hazard a few guesses every now and then.

The blurring of content and commerce has been going on for several years now. You could even argue that it happened in offline media first - fashion magazines list brands and prices of every item of clothing on every photo, and magazines like Lucky drop the whole editorial pretense and just tell you what to buy.

There are examples of this online of course, but the Internet being what it is, we’ve started to see many more permutations. The Wall Street Journal ran an article the other day about a woman who posts youtube videos of herself discussing and making her latest painting.. if you like what you see, you can go to her site and buy the painting.

Refinery 29 is a fashion site that runs articles featuring the latest hot designers.. but it also has an online virtual “mall” where you can buy items from said designers. Clever, no? But the real genius is that, as you click around their shop, you generate so many more pageviews, which means more ad revenue for them.. we just might be seeing a lot more of this model in the future.