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While I wasn’t all that surprised to see the sale price of Newsweek (a token dollar, plus the assumption of $70 million in debt), I was pretty surprised to see that a 91-year-old industry titan from the consumer electronics world, JBL and Harman-Kardon founder Sidney Harman, was the only one to step up to the plate with an offer acceptable to the Washington Post.

Naturally, there was a lot of same-day coverage about motivation. How a patient magnate prepared to lose $10 million a year for the next few years (although how patient can you be with your 92nd birthday around the corner?) was the proper fit. How the key for the Post was that they’d keep a lot of the editorial jobs instead of just scraping the name. It will be interesting indeed to see if Harmon’s plan is for a more streamlined print publication, as Bloomberg carved out when it bought Business Week for $4,999,999 more than Harman just paid for Newsweek. A crafty veteran of negotiating billions of dollars of parts throughout the world might simply have bought the asset to skillfully negotiate away all the debt for pennies on the dollar so he can flip it back to a big media company in the future.

But not much has been said about the lost opportunity for America Online, Google, Yahoo! or a dozen other Web behemoths, or for that matter diversified media companies (and Web wannabes) like Disney, Fox or Viacom (all of whom have paid hundreds of millions of dollars for acquisitions of far more questionable value) to redefine for a digital era one of the last iconic bastions of thoughtful news journalism and commentary, a brand that’s known and respected worldwide with tens of millions of readers among print, online and syndication. Newsweek’s content (and imprimatur) on the Yahoo! homepage with its 100-million-plus daily readers puts it into quite a different category of influence from Time and The Economist. Deep pockets could experiment with regional print-on-demand and e-book variations, and the combination of a brand that its disciples would want to test in any innovation coupled with the experimentation of a Web 2.0 mindset could have produced an eventual winner (think of the millions these big media companies have spent trying to simultaneously create new brands while simultaneously innovating on a business model – with Newsweek, you’d only need to do one right to win).

Sidney, if you’re listening, scrape off the debt and debris, include a podcast subscription with every new stereo system, and repackage this thing for sale to Time Warner. I’m confident you can pull this off before your 95th birthday.

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Today is the start of the AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford, which I’ve always seen as a midsummer touchpoint for how Silicon Valley’s venture economy is doing headed into its annual August snooze (like July in northern Europe and August along the Mediterranean, the last two weeks of August are widely recognized in Silicon Valley as the times everyone on Sand Hill Road mutually agrees to take time off).

Some years there is an excitement about the hot economy, more recently it’s been shock and awe over the 2008-09 financial meltdown. But, just as the Valley climbed out of much worse ditches (nothing was worse than the slow-motion, dot-com meltdown of 2000-03, yet out of its ashes came a new bull market for tech and a Google IPO in 2004.

Today, amidst talk of double-dip recession, funds not being able to raise money (which is never true for the top-top-tier; just ask Sequoia Capital), and a return to the dismal days of down rounds, a recent rash of legitimate tech IPOs has taken hold. What’s more remarkable is that three of them have been in Los Angeles, the oft-overlooked poor stepchild to San Francisco, Silicon Valley and even San Diego when it comes to California tech hotspots. Yet here are RealD (NASDAQ: RLD), Meru Networks (MERU), and Green Dot (GDOT) – all with sizeable valuations despite the “not applicable” sign under their P/E ratios. (OK, one can quibble that Green Dot is more of a finance and retail play than tech, but it was funded by the Tech Coast Angels and Sequoia Capital and has a strong technology component in its structure.)

But if social media is the future of the Internet, and the Internet is still the future of the future, where the heck are those Facebook and Twitter IPOs? Like Google holding out for an absurdly long time past high growth and predictable profitability (so much so that the market consensus was that its $85 a share IPO was pricey; how many shares would you like to have at that entry point today?), Facebook and Twitter have virtually no pressure to go public now from their well-heeled investors. Ditto for Foursquare, which has only two million users and yet has turned down relatively astronomical offers to be acquired (and inevitably made irrelevant) by Yahoo.

