“Honestly,” says Holloway, “in marketing and public relations education, we need to teach our students to send a great promotional text message.

“We are moving quickly to a world in which we all are media content creators and information providers.”

Fatdoor uses Microsoft Virtual Earth to map neighborhoods, letting residents position icons over photos of their houses and streets. They can create profiles, rate restaurants, post images, leave messages for other neighbors – and the more they participate, the more points they earn, building their credibility. Even before residents join, the local sites are prepopulated with information already available on the Web.

Orkut recently pushed past the News Corp. (NWS) subsidiary in the Asia Pacific region. Orkut’s following in that market, which includes China and Japan, has nearly tripled, to roughly 11 million visitors a month, over the past year, according to the consultancy comScore (SCOR). MySpace, by contrast, has been drawing between 9 million and 10 million visitors in recent months.

Meanwhile, Orkut’s usage in Latin America has continued to climb: In August, it received 12.4 million unique visitors from that region, double the Latin American traffic of MySpace and Facebook combined.

f you looked at the press 18 months ago, you couldn’t pick up an article or watch a TV show without hearing about MySpace founders Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe as the media darlings.

Now, Facebook is the next media darling, and in between there was YouTube. They are highly differentiated products. We are seeing growth in both.