So today I discovered Snubster and I have to tell you, I'm hearting it pretty hard.

I'll admit, I'm on myspace. And friendster. And dodgeball. I'm social networking myself all across the spectrum and I have been since most of these sites kicked their initial servers into gear. Since I have been a long time user of many of these sites, I'm comfortable admitting - it's getting old.

This contest out there right now - to connect with as many strangers as possible just to have "the most friends" (friends that you've never met? how exactly is that a friend?) - is pretty vapid if you sit down and look at the model that surfers are buying across the globe. And if you look even harder, you may become cynical of the crop of new social networking sites that are popping up like dandelions; you may even see them as outright pathetic.

I'm not there yet. I'm keeping my myspace.

However, I can appreciate what snubster is doing. The anti-social network. How Suicide Girls. Underground but mass. Counter-culture/subversive without being polarizing or niche.

So we'll see how they do. They're beta testing now, so who knows if they make it or how they will evolve. Right now I'm just happy typing into my list that Paris Hilton is officially "dead to me."

I haven't updated in while. I'm slackin'. What happened to my generation? Ten years ago the media were calling us slackers. Hollywood made movies about us slacking. Now everyone my age that I know, who vowed never to become their parents and spend their lives toiling for the man, work double the hours our parents worked. Generation X has truly lost its way.

I was thinking about this generational work-life predicament two weekends ago after having lunch with some friends. We discussed men our age, who seem to be leading a trend of quitting their jobs and not working. More and more, the model seems to be that Gen X women work and men do not. They don't make excuses about not working, they aren't unable to work, they simply do not want to work and quit their jobs. We sat and thought about this phenomenon and as we took inventory of our friends who are couples, we could only name a handful of them whose male partners are gainfully employed.

We considered this societal shift and some of the causes of it. A backlash to feminism? The result of our working mothers making it look too easy? The next evolution of the metrosexual: first he became comfortable getting a manicure, now he's playing house? Or more likely, now he's playing X-Box in the house.

As I walked home though the West Village, I stepped right on someone's street team marketing campaign.



Chalked along Sixth avenue and 10th Street, for several blocks, was this URL.

I don't know if this kind of grassroots, guerilla marketing tactic is successful enough generate traffic, but it got me to the site.

And I kinda wish I hadn't gone there.

Someone forwarded an e-mail to me recently that I think is something we are all going to see more and more of, particularly within corporate communications, as Corporate America jumps on the Cluetrain and learns that blogging isn't something to be contained or ignored.

The email contained a "boilerplate" along the lines of an autosignature and simply stated:

This e-mail is bloggable
This email is: [ ] bloggable [ x ] ask first [ ] private

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This is great CYA tool for corporations/businesses/brands/consumers looking to legally bind their employees or contacts from disclosing potentionally proprietary information. It's also a concise way to communicate to recipients what information is acceptable to pass along and what is not.

We've all read, and cringed at, those internal memo's from a CEO or management delivering company news or new policies that have somehow "leaked" to sites like Gawker or F*cked Company.

With the simple add of "bloggable" or "not bloggable" senders are newly empowered to protect sensitive information or details that could be negatively interpreted by individuals outside of an organization - people who don't have the history leading up to the policy. This add has the potentional to place legal culpability and accountability back in the hands of the new "citizen journalists."

Bloggers beware. And suddenly, Goliath finds a way back into the saddle....