The sign of a broad-based healthy market for new issues isn’t the lone player at the top. Google so dominated search that it didn’t spark a firestorm of me-too IPOs the way Netscape ignited the dot-com fever in 1995 that brought us not only the bad deals remembered by so many, but also Amazon, EBay and Yahoo. Will the inevitable IPO of Facebook in the next year or two bring on a rush to the public exits for Twitter, Hi5, Foursquare and a MySpace spin-off? Will a new passion for growth spread to hot B2B companies embracing a social structure? Perhaps the difference in whether Facebook ignites a firestorm of new retail investment among the baby and echo boomers at times in their lives they would be investing more will not be how high Facebook climbs, but whether it takes a diverse portfolio from Hi5 to Brickfish along for the ride.

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I’ve always been a vibrate guy when it comes to cell phones. I hate having a ringer on my phone and I hate other people’s ringers too. Only once, in pre-Razr days of portable phone technology—remember when they were the coolest thing ever?—back when popular songs were first being re-imagined as ringtones, I had a crush on a girl who had “Big Pimpin’” as the ringer on her cell and I thought it was awesome and adorable and it made me feel all gushy inside when I heard the tinny beeps of the song coming from her purse. She switched it over to “So Fresh, So Clean” later, which elicited a similar response from the butterflies in my stomach. But I was 16! So we can write that off to romanticism and teen angst. It’s the one blip in my steadfast opposition to cell phone ringtones.

And my general attitude towards phones isn’t much more positive, preferring the cheap, Internet and app-free models that, you know, make phone calls, as phones are want to do. But as I’ve watched friends increasingly fetishize their iPhones—all smoothly rounded corners and shiny surfaces, their fingers gradually exaggerating the sliding motion required for unlocking the screen or picking up calls until their whole body seems to be pushing that little switch, as if it had the reassuring weight of a physical object—a desire to own one myself has crept up on me at times.

But I refuse to be seduced any longer. Not after Apple’s latest iPhone commercial.

Sure, the commercial is about “family travel” and it’s perfectly believable that a handful of apps would offer some stress relief while being in transit with kids, baggage, etc. But how hard is it to find a snack next to the gate in the airport? YOU DO NOT NEED AN APP FOR THAT. Simply walk to your gate, take note of the last snack-selling business you pass before arriving then WALK BACK TO IT. Revolutionary! 99 cents worth of information, direction and logic! (I accept checks, cash, credit and money orders) And the lights. How can anyone live without an iPhone app for turning off the lights remotely? The mind reels . . .

The ad seems to be a shift in messaging by Steve Jobs and Co. Rather than framing the smart phone as the cool, sexy, fashionable device-to-have, it has become indispensible! Impossible to live without!

An insightful article by Abe Sauers just ran on The Awl about Mac’s excessive amount of product placements in major films. The gist of the article (which you should really read: http://www.theawl.com/2010/03/why-apple-deserves-an-oscar-too) is that the make of computer technology in films hugely misrepresents what actual office, police station, FBI headquarters and the Oval Office computers look like. In Hollywood, they’re Macs. In the real world, not so much. Since the launch of the iPod, Mac has managed to do the same thing with their music players and smart phones, convincing consumers with their flashy, hip advertising that everyone else has one, leaving the iPod and iPhone-less to ask: Why not me? Where’s my iPod, my iPhone? Just as films misrepresent the market share of Apple products, these commercials are a bunch of spin too: smart phones users make up a very small percentage of overall cell phone market. Your flip phone is actually the norm—not a technological fossil. And all you need is a simple SMS plan to use Twitter on-the-go, so a slice of the zeitgeist can still be had. And to make phone calls, all you need is, you know, a cell phone.

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The sixth and final season of LOST premiered this Tuesday and with it comes some very important questions that hopefully by the course of this season, will finally be answered. Fans known simply as Losties are probably deciphering at this very moment some of the common questions that linger: what is the Island and its purpose? What role will John Locke play this season? And how come that one guy doesn’t age at all?  One can only hope that show runners/executive producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse as well as the LOST writing team will give us some if not all of those answers. Still there is one question that they themselves cannot solve.  That question: how am I going to avoid LOST spoilers on Twitter? Not even spinning a huge wheel to make Twitter disappear will work. Not only is that task time extensive but it’s quite implausible.

While we may show more restraint for not wanting to ruin our friends on Facebook with our plethora of status updates, it’s Twitter that is the apex for massive LOST spoilage, what with its fake hash tags that are meant to deceive and spoiler re-tweets that cause even bigger wars than those set on the island itself. And to make matters worse, people actually don’t even watch LOST on Tuesday night! I know shocking.  How awful would it be than to set your DVR, then right after check your Twitter and instantly the first tweet you see, ruins the entire episode for you? Truly awful.

