"Much like corporations leveraged Internet 1.0 by creating digital storefronts and giving rise to ecommerce, people around the world are now learning how to leverage the incredible power inherent in the URL to create what is essentially a parallel universe of digital identities. And just like all things Internet, digital identities are not subject to the boundaries of geography, or the laws of physics, or any of the other limitations of being a carbon-based life-form. As such, the extensibility and scale of the ?digital you? is far-reaching, as are the strategic implications to the media industry. In many ways, the art-form of self-expression has become the ?new media?, and social networks are their distribution channels."
--Robert Young, writing at GigaOm, Om Malik's blog about social networks as the new media