MySpace is YOUR Space, Not THEIR Space

Nick Carr emailed me Saturday morning with the news that Dan Mitchell’s NYT column had referenced my MySpace downturn post and that I had “dragged” Nick along with me. “One could make a career out of this MySpace skeptic thing,” I quipped back, “probably pays as much as a career in user-generated content.”

And then I thought: there’s quite a bit of irony in all this. Here I am with my one-man-band “user-generated content,” taking shots at the granddaddy of user-generated content, and suddenly the skeptical view of MySpace is being read by millions of people in the Times (ok, well maybe not that many).

(Incidentally, the notion of a blog as “user-generated content” is ridiculous on the face of it — what exactly am I a user OF? WordPress? I’m not a user — if anything, I’m a publisher, like any other — except for the profit margins.)

What’s so appealing, then, about this skeptical view of MySpace? Dan is right that, despite the fun I had with Alexa graphs, the “evidence that MySpace is fading is, at best, dubious.”

I think this struck a nerve because instinctively everyone knows the MySpace phenomenon can’t last.

After all, MySpace is just a PLATFORM — the spaces on MySpace belong to the users — it’s YOUR space, not THEIR (i.e. News Corp’s) space. The users can pack up and leave any time they want — that’s what happens when you don’t own the content.

Remember, it’s about the COMMUNITY, not the platform — MySpace boosters tend to conflate the two. Communities are about people, and the places for people to connect online are proliferating like rabbits.

While we’re on the topic of the NYT article, what’s up with the online articles not including in-line links? Instead, they list all the links in a sidebar titled “Related.”

Perhaps the Time doesn’t want to temp readers with the opportunity to link off the site — or maybe they just like annoying people by flouting the convention used by every other website on the planet.

The print edition is even worse — here’s where the sidebar with list of URLs would actually make sense, but instead there’s just a tiny note at the bottom: “Complete list of links at nytimes.com/business”

Based on the large number of people who arrived here by Googling “Publishing 2.0 blog,” I’d say most print readers have better ways of finding the references that interest them.

Oh, and it’s worth noting that a reference in the New York Times doesn’t drive nearly as much traffic as a top spot on Techmeme.