So it seems almost inevitable.  Whether you’re someone from the west coast who won’t see LOST for another three hours or you’re someone who can’t bare the sight of a tweet that includes such words as “Locke,” “OMG,” “yeah…that just happened”, Tuesday nights on Twitter would appear to be unnecessary. Or is it?  I’ve created a few helpful tips to help guide you through this trickery path, which will likely last for a few months. It’s a plan that’s as fail proof like one conceived by Dr. Jack Shephard…wait…

1. Be adamant about your love for LOST – If you haven’t already, write a declarative 141 character tweet that says that you do not want to be spoiled on anything LOST. Your followers (who do watch LOST) will respect your wishes and be sensitive as to how they tweet about LOST. And who knows your tweet might be re-tweeted and you might become an Internet sensation over night. Go you.

2. Find your very own constant – Just how Penny was Desmond’s constant, find someone on Twitter that shares the same love for LOST as you/hated for spoilers. Communicate with them via direct message and have an ongoing conversation that will tide you until 9 p.m.

3. Time is of the essence – One of the key components of the mythology of LOST is time and where you are at any given point. We all know that LOST episodes are all about the shocking opening and cliffhanger finale.  By keeping track of the time and knowing that millions will likely tweet almost instanteously the first and final scenes, avoid your Twitter feed at those times. When the coast is clear you can resume your regular Tweeting routine.

4. Create your very own LOST hash tag that becomes a common Tuesday occurrence: Like Follow Friday or Music Monday, create your own specific LOST hash tag for Tuesday Nights.  You can call it Don’t Spoil Me Tuesdays or #NSLT which stands for No Spoilers Lost Tuesday. In these tweets you and those that wish to type the hash tag will detail what is going on in your lives while LOST is airing. For example: decided to move up Laundry Thursdays to No Spoilers Lost Tuesday #NSLT

5. Spoil American Idol results: It’s only fair.

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In all the noise of CES, 3D is again the main theme of this year’s mega conference. From the “intended” launch of Discovery/Sony/ IMAX New 3D Television Network, the first 3D broadcast of a live football game and the launch of Sony’s 3D Blu-Ray player, to a slew of 3D-ready home systems, life at CES is anything but two dimensional.

But, what is the impact of 3D to consumers? For me, watching TV, or even a movie, is extremely social. Sitting next to a friend sharing whispered comments, seeing their reactions or laughing together makes the entire experience more enjoyable. But with the introduction of the 3D glasses, the movie appears to replace the physical interaction with those around you and instead sucks you into a tactical exchange with the medium, isolating you from the rest of the world and making you feel a connection like never before with an inanimate object.

But are we not isolated enough as it is? Already, children are growing up unable to go through a day without texting a hundred times and removing themselves from the real world. What will happen when every home is decked out with the latest in 3D TV tech? Will watching ‘Friends’ or ‘Lost’ ever be the same in 3D? Will the entire experience be changed by this bleeding edge technology?

Maybe we can adapt, but with gadgets taking over our lives and separating us from reality a little more each day, a home theater experience that replaces the need to engage with anything or anyone outside of it makes me wonder why reality isn’t 3D enough for us…

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As I tweeted this morning (@michaelterpin), the showfloor doesn’t even open until tomorrow and I’m already exhausted by CES activity. I wrote two years ago that CES 2008 was the Year of the Blogger (and sure enough, the new blogger lounge and Bloghaus made traditional media seem oh so passé), that CES 2009, for all of its recessionary pullbacks, was the Year of the Tweet, as Twitter usage grew so exponentially, particularly among journalists in the prior 12 months.

And while last year also showed a huge increase in live blogging (I remember being at a Motorola press conference and watching it both live and on livestream from my laptop simultaneously…), this year it seems like there will be more hours of live streaming that real-time hours that the show is taking place. CrunchGear, LiveStream, UStream, Watchitoo, Gizmodo and many more are livestreaming extensively from the show. And high among the “is it live or Memorex” moments are all of the big stories that are timed to CES but happening nowhere near the show, including the Google Nexus phone and daily speculation watch on the Apple tablet. And 3D is a buzzword in so many pre-show announcements, it’s bound to be quite the three-dimensional show.

We’ll be covering the show with old-fashioned print, but we’ll repost interesting live feeds we think are interesting, both here and on the CES Party List (www.cespartylist.com).

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Standing in the parking lot of a Long Beach club on a Thursday night, I watched what seemed like an unusually amount of people milling around in small groups, standing in circles or sitting on the rear bumpers of cars. It was “College Thursdays” at the club and groups of glittery clothed and high-heeled girls or Ed Hardy-wearing guys would occasionally walk past, actually going into the bar. But the crowds in the parking lot remained, not seeming to be outside just for a smoke, not making their way towards the bouncer at the door. A few looked to be too young to make it past him.

We stayed like that, just waiting, for about a half an hour—each in our little groups, scattered around the lot, more cars pulling up and unloading two, three or five more people, adding to the count of the standing and waiting. It was about 10:30, a little bit later, when a truck came around the corner and pulled into the lot. Immediately, the scattered groupings formed into one mass, slowly making its way to the far corner of the parking lot where the truck, KOGI BBQ written out in a slanted script on the side, had parked.

What followed was an hour-and-a-half wait in line for a paper carton full of tacos. For me, it was two stuffed with Korean spicy pork, two stuffed with Korean short ribs, all topped with kimchi and sirracha. Other choices included similarly Korean-influence burritos, quesadillas, hot dogs and sliders. And it was all—the parking lot, the truck, the few hundred people, the Korean/Mexican mash-up—thanks to Twitter. Whether online, on a cell phone or—like me—through a text message from a fellow peer, we had all received this address, this time, via a tweet sent out earlier in the day.

Tweeting and driving around the Southland for only a year, the postmodern, tech-driven approach to street food has been booming business for Kogi. With nearly 50,000 followers on Twitter, nationwide coverage—from food blogs to Gourmet Magazine—and trucks soon rolling around the five boroughs, Kogi is a leader of social media-driven dining.

Los Angeles has a rich history of street food and ethnic eateries—both traditions that are ingrained in the culture of the city. Many have adopted the Kogi model, borrowing from the ethnic restaurants of LA, dressing up the food and dressing down the décor by throwing it all in a truck and serving it up in parking lots and on street corners—no reservations, no valet, no seating, the threat of a ticketing by the police very real. Not your average restaurant.

But as delicious as a Korean short rib taco may be—and they are quite delicious—the success of Kogi and its pretenders hinge on the mobile connectivity provided by Twitter. With no static location and trucks covering a large swath of LA and Orange counties, the nearly instant link that social media offers Kogi to connect with 50,000 hungry mouths is what keeps the lines long night after night. They get crowds through association often enough—showing up at the Downtown LA Art Walk every month, or outside popular bars, clubs or concerts at closing time—but when you consider that there were maybe thirty people enjoying whatever well drink special the Shoreline Lounge was offering on “College Thursdays” and probably two hundred people outside queued up for Korean tacos, I’m fairly certainly that Twitter is to thank.

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Surely to be taken seriously in the world of Social Media, I must have my own blog, Twitter, and Facebook account, correct? However, as a staff member of a Social Media based company, I find myself in a constant battle between my professional and personal social networking sites. What is an acceptable post? Where can I express my emotions? Or will I have to resort back to only telling people how I feel when I can actually talk to them in person? Gasp! Here’s how I’ve sorted it out up to this point.

I was a member of the original Facebook era in which only college students were allowed to join. It felt safe, and being surrounded by only members of my alma mater left me feeling all warm and fuzzy inside. I actually got frustrated with the folks that used privacy options because, come on, we’re all friends here right? When Facebook opened up to the public, however, it became my most guarded social network. My profile, photos, and information are only available to those people that I have accepted as my friends, and when it comes to the number of Facebook friends I have it is no longer about quantity, but about quality. Only people I truly know are allowed to be my Facebook friends, thus allowing me to express feelings that may not be suitable for my public and professional persona.

Twitter was brought to my attention about a year ago, and being the social media junkie that I am, I started to Tweet and never turned back. With Twitter, I knew I had the option to guard my thoughts with privacy settings, but chose to open my comments up to the public, knowing that privacy settings would hinder my following. As I Tweet, I am more guarded than on Facebook, and I’m always careful to not put anything incriminating in a Tweet. Sometimes I feel silly about my random Tweets about traffic or what I want for lunch because I am a professional, but at the end of the day I am first and foremost myself and that cannot be completely obscured by professionalism.

Tumblr is my most recently joined social network, and it is arguably my favorite. It’s fairly easy to have an anonymous blog that it completely open to the public eye. Simply choose a pseudonym that will not reveal your identity, and let the blogging begin. Of course, if you do choose to let loose on this blog, do not put it on your resume. Some companies may want to see your blog to get a better feel for who you are as a person. For this you may want to create an additional, cleaner blog that is a good representation of you as a professional. Not to say that this blog must be exclusively about politics and your thoughts on the economy, but you may want to keep your guilty pleasure of watching late night reruns of Full House in your underwear on the hush.

Social media is out there, and it is becoming more important to get involved, as it can be a useful tool for professionals. It is fairly easy to balance the personal and professional as long as you keep in mind your audience. However, when in doubt, privacy options never hurt anyone.

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Hitler can get really mad. This shouldn’t come as much a surprise, considering the well-recorded history of World War II and the Holocaust. From his attempts at genocide to trying to take over Europe (not to mention some of North Africa), the man must have had some serious, deep-seeded anger. So it’s no wonder that when his Xbox broke, when his favorite band split up, when his favorite soccer team lost, he’d have an outpouring of rage. You would think he’d get angry too when he found out that he’d been made fun of for his many fits, that they had spread like wildfire across the Internet, archived for ever on YouTube. And you’d be right. Since early 2007, nearly 2,000 clips have stacked up on YouTube of Hitler—as played by Bruno Ganz in the 2004 film The Downfall—yelling about something or other. The German-language film—the first to include Hitler as a central character—features cleverly (and sometimes not so cleverly) altered English subtitles that re-imagine Hitler’s rant as a reaction to any variety of bits of contemporary news and culture.

Video mash-ups like this have these have been popping up on YouTube since the website launched in 2005, with parodies of Brokeback Mountain being another popular meme. But when it comes to Hitler, satire and collage, the history reaches much further than the short if not highly influential life of social media, the Internet and even the first computer (baring the abacus), back to the dying days of Weimar Germany.

Languishing after the ruin of the first World War, the years of Weimar Republic are remember as a chaotic and debauched time for Germany—its cities full of cabarets (the film Cabaret is set in Germany, during this time period) and nightclubs (along with all of the associated ills and vices), the economy in turmoil due to hyperinflation. The general chaos was captured in the driving art movement in Germany in the years between the World Wars, German Expressionism. But once Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party began their ascent into power, culminating in 1933 with the beginning of the Third Reich, it was the Berlin branch of the Dada art movement that captured the zeitgeist of fear and resistance in late-Weimar Germany.

Started in Zurich in 1916 by Tristan Zara and a group of expats who read unintelligible sound poems and gave other absurdist performances at the Café Voltaire, Dada is an art movement that in the beginning embraced the idea of illogic. With its founding members all affected in one form or another by World War I, they banded together through their suspicion of language and logic, those so-called trustworthy foundations of society that had watch lead to the utter destruction of the Great War.

Dada went through many incarnations between Zurich in the Teens and Berlin in the late ’20s and early ‘30s. Lead by John Heartfield, Berlin Dada was infinitely more image-based and often took the form of collage. But Dada in Berlin continued to follow the anti-war stance of Zurich, with Heartfield and the other Dadaist creating ironic and often darkly humorous collages criticizing Hitler and the Nazi regime. Both the technological developments in printing and the prevalence of Nazi imagery and propaganda made collage a natural and highly effective medium for the Berlin Dadaist to work in.

Just as YouTube users have taken advantage of contemporary technology to put new words into Hitler’s mouth, Heartfield used the technology of his age to similarly co-opt and re-contextualize the Nazis to equally ironic ends. One of Heartfield’s most famous images, titled Hurray, The Butter is Gone, shows a German family sitting at a dinner table chewing on various gigantic pieces of metal—weights, bicycle parts, a Swastika-bearing ax—with a quote from Hermann Göring responding to food shortages in Germany running below the image: “Iron has always made a nation strong, butter and lard have only made the people fat.”

If only Heartfield and the Dadaist had the glut of videos and images—all those Reni Riefenstahl YouTube clips—that social media provides us access to today . . . Then again, they did quite a good job on their own and Internet users, knowingly or not, continue to keep the Dadaist tradition of making fun of Hitler alive.

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