The way we watch television has changed immensely in recent years. DVRs have changed when we watch TV by allowing us to record, rewind, and fast-forward through our favorite shows (and the commercials that support them). Televisions themselves have become wide, flat, and HD. But television doesn’t just live in our TV’s anymore: it is now also readily available online. The internet has changed how we watch television.

YouTube has made it easy for anyone to share videos online. Web-only content such as that produced by Revision3 is gaining loyal viewers and television networks are letting people stream full-episodes on their websites, subscription services like NetFlix, applications like Joost, and web services like Comcast’s Fancast, CBS’ TV.com, and Hulu.

Hulu, which is the No. 3 online video distributor (after YouTube and MySpaceVideo)  is especially showing signs that the move to online viewing is going mainstream: 380 million streams as of March 2009. Its appeal is only growing now that Disney has joined NBC and Fox (News Corp.) as a joint venture partner of the site - resulting in an exclusive distribution deal of NBC, ABC, and FOX for the next 2 years. It is  probable that CBS will join the other three.

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Everyone with a Facebook account is now more than used to letting the world know what’s on their mind.

In September of 2006, not so much. What today is a simple way to check-up on friends, was once seen as unnecessary and even scary. When Facebook first rolled out its stream of feeds, some revolted. A few with common sense argued otherwise. Regardless of what who you agreed with back then no longer matters today, because in 2009, information trumps ignorance and immediacy trumps waiting. 

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You probably already know about the Pizza Hut Summer Twinternship. I’ve read lots of opinions about how this is the wrong thing for Pizza Hut to do. PR professionals seem to be particularly against the idea and several have accused Pizza Hut of “not thinking it through”. Critics argue that it makes little to no sense to hire a college student for an internship position that consists of publicly communicating on behalf of a brand like Pizza Hut.

First of all, there are 3 things to remember: Nothing is a coincidence, nothing is what it seems, and… Twitter allows you to delete tweets.

Knowing that, we can assume that Pizza Hut’s perfect timing (right after Domino’s became a YouTube destination) is not a coincidence. We can also assume that Pizza Hut has given this some thought. It’s not as if their marketing people simply stumbled upon Twitter yesterday and decided to go with it. Pizza Hut has already showed that it understands the value of the internet and has shown signs of online life with its web site, Facebook efforts, and viral video.

More importantly, tweets can be deleted.

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What if Facebook helped you with your status updates so you wouldn’t have to waste more time?

What if it could not only talk to your Facebook apps, and external sites using Facebook Connect, but also go beyond that and share info from your tv, your microwave, your toll tag, your watch, your guitar, etc.? Automatically, based on your settings and usage. Now that would be a real “Facebook Connect”.

Sure, maybe at first people would revolt as they did with Beacon, but maybe they’d eventually get used to it. Tracking your emissions and comparing them with others could motivate you to actually go green instead of talking about it. Or maybe a connected scale that shares your most recent poundage in a public manner could motivate you to work out more often.

Maybe you could do fun stuff like “ping” a specific scene from a TV show by pressing a button on your remote control and Facebook would let your friends know that you liked that part of the show. No need for you to type it down – Facebook could do it for you. How nice of them. Immediate status updates would be immediate, not merely semi-immediate (who has time to get online and type about stuff that could happen immediately!).

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Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success is a solid, relevant, timely, and easy-to-read book about personal branding. It is targeted at young adults, but people of different ages in the following 3 groups might enjoy it: 

1. Anyone who is confused or clueless about today’s internet
2. Anyone interested in bettering themselves in the ‘workplace’
3. Anyone interested in learning more about social media and marketing

I personally believe that most young adults should already know much of what makes up this book, but since that is not the case, I’m glad that someone from my generation actually got a book published on the topic. The book is well-organized and it has a lot of insightful and practical information.

Many older people would probably greatly benefit from this book, but unfortunately, some of them will not take it very seriously. The fact that the author is young might make him seem less than credible to someone who has ‘paid his dues’ and often buys self-help books at FedEx Kinko’s. Such a person might not know what to make of Wordpress, podcasts, or Twitter. On the other hand, to a 25 year-old tech-geek with a marketing degree, such as myself, Dan seems approachable, tech-savvy, and normal.

And as the Miami Herald put it, Dan’s youth gives him a “competitive edge“. 

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The last 6-12 months have been quite interesting. The credit crisis hit harder than most people expected and we now find ourselves in an unapologetic downturn. On the upside, social media (or social web) has exploded everywhere and it is now officially mindblasting.

From Facebook co-founders working for former presidential nominees, to Twitter love on Today, Colbert Report, Oprah, Super News! and Ellen, social media and anything and everything related to it has become quite the serious matter.

Celebrities have become bigger celebrities (Shaq, the real one, is now appreciated much more for his tweets than for his free throws). Congress is getting super duper good at least at something. Universities are offering social media degrees. Companies and brands are now rushing to create profiles, viral videos and YouTube apologies, blogs, forums (Verizon’s Community Forums), podcasts, plugins, iPhone apps, browser toolbars, RSS feeds, creative forms of crowdsourcing, wikis, Second life empty islands, volunteer networks (V2V + Starbucks), Adobe Air applications, entire web sites (skittles anyone?),  and ad campaigns (Burger King Whopper Sacrifice)…

The list goes on and on. And ALL of this around the idea that social media / web / interweb is the secret to generating meaningful and desperately needed cost-effective buzz.

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Welcome to Social Nerdia random wanderers. We are just getting started so look around and come back often.