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Last Thursday I was listening to The Howard Stern Show on Sirius, (on a friend’s car receiver, I should point out – I don’t own satellite radio myself,) and heard a brilliant tirade from him on how much he hates social media. He displayed a dedication to not getting it that was hilarious – going so far as to continually call it, “MyFaceBook,” because he didn’t know that there is a “Myspace” and a “Facebook.” It was as though he were insisting, “I am going to stay an out of touch old coot, and there’s not a thing you can do to stop  me.”

The discussion came about because Mike Gange, one of the show staffers, told how he maintains a blog. (On the aforementioned, “MyFaceBook,” apparently. I didn’t hear the exactly location.) Howard pointed out that Gange and other users of social media are getting used by these sites, because they are providing “free content,” which the sites make their living off of, and besides none of the content is interesting.

In my opinion, the latter point is absolutely true: The bulk of what is written on Facebook or Myspace or Twitter of blogs is largely complete twaddle. No one cares what is written, and no one reads it. The users of most all of these sites are only in it to get as many viewers/vollowers/fans as they can, so they don’t spend time reading other people’s posts as much as they do networking and building up a collection of online friends so they can have a sizeable, impressive number, but never read or keep in touch with all of them.

I’m speaking mostly of the, “lifecasters,” who share everything they’re doing at any particular moment. As someone who’s a fan of Brightkite, Utterz, and has maintained a LiveJournal since 2002, I am so completely guilty of this, so don’t think I’m casing any stones here. But for the most part, the things I do there are meant for friends and not for mass consumption. This is when social media really works, when I’m keeping in touch with friends I can’t easily keep in touch with.

It’s when people look to social as a means for being rock stars that there’s a problem, and I think this is really where Stern gets peeved. It makes sense that he would see how “MyFaceBook” or whatever is milking its users for free content – because this content is what he is competing with.

Satellite radio costs money, and social media does not. If people are eager to spend hours blogging and viewing videos and sharing pictures online, for free, that eats up a lot of potential consumers of satellite radio, and The Howard Stern Show specifically. This is another example of the point of “sink or swim” traditional media is facing: Whether to embrace the new technology, because it is the way people want to experience media, or to complain about it and hope it goes away.

After all, that’s what Don Imus would do.

Generation Virtual – AKA Generation V – is the new title given to the emerging generation of technology-savvy folks who converge online from a variety of backgrounds. According to a recent article, Generation V is becoming a force to be reckoned with, one unlike any other generation before. Instead of being divided into categories based on traditional demographics (age, race, social status and the like), Generation V is instead characterized by traits like an “increasing preference for the use of digital media channels to discover information, build knowledge and share insights,” according to the research.

This rise in a new consumer base with its own subcategories and trends is a chance for marketers to create new campaigns geared toward Generation V and the technological mediums they use. It’s a chance for online marketers to shine and also to reach across several traditional demographic groups at once as your message reaches the diverse Generation V members.

Biz Stone, co-creator of this month’s flavor Twitter, posted on his blog recently about their fight against spam - which I do think is always a laudable goal, no matter where you are. The bit I found interesting in his post about it was this:

Posting links to Twitter is great and we encourage people to do so. However, spammers are posting links on a whole different scale and they’re doing something else we call Aggressive Following. This behavior entails following thousands of other accounts in the hope of reciprocation and it really peeves Twitter users because many of us are sensitive to our Follower count—we don’t want email notifications triggered by spammers and we don’t want to see our avatar on their profile page.

The immediate problem here is that sometimes you follow thousands of other people because they’re all following you. It would seem a simple adjustment to make, that if you are reciprocating follows, you can go as high as you want. After all, if you’re popular, then a lot of people want to hear from you - and anything where people actually want to hear from you isn’t spam - it’s popular.

“Every week I turn on the TV to watch ‘House,’ and every week that show ‘House’ comes on my TV! Why won’t Fox stop spamming me!”

“Spam” on Twitter is not, in fact, spam. Twitterers can come up with some new cute name to describe what this is, perhaps, but anything you opt into is not spam. If you choose to follow another account - even if they are already following 1000 people and only being followed by 1 - that is the choice you have made.

Personally I wonder if this has more to do with Twitter’s hosting issues. I know nothing about their internal network other than it constantly breaks, but perhaps a large number of users with a large number of users followed is part of what slows down their network? That would make a lot more sense than crying, “spam” because some poor fool with a website wants traffic.

And ultimately THAT is what will detract people from using Twitter in this way - as a means for getting followers, or traffic, it just doesn’t work.

One of the comments I get most when evangelizing Twitter is that its often hard to find people to follow. Sure, Twitter itself offers a search tool but it really only scrubs basic profile information from users and returns very basic, sometimes inaccurate results.

That’s where a tool like Summize comes in.

Summize is a real time, conversational search engine. It scans twitter for conversations, using Twitter’s API, and returns to you a list of people who are talking about topics specific to your supplied keywords. It does it fast, accurately and in multiple languages. Using Summize’s advanced search options you can even localize the search to specific places (such as people who are talking about the iPhone who live in Tempe, AZ near our offices here at Mighty).

So next time you are lonely online and want to meet some other folks who are talking about the same things you are, try out Summize.

Tip: Summize is great for even “popular” twitterers or public relations folks who want to see what the twitterverse thinks about their products or services.

Could this be the beginning of a truce between traditional journalism and organized bloggers? On Thursday, the AP and the Media Bloggers Association are meeting to discuss definite rules for bloggers’ content usage of AP stories after a fall out over exactly how much content they can use. The results of this meeting could possibly be a step in the right direction of understanding between the two entities.

“We need to protect our content, no matter who’s using it, but we also recognize that the bloggers perform a really important function on the Internet in terms of increasing the engagement of the audience online, and we want to facilitate that,” said Jim Kennedy, the AP’s director of strategic planning.