Teresa Valdez Klein, Director of Web Operations, Parnassus Ventures

Infamous celebublogger Perez Hilton posted yesterday on his blog that there’s a reason why he hasn’t written about Leona Lewis — one of his favorite artists — in a while.

It’s because he’s being sued by her label, Sony BMG and its subsidiaries Jive and Zomba for posting widely distributed songs that were being attributed to Britney Spears. It turns out that the offending .mp3s were tracks that didn’t make it onto Spears’ newest album.

In Hilton’s words:

Sony BMG, and their labels Zomba and Jive, are suing us for streaming several songs that turned out to be by Britney Spears.

When these songs first leaked, there was a lot of doubt as to whether they were Britney or a fake. Plus, we never made any music downloadable.

Every time we saw a take-down notice from the R.I.A.A., we complied immediately. By the way, no one at Sony BMG ever contacted us about Britney.

Also, every song we posted - not knowing if it was or wasn’t an authentic Spears song - had already been all over the internet and fansites, yet PerezHilton.com is the only entity being sued by Sony BMG.

He lists a number of other talented people that he no longer covers, including my all-time favorite singer Christina Aguilera. He asked himself:

Because Zomba, which is owned by Sony BMG, is suing us and we had a lightbulb go off recently: we can’t support any artist signed to Sony BMG.

Why should we help the company suing us make money???? Especially when their lawsuit is personal!

The record industry has been notoriously backward when it comes to the Web. Their behavior towards Hilton has been no exception. It doesn’t matter much whether the gang at Sony BMG has a legitimate case against Hilton, it’s not in their long-term best interests to sue him.

Hilton may be reviled by many, but his coverage has helped to rocket some musicians from obscurity into the national spotlight. Musicians crave coverage on his site. A rave from him drives countless iTunes downloads.

If Hilton refuses to cover any artist signed to Sony BMG, you can expect that other artists will get the spotlight. That means lost revenues and lost opportunities. It would have been better to just send him a takedown notice and let the whole thing go away quietly.

One of our favorite online communities is the group of gadget heads that gather at CES every year to blog and geek out. We love them so much that we throw them a party every year. Here’s some video footage of this year’s event:

Full coverage of the event can be found here. Special thanks to our sponsors:

We’re very excited to announce that our friends at Virgin America airlines will be handing out 80 free round trip tickets anywhere they fly. For you online community geeks, this might be interesting because of Virgin America’s nifty seat-to-seat communications tool.

So if you’re at CES and you’ll be around tomorrow night, drop my colleague Jason a line at jason [at] blogbusinesssummit [dot] com, include the URL of your blog and let him know that you’d like to join us.

I’m a big fan of WordPress and have yet to really dig into the nitty gritty of building sites in Drupal. But from what I’ve seen, it’s a hell of an application.

Here’s Todd Zeigler’s take from the Bivings Report.

Our good buddy Liz Strauss is asking some very worthwhile questions about blogging for business. She’s working on a series of posts about what she calls “inside out thinking,” that we are very much looking forward to.

We encourage you all to go post your responses.

We are incredibly adamant that business bloggers should host their content on their own servers. Nobody — not Six Apart, not our friends at WordPress, not Blogger — should have control over where or how your content is hosted.

Ultimately, Facebook presents the same problem. Servers crash, stuff happens and your content is locked away inside an extremely limited walled garden.

Facebook is a great tool for online community building, but the long-term future of online communities rests with the ability for bloggers and site owners to link their sites together via a “friend standard.” This is what I meant when I said that the Facebook killer may be the Web itself.

A business blog running on your own domain, on your own servers means that nobody controls your content but you. Facebook holds a lot of promise, but it can’t promise that.

So while we love Facebook and social networks and online community building tools, we’re also still completely gonzo about business blogs, and blogs in general. This is a medium with real staying power.

Since we’ve recently expanded our editorial gamut to a discussion of online community building tools, I want to know how you’ve used your business blogs to build community. Do you cross-promote with other platforms?

How do you encourage conversations?

There’s been some speculation since we canceled the September Blog Business Summit that we’ve abandoned the blogging and blogging for business spaces outright. I understand why it would be easy to think that. We’ve made a pretty dramatic transition. In just a few days, we pulled the plug on our Chicago event, launched this new site, and announced our intention to put on a event in Seattle this December that is not strictly about business blogging.

It’s absolutely no wonder that people are getting the wrong idea.

But like Steve posted yesterday on the Blog Business Summit site, we do plan to do more Blog Business Summits. It’s true that we don’t have a specific date in mind, but blogging is as much a community building tool as any social network. If you doubt it, look no further than Liz Strauss’ blog where she hosts open comment nights and put together a whole conference based on getting those people together in the flesh-and-blood world.

If businesses overlook the power of blogging as a community building tool, they’re sunk. [Update: It has been pointed out to me that this last statement was overgeneralized and somewhat inaccurate. Businesses that overlook blogging are not, in fact "sunk." What I meant to say is that businesses who overextend themselves in the social media space without a place to call home -- a blog in most cases -- are at a distinct disadvantage. Everyone should have a hub.]

In fact, I’m just now getting ready to post a video - as soon as Revver approves it - about how to bring the RSS feeds from your multiple business and personal blogs into Facebook. That’s a community building move because sharing content starts conversations, and conversations are the building blocks of community.

Blogging, bloggers and this incredible space we’ve created out here on the Web are still at the forefront of our imaginations, our interest and our intellectual curiosity. The rapid-fire changes over the past few days are really just an expansion of our editorial gamut, not an abandonment of the space that got us started.

Cross-posted at Web Community Forum.

I’ll be appearing as a guest on One By One Media’s show The Mediasphere today at noon PST.

Please join us and call in with your questions at (646) 478-5023.

Every morning, I go to my RSS reader and pull out a few tasty chunks of content: usually about ten out of 500 or so items. I open each in a tab in my browser, then I go through the list and decide what to do with each of them.

This morning, three of my nine tasty content chunks were about Facebook. And I decided that I should post them here:

• Jeremiah Owyang comments on Wal-Mart’s sinking Facebook strategy and offers some sage recommendations for how to turn things around. Basically, he says they should rise to a new level of facilitated conversation.
• Wired’s Kendall Black has some tips from a Facebook native to share. Among her pearls of wisdom, “poke frequently.” I couldn’t agree more.
• Marketing Pilgrin’s Jordan McCollum has some great insights on using Facebook for B2B relationships and for being a Facebook entrepreneur.

Update: Whoops! I forgot to list Dave McClure’s insight: it’s the feed, stupid!

Jeremiah Owyang asked his Twitter network this late last night.

I’d like to be able to import RSS feeds and post items to a group’s page. Sharing content with people who share your interests is one of the best features of Facebook and it should be extended to interest groups.

What features do you think Facebook should add to groups?

When I was first getting into social networks, I noticed that a lot of people I knew had hundreds, even thousands of “friends.” I asked one girlfriend about how she knew all those people and she explained that a lot of them were just random strangers. This was especially true on MySpace.

Apparently, the number of people you count as cyber “friends” is a metric of your popularity. For many, it’s a manifestation of the same phenomenon that leads people to conduct smear campaigns before prom court is announced in high school.

Having never been terribly popular in school — hard to believe, I know, but true — I was pretty much oblivious to this phenomenon. Until recently, the only people I was friends with on Facebook were folks that I had met in real life. Since then, Robert Scoble has convinced me that it’s alright to friend — it’s a verb now — all comers. It’s a good way to reach out to your readers. Robert uses his Facebook as a hub to organize the copious content he produces all over the Web.

This raises a lot of questions about privacy and control over personal information. But those issues aside, it also brings us back to the hyper-friending phenomenon:

How many friends do you really need? Don’t the quality relationships matter more?
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Jim Turner of One By One Media — which is sponsoring the Blog Business Summit — wrote some really nice things about us today. I couldn’t resist linking in.

I’ll be appearing on One By One’s BlogTalkRadio show next week Tuesday at noon PST.

Today’s guest is Jeremiah Owyang, one of my favorite people and a great resource for everything you need to know about online community building. You should absolutely tune in to listen to today’s discussion at 12 noon PST.

They say that a good magician never reveals his secrets, but that cannot be said of entrepreneurial bloggers. In fact, our distinguished panel of high revenue bloggers are jazzed to share their latest tips, tools and tricks for maximizing the money they make from their blogs.

In this session, attendees will learn:

• The role of patience in successful entrepreneurial blogging
• How small changes can make huge differences in revenue
• What community interaction can bring to your blog, and your pocketbook

One trend I see among business bloggers is to write blog posts by committee. That is, they ask others to read and edit blog posts before they publish them. This practice has its place in school papers, formal reports and books. But a blog post is none of these things.

As our speaker Liz Strauss is quick to point out, a blog post is about starting a conversation. How you write that blog post is as important as what you write.

Bloggers are very fond of citing a study in the Journal of Educational Psychology that supports this assertion.

Here in Kathy Sierra’s words:

So one of the theories on why speaking directly to the user is more effective than a more formal lecture tone is that the user’s brain thinks it’s in a conversation, and therefore has to pay more attention to hold up its end! Sure, your brain intellectually knows it isn’t having a face-to-face conversation, but at some level, your brain wakes up when its being talked with as opposed to talked at. And the word “you” can sometimes make all the difference.

The key to a blog post is to start a conversation, because conversation are the building blocks of community. And if you’re a marketer, you want to be building community the natural way.

Just a few years ago, AIM, Friendster and Yahoo Groups were considered to be community platforms with almost unassailable momentum. Today, those destinations are mentioned far less frequently than Facebook, Twitter, Flikr, Jaiku and Pownce.

And what about MySpace? Are the reports of its death greatly exaggerated, or are we looking at the end of an era?

In a world where the next big thing can so quickly become yesterday’s news, how can we allocate and invest marketing dollars? We know where out target market’s attention is today, but where will it be six months or a year from now? Is there any social network that can stay relevant long enough to become THE platform?

And what about the the challenge to create an open social network? Will it happen? What’s a marketer to do if it does?

• How social networks become and stay relevant
• Do any of the social networks have what it takes to keep the early adopters around?
• What’s features and technologies can we anticipate in the next ten years?

The social utility Facebook anounced today that iPhone users can quickly flip through their Facebook contacts in an EDGE-compatible, easy-view application at iPhone.Facebook.com.

The “geeky, soon-to-be-loaded executives of Facebook” — as Steven Levy so aptly called them in this week’s Newsweek cover story — may not always listen to their users. But with this newest development, they have hit a home run.

This move reveals the big strategy in Facebook’s effort to remain eternally relevant. They are trying to become the “Facebook Killer” rather than letting a new service come along and siphon off all their early adopters. To keep those early adopters — a.k.a. people who use Facebook and would spend $650 on a 1.0 phone from Apple — happy, they’ve launched a widget that will keep us engaged with Facebook longer.

Bravo!

Update: Here are some other sites with great insight on the Facebook for iPhone:

• Profy.com
• Inside Facebook
• Laughing Squid
• TechCrunch
• CrunchGear

We’ve got a “blogging for talent” session coming up at the conference this September. Social media and recruitment is a huge deal, but it goes way beyond blogging.

Here’s a great idea from ZDNet’s Dennis Howlett about how companies can use Facebook’s platform as a recruiting mechanism.

Cool stuff!