In the age of social media—when everybody is busy creating personal broadcasts on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, blogs, Justin.tv, you name it—what happens to the notion of the broadcast? I am not talking about TV or radio, where traditional broadcasts still work the way they always have. I am talking about broadcasting an event or a message on the Web. Does the notion of broadcasting even make sense anymore in a narrowcasting world where anybody can read, watch or listen to any piece of information on their own schedule? And if it does make sense, how do you pull together the personal media of the Web into a coherent experience rather than produce something in a top-down fashion to be released upon a no-longer-passive audience? These are the kinds of questions that Tola Oguntoyinbo wrestles with all the time. Tola is the CEO and co-founder of Sonecast, a bare-bones social media marketing startup in Chapel Hill, North Carolina that is credit-card funded. His sonecasts (social network broadcasts) pull social media from practically any source into a dedicated, branded site. The closest thing to it is perhaps a combination of Meebo Rooms and SplashCast (which just raised $4 million earlier this week). Sonecasts tend to work better around a live event, like this one for a DJ Spooky concert or this one for the Crunchies that he ginned up after the fact (see also screen shot below). In the Crunchies sonecast, there is a floating frame on the page with little tabs that bring up clickable thumbnails of Flickr photos, YouTube videos, and blog posts from the event. There is also a live tab that would have shown the live video feed from Mogulus during the awards ceremony. Each photo, video, or blog headline you click on opens up a new window and lets you comment on each item. The DJ Spooky one broadcast live video from a concert at Duke University, which is now archived and still viewable. Other tabs include photos from Flickr and Facebook, DJ Spooky videos, music, and posts from MySpace, a podcast interview from the event, and a fully-featured music widget with complete streaming songs, music videos and links to posts about the artist on music blogs. Please note that these are demo sites, they are a little slow to load, and probably cannot handle a ton of traffic. (The service is still in a → Read More