Maybe it is because I am 50, repressed, an old fart…or all three, but I am not plugged into the user-generated content machine. I am the Facebook member who never pokes anyone or even asks someone else to be my friend. I just put my page up there once day because I had to review some new Facebook apps, and now 150 or so people are in my circle. I did the same with Twitter. I never use Twitter, but now I have scores of subscribers to all the things I never say.

So I understand why a site feels compelled to grease the UGC wheels with a contest. Recognizing that a host of travel sites altready ask visitors to rate and recommend hotels, services, etc., CondeNet’s Concierge launches a “Travel Tips” contest this week to help them pump up the user content quickly. The idea is sound, although I can’t say that itis an easy feature to find on the site. Conceptually, however, this is an idea that other publishers might consider. Concierge succeeded in pullling in several sponsors to help provide prizes and support. Generally, we like to think that UGC just flows naturally out of always-communicative users. For many content heavy, editorially driven sites, visitors can be disarmingly passive. Getting them engaged to constirbute is asking them to switch modes. Contests, of course, are a smart way to disengage that passivity and give users a stake in the game.

Launching overnight, the MySpace Music site hopes to shake up the iTunes models a bit with ad-supported free streaming msuic from major labels. Users can assemble playlists they can swap with others. MySpace says eventually it will offer ringtones and concert tickets so that the site becomes a one-stop for tuneheads. In some sense MySapce already is a music hub, since more than half of teen music fans already use social networks to discover information about bands and concerts. MySpace convinced EMI, Sony BMG, Universal Music Group and Sony ATV to participate and allow some of their otherwise fee-based fare to run free. I recall only a few years ago speaking with pie-in-the-sky techies who tried to peddle a free model for the music industry. There were schemes for inserting ad spots into iPod downloads, etc. A few years later and we have free Web radio providers like last.fm and Pandora essentially running the model already. MySpace brings to the party a massive youth music culture. I know my 16-year-old daughter gets music, movie and even book recommendations from the traffic across her MySpace page. Finding ways to harness that energy in the service of ad clients has been a challenge even for the mighty MySpace, which still has trouble selling its banners into profile pages at a decent rate. The same daughter who picks up entertainment recommendations from the social site also eschews these ads. “Why are they posting Viagara ads on my page?” she complains.

Once complex and fraught with labyrinthine business relationships across countless vendors, the mobile development world is starting to open up considerably for publishers who want to get their beak wet with the emerging platform. Companies like MuseStorm, Yahoo, and now Apple are making it easier for just about any-sized publisher to develop mobile sites, widgets and applications and see how they fly on multiple devices. All you need to add is the promotion.

Apple announced that it served over 100 million apps in less than two months. Forget the fact that many of us ignore most of the iPhone apps we did download greedily, or that many of these apps are one-trick ponies that are fun to try once or twice before deleting. The sheer volume of downloads on a platform with such a relatively small installed base tells us something about user curiosity about mobile. Of course, we would prefer that Apple gave us some stats on user retention, active use, deletion rates, etc. As if that is going to happen!

One new player in the self-serve, build-your-own mobile strategy game is Thumbplay. This veteran of the ringtone, wallpaper, games market in mobile is launching an open beta of its Thumbplay Open platform, which lets any publisher up0load, manage and sell mobile assets to users. Site publishers can sell wallpapers, ringtones, applications or widgets from their site via the Thumbplay system, which handles the back end of fulfillment and billing. A publisher can feature the mobile content on their own site and give users direct access to the Thumbplay distribution system so the end user can download content. Thumbplay claims that mobile generate $5-$8 from each new subscriber typically.

With the new mobile openness comes the challenge: how do you market this stuff effectively and to what degree. One of the frustrating aspects of the market thus far has been finding effective ways to push mobile assets to users. How much of your staff’s attention and how much