It seems that everywhere I look, there’s someone telling us why corporate blogs are not only a waste of time if you’re looking for something to read, but they offer no value and should be taken down as soon as possible.

The detractors claim corporate blogs lack transparency, fail to adapt to the changing times, and generally play the PR game without ever admitting issues or entering into a discussion with the reader.

I think that’s pure rubbish.

Sure, most of these corporate blogs play the PR game and would rather tell you how wonderful they are than how awful they’ve performed over time, but who cares? Do you really go to a corporate blog looking for the company to bash itself? I seriously doubt the shareholders would be too happy with that.

Instead, corporate blogs provide me with some insider knowledge into what’s really going on behind the scenes at some of these companies. And while some make the complaint that transparency is an issue and corporate blogs keep things guarded, most corporate blog posts are actually quite transparent if you read between the lines.

Is the company trying to hide something when it uses some clever language and side steps some major issues? Is the company saying something different than it’s writing by including some innuendos? These are the questions you need to ask when you read a corporate blog and generally, the answer is yes.

That said, not all corporate blogs are created equal. Zillow has a great blog and Garmin has done a fantastic job of adding some personality to an otherwise vanilla landscape. Twitter has a nicely informative blog now that it’s trying to have a dialogue with its users and explain its issues and Google is easily one of the most entertaining companies in the corporate blogging space.

These blogs, much like countless others from companies across vastly different industries, may not offer something compelling with each post and sometimes they’re nothing more than an extension of the PR team, but even the most self-adulating blogs tend to offer some entertaining and extremely informative posts that not only act as the backbone for news stories, but for shareholder consumption as well.

Who can forget Palm CEO Ed Colligan’s response to Engadget’s open letter? Who else finds value in Garmin’s answers to reader questions? How about Zillow’s celebrity listings that show you how much some of your favorite celebrities’ homes are worth?

See, it’s not that I love corporate blogs because they only talk about a company, but I love corporate blogs because they give a company some personality and they offer you some insight (no matter how guarded) into the people behind an organization that seems so cold and calculating.

Lest we forget, tech companies are moneymaking machines. Sure, some may not turn the kind of profit Microsoft does and others don’t seem to have their finger on the pulse of consumers like Apple, but each is managed by individuals with unique identities and something interesting to say – if we’ll listen.

I don’t love corporate blogs because they spread propaganda – that’s a guarantee that you should be aware of before you head to the site – or because they tend to gloss over some of the less glowing facts. I love corporate blogs because at the very least, they provide a human element to something that is devoid of emotion, understanding, and personality.

On top of that, I love corporate blogs because they’re the easiest way to file a complaint and tell more than a recording or a customer service agent that something is wrong. In a matter of seconds, you can file a complaint in the comments and if people agree, they’ll jump on the bandwagon and in one fell swoop, your singular issue becomes a major problem and someone will be forced to listen.

I understand that most people look at corporate blogs as nothing more than another propaganda machine, but I don’t. Sure, they’re inundated with useless crap from time to time, but I see them as more than a place for a company to write things about itself. Corporate blogs give you clues about the organization’s culture, its people, and why (right or wrong) most of its employees believe in what they’re doing.

And if you ask me, there’s nothing wrong with that.

[Image credit: Wyetha Lipford (attribution)]

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Mashable is headed on its second leg of the Summer Tour, beginning with Austin, followed by Miami, Boston, and ending at New York City. During each of these SummerMashes, attendees have a chance to score some sweet tickets to Austin’s hottest interactive festival. That’s right, the nice folks behind South by Southwest are giving away two tickets per city to SXSWi 2009, which will be held from March 13-17 next year.

Be sure to sign up for the events now if you haven’t, because prices will go up (and not down) for each individual SummerMash. You could win tickets to one of the best tech events of the year!

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I know there’s a good portion of you that are going to instantly groan at the headline, either because it’s a territory that’s been hashed out a number of times from a number of different angles or because you’re one of those folks who simply doesn’t believe there are such thing as “killer” technology (I’ve had that conversation with a few folks recently).

But Duncan Riley put out an interesting, if not provocative, editorial this evening entitled “Television will be the first traditional media medium to fall.”  Personally, I have always felt that radio would be the first to falter, though in a neck-and-neck race with newsprint, but Duncan Riley puts some new stats to work in support the prediction today:

The television switch off is real. In the United States, 2.5 million viewers switched off in the spring on 2008 compared to the same time in 2006. Statistically this is only a small percentage of the overall viewing audience, but among those still watching television, the amount of television they watch each day is declining.

The decline in television viewing is stronger among younger statistical groups. In Europe, a 2005 study from the European Interactive Advertising Association found almost half of 15- to 24-year-olds are watching less TV in favor of browsing the web. A study reported in The Guardian in 2007 headlined with “Young networkers turn off TV and log on to the web.” The television switch off in the United States among younger people has seen the average age of a TV viewer increase to 50.

The stats are compelling, and certainly point to an uncertain future for Old Media television, particularly in the face of the ever increasing volume of studies showing that pretty soon we’ll be watching video online more than we’ll be sleeping. Duncan goes on to say that while newsprint and radio have some harrowing times ahead of them, they’ll survive. At least, for now.

I’m not sure that I agree that TV is the first to go, though. Certainly Duncan makes a compelling case, and I’m not one of those folks who thinks new technology incapable of killing old technology (you certainly don’t see a lot of eight-tracks for sale these days, and photograph developing is quickly becoming a thing of the past). But we’re seeing a lot more rapid detioration taking place in the music and radio business than we’re seeing even in newspaper and television. It’s an interesting deathrace between the industries, and it’s difficult to call a ‘winner’ to the finish line.

Newspaper death watch.

For instance, newspaper decline is largely financial in nature.  Certainly, when you’re talking about business, that’s the most important factor to measure a media type’s life span. Is that what we’re really talking about here, though? The death of the media type or the changing of the guard in terms of the dominant companies behind them. In either event, newsprint and text delivery of news is increasingly being dominated by online blogs and news portals. Circulation may be technically up, but revenues for the companies that resist the transition to online delivery are most decidedly down.

Wise newspaper publications are managing some sort of a transition to an online revenue, but most companies that have their base in serialized news in the printed form still have problems adjusting to the new formats that we in the blogging business take for granted.

Duncan is very positive that newspapers will always go the distance because of the need for quality journalism.  Unfortunately (at least for the newspaper industry) I don’t see this as a particularly convincing argument.  Quality journalism can and does take place outside of newsprint, and for a much greater profit. Some traditional text journalism outfits may realize this and make the transition.  Most won’t.

Disclosure: I may be particularly negative towards newspaper futures due to the fact that in a previous life I consulted for several newspapers in their New Media efforts. In my experience they’re generally not a very forward thinking bunch.

TV death and destruction.

As I said, Duncan makes a compelling point for the impending doom of television, and I’d go even further than he in my prognostications of doom for the media type. Again, like I said regarding the newspaper business, when you’re talking about the death of a media, you’re potentially talking about two things: either the media type itself or the industries behind that media production.

In this situation I think it’s silly to say we’ll stop watching video in our livingrooms on television sets.  Where the video that plays on those sets comes from is very likely to change very soon. Just yesterday I talked about a very clear path for Netflix and Roku to make a play for the livingroom very soon, but they’re obviously not the only ones competing for eyeballs.  TiVo, Apple, and a cadre of other set-top device manufacturers are working on taking real-estate in your entertainment center.

Traditional television has something that no set-top box solution has tackled or mastered yet (aside from coverage of live sporting events), and I’ve talked about it in the past here in my editorials on the subject: the “veg-factor.”

To illustrate the veg-factor, think about the type of media consumption you do in the morning, while you’re getting the kids ready for school, or fixing breakfast in the morning while you’re getting ready for work. Morning show format news-ish programs are designed for this low-engagement, veg-factor consumption. They’re, in large part, designed to be background noise that delivers some entertainment and utility to your morning.

Likewise, in the evening, you come home from work, you switch on the TV and catch the local news or a Seinfeld re-run, and leave the TV on through Wheel of Fortune or whatever reality program du jour is on this season. Most people won’t even touch the remote until prime-time starts. That’s the veg-factor in action.

Very simply, no one is doing this for the set-top box experience. Until there is a one-to-one equivalent for this, you won’t see a complete replacement for television.

Radio apocalypse.

The radio business has been even more dominated in recent years by mega-conglomorates and mergers. With this has come the ‘Clearchannel approach,’ that has driven almost all radio towards a formula for profit. Anecdotally, this was hashed out recently in the comments of an editorial I recently wrote about the impending doom for radio at the hands of the iPhone’s on demand music applications. Sean and I talked about this the other day, and the argument is compelling that radio is doing a decent job of killing itself, and requires no new technology to hasten its death.

But the fact remains that new technologies like smartphones and other pocket devices coupled with the impending ubiquity of wireless Internet access makes things look pretty bleak.

I say that, and I can almost hear Steven Hodson’s voice cracking as he crankily reminds me that impending ubiquity of access is anything but certain (most likely because he reminds me once a week on Elite Tech News). He makes a compelling case for it, but recent news like the coming embedded “Internet Chips” from Intel as VentureBeat reported on the other day makes me think otherwise.

Here’s the thing that really makes radio’s future look particularly bad compared to the rest - the record labels.  Talk radio is very ably making the transition to podcasting and other forms of online audio entertainment media types, but the record labels have very famously dug in their heels and made it next to impossible for broadcasters to adapt their business models for the online environment using popular music.

Given that, it isn’t surprising to see radio clinging the hardest to their dying business models. I predicted back in December that we’d see an end to at least one major record label this year, and I stick by that assessment. Given that the mainstream record labels are so integral to traditional radio’s survival (and their demise is key to online radio’s ascendence), I think it’s now more than ever we should be looking to traditional radio as the first to die off.

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You know you want Mashable on your desktop’s Dashboard — that way you can ensure you never miss a post and see articles real time as we post them! Interested? Check out Mashable’s brand new Mac OS X Dashboard widget made by one of our dedicated readers, Joel Then.

Enjoy reading Mashable whenever you pull up your Dashboard, and thank you to Joel for the awesome unexpected Mashable treat!

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In the past few weeks Plurk has released a number of updates in preparation for its upcoming API launch. Improvements include, a new customizable sidebar widget, new starter verbs such as “wonders” and “needs,” a cleaner “All Plurks,” and “My Plurks” navigation, along with a custom search feature. Plurk has even enhanced their competitive ranking system, also known as “Karma” to make the algorithm more fair and balanced.

Another feature that Plurk recently implemented that reminds me of the unofficial Twitter extended backgrounds is the ability to customize everything on your profile via CSS if your Karma is over 25. Customizing your profile background is something that some Twitter users, myself included, have wanted to see, but after seeing a few backgrounds and profiles in Plurk, I’m not so sure. Take a look below:

Plurk fail whale:

Animated gator background:

I’m not saying they’re bad - I’ll let you be the judge of that. But customizing backgrounds should be an enhancement and not a distraction to users, especially since many Plurk users are waiting for desktop integration such as Plurker, a Windows WPF desktop application or twhirl.

For those of us who Plurk on a regular basis I would say that we’re satisfied with the service’s development and features — and just this week Plurk was added to the list of supported sites on FriendFeed. However, Plurk’s community and conversations still remain a question. Currently from the twitter/tech/blog community, Darren Rowse of Problogger and Majo of Live Crunch are making headway up the interesting plurkers karma list. But still, without an API, no desktop application, and some of the most popular topics on Plurk being “good morning,” “good night,” “hi,” “sex” and “coffee,” it will be interesting to see what audience Plurk continues to build.

Is Plurk the MySpace or Facebook of micro-blogging? Only time will tell.

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Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

STARTUP DETAILS:

Company Name: AudioMicro

20-word Description: AudioMicro is the preeminent user generated micro stock music and sound effects licensing platform.

CEO’s Pitch: AudioMicro’s proven business model, micro stock, makes its platform innovative and revolutionary in a music industry traditionally unwelcoming of new licensing and monetization models. Micro stock is a business model rooted in the photography industry whereby content is crowd sourced and democratically licensed for prices starting a $1. The largest micro stock photography licensor, iStockphoto.com, will experience approximately $122 million in FY 2008 revenues. AudioMicro is the iStockphoto of the audio world, operating in the $3.4 billion commercial music (performance and sync) licensing market, representing world class composers and sound designers.

Mashable’s Take: Launched earlier this year, AudioMicro, a Los Angeles-based stock music licensing service, is aiming to capture a part of the commercial music market at the same time that iStockphoto has joined the fray. It may be right to assume that an earlier entry into the market would have bade better for its future. The field is now populated by the likes of independent operations such as YouLicense and even Getty Images, a global image-heavy juggernaut that acquired Pump Audio more than a year ago.

Now that major brands have involved themselves in the relatively young, Web-based audio licensing market, AudioMicro must rely almost exclusively on its content and cost structure in order to grab a healthy percentage of the market. Looking at its catalog of material, which the startup lists as user-generated, it seems to be working with a decent supply of material. As with most archives filled with music and sound effects and so forth, some content will interest few users, but there’s enough quality there to warrant an account. Fees are easy to understand, too. One minute or less will run you $1. The same ratio is had for anything up to 4 minutes in length. Push past that mark, and you’ll pay $5.

As for the service’s layout, it’s simple enough that you more or less find your own way around without trouble. It would certainly do well to rearrange its front page to make it seem a bit more current. Perhaps more featured media and less tags would grab the eye of the visitor a bit more. But on the whole, it serves its purpose. If you don’t find what you’re looking for elsewhere, or if you would simply like a basic place to shop for stock downloads (or offer your own for sale), without having to contend with mountains of users pooling into higher-profile venues, AudioMicro is a good bet. The company’s stated commissions for submitters of music and effects is 60% for exclusives (uploaded to AudioMicro only) and 50% for non-exclusives.

Sponsored By: Sun Startup Essentials

Mashable is ready for the sixth stop on the U.S. Summer Tour in Boston. It’s Mashable’s first time coming to Beantown and Pete Cashmore and Karen Hartline are ready to meet everyone at The Roxy where we’ll have a DJ, food and drink tickets to help set the mood for the night. We also have some surprises and major prizes we’re giving away, so bring those business cards and keep your fingers crossed. Each SummerMash event is better than the last one, so the pressure’s on for Boston to rock. We’re ready if you are!

Check out the other cities on the U.S. Summer Tour:

Seattle | San Francisco | Los Angeles | Austin | Miami | New York City

When: August 5th, Tuesday, 7:00 - 10:00 PM

Where: The Roxy 279 Tremont Street, Boston, MA 02116

What Else?: Drink Tickets, Light Appetizers, and a few surprises!

RSVP?: Tickets will be released through Eventbrite, 21+ Only

Socialize: Facebook, MySpace, Meetup and Upcoming

Press Passes: Please inquire through events [at] mashable |dot| com for Press Passes

Local Sponsor:

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‘Mashery is the leading provider of on-demand API management solutions, enabling you to attract new partners, manage API access, monitor the distribution of your content, and measure success.’

‘E.Factor - With over 48,000 members and over 90 investors it is the fastest growing social network for Entrepreneurs. Now offering health insurance to its members!’

‘Mzinga‘s business social media solutions enable companies to harness the collective intelligence of employees and customers to achieve higher revenues, lower costs, and greater satisfaction.’

*There are a few special Sponsorship positions available. For more info please contact: Brett and Karen at events [at] mashable |dot| com

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Local Media Partner:

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Special Marketing Partner:

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Tour Sponsors

The Sun(TM) Startup Essentials program is designed to help startup businesses off the ground by providing access to industry-leading systems at deep discounts, free world-class software and web-based training, discounts on partner hosting services, and more.

Yoono’s mission is to make the social web accessible, easy and fun for everyone. Its newly expanded service socializes your browser, helps you manage your digital life and brings the best of the web into one single browser-based application. Today, 1.3 million users are leveraging Yoono.

Yoono is hosting Social Media Camp at each tour stop which brings together the top local names in Blogging, Podcasting, Live Streaming, and New Media to participate in an open workshop about the power of social media.

MySites is a single place for all your online needs. You can create and customize a website, save and share any media, decide who can view it, embed anywhere, and use any device.

Touring Video Partner

Launched in February 2006, Stickam emerged as the first and largest Web site dedicated to live interactive video streaming. Stickam’s cutting edge technology delivers millions of streams each day, reaching over two million registered users. They are continuing on the path of social interactive TV by adding features that nurture its growing community and tech-savvy broadcasters. Whether you are famous for 15 or 150,000, Stickam.com is where you will find your friends and fans. See and be seen at Stickam.com, The Live Community.

Exclusive Ticketing Partner

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Blog Networks is a new application for reading, rating and finding other people who enjoy the same blogs, all within Facebook. We’ve setup a Network for Mashable, where you can interact with our bloggers, find other Mashable fans, and keep up with our latest posts. To get it jump started, we’re having a contest. Here are the details:

Your challenge: Add Mashable to your Blog Networks Facebook App

Difficulty Level: Click the link above or this button/chiclet:

Bonus: Rate us!

Reward: $50 (iTunes or Amazon) to 5 randomly selected members after we hit 1,000 members

The Catch: Leave your Blog Network’s User Page URL in the Comments Section below to enter

Fun Facts from the Developer:

- 9,000 new blog networks created in the last 3 weeks

- About 300 blogs added to the system every day

- Total number of blogs: 17,000

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So you’re a real-estate agent or a homeowner toughing a sales effort on your own, and you are interested in going above and beyond the requisite listing of photos, overview, and geo-tagging. Maybe you want to work in a little video slideshow for shoppers. If so, PropertyPreviews is a free service that automates the process of creating such clips without need for any software downloads. Just upload your images, include any relevant information, and the service will do the rest.

It can also send your video tour off to a number of real estate listing services and video sharing sites of your choosing, including Trulia, Zillow, and YouTube. Agents can place videos on their own websites if so desired.

Though PropertyPreviews general manager Jeff Harris touts the service as offering a sort of 24-hour open house, suffice it to say that you won’t be awed by its powers. Magic is minimal, but for a good number of users, it’s likely to do what it needs to regardless. It cost nil to the user, after all, so if anything, it provides just a bit of extra window dressing if desired.

A word of warning. While PropertyPreviews proudly displays generic samples on its front page, it does so with an unfortunate selection of music. What’s more, it appears that the service itself mandates the addition of an audio track. Silent playback isn’t an option. So choose wisely!

When major companies emerge in the technology industry, there’s no indication of what may come of them. Will they go the way of Google and become an online powerhouse? Or will they go the way of countless other online properties that get sold off to the highest bidder? Either way, it doesn’t matter: in the end, somebody makes it big.

But when it comes to Facebook, not everything is so clear-cut. The company is huge, sure, but it’s also huge in a sector that’s dictated by fickle users that would gladly move to the next bigger, better, cooler thing at the drop of a hat. That said, it’s also a huge company that should enjoy around $350 million in revenue this year and has a (foolhardy) valuation of about $15 billion, according to Microsoft’s estimates.

On top of that, Facebook is also the world’s most popular social network even though MySpace still leads the US market, and as more users jump on-board each day, it’s becoming an increasingly valuable property.

But now, it’s time for Zuckerberg and the rest of his cronies to forego his faulty hope of an IPO and sell Facebook to the highest bidder.

Simply put, Facebook is at the top of its game. It’s enjoying exponential growth, its user-base is growing rapidly, and as it adds more advertising and investment deals to its offering, it’s quickly becoming a valuable online property. And as it becomes an even more valuable property, it becomes an even more attractive target for major companies like Google and Microsoft to acquire for billions of dollars.

And while some believe that the growth can last forever and selling now would mean that it gets out of the business too early, I think that mentality is what could see Facebook sell for $500 million instead of $10 billion.

Facebook is a generational platform. Just like AIM was the most popular social tool of the nineties in the US and MySpace was huge a few years ago, Facebook is the new king in the social space. Right now, it’s cool for high school and college kids to log on to Facebook, send messages to each other, and play the myriad games that make it such a compelling platform.

But as those kids grow up and enter adult life, they will find other tools – much like the AIM and MySpace crowds did – and leave Facebook in its wake.

Do we even think about LiveJournal anymore? I didn’t think so.

At this point, there isn’t a more attractive target online than Facebook. And with a new generation of kids growing up on messaging, Facebook chats, and friend news feeds, it should enjoy considerable success as it grows with that generation.

But it’s also difficult to argue that it can ever make more than it would right now. Facebook is the topic of conversation everywhere on the Web and its growth has been truly astounding. It won’t last forever though, and once something new comes along that is seemingly “cooler,” a mass exodus of MySpace proportions will occur and instead of billions, Zuckerberg might walk away with millions.

There’s no shame in waking up and realizing that you’ve built a wildly successful company and it’s time to sell before you may want. Sure, there’s always the possibility that Facebook will be worth ten times as much three years from now, but when you’re playing with a fickle crowd that gets upset with every wrong move, it’s better to err on the side of caution than to see one wrong move totally cripple your service.

In the online space, which is dominated by a select few companies, major firms like Microsoft are trying desperately to establish itself as a force on the Web. And although it may have waited too long to do it, it’s ready to move right now and its desperation for tons of traffic is palpable.

And it’s that formula: fickle users, huge (and valuable) growth, and desperate juggernauts, that makes this the prime time to sell Facebook off and move on. Rest assured, it’s the right decision.

Mashable Prediction Center: Will Facebook be acquired or file for an IPO in 2008?

Facebook company profile provided by TradeVibes

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