This Week in Social Media: Murders and Executions Edition
The weekly recap from The Social.
"This Week in Social Media" is a completely straightforward and unbiased recap of recent industry moves and hot topics, pulled from all over the Web, so that you can go out on Friday Saturday night and impress people with how in-the-know you are.
If you're a tech enthusiast who also happens to be a fan of Bret Easton Ellis' novel American Psycho, or the film adaptation starring Christian Bale, you've probably made plenty of jokes this week involving the verbal parallels drawn between deranged protagonist Patrick Bateman's night job in "murders and executions" and day job in mergers and acquisitions. (I know I sure have.) That's because the media industry's current buyout bender reached rock-star proportions this week.
As if last week's acquisition of TreeHugger by Discovery Communications wasn't enough, this week we saw Kaboodle consumed by Hearst Publications, the Freakonomics blog absorbed by the New York Times (which is, by the way, potentially shedding its paid-content skin), and rumors circulated that Clipmarks will potentially be acquired by Forbes.
Meanwhile, not all start-ups were getting along with The Man: big-media-backed Veoh (you know, the one with Michael Eisner on its board of directors) made a seemingly anti-establishment move by suing Universal Music. TechCrunch's Michael Arrington called it "a major surprise."
In other news, Apple brought its iTunes software into the wonderful world of widgets...Plaxo dove into the deep end of the social-networking pool...Facebook has been under some advertiser pressure across the pond...and fellow CNET blog Webware has started dabbling in fashion journalism.
Plus, "Lonelygirl15" protagonist Bree, played by actress Jessica Rose, got the axe in the Web show's season finale at the hands of a cult ritual...the beloved Fake Steve Jobs was unmasked over the weekend as Forbes editor Dan Lyons, thus killing a myriad of cocktail party conversations about the formerly anonymous satire blogger's true identity...and JibJab has been brutally murdering office productivity around the globe.
So, ultimately, it looks like there was some murders-and-executions action going on after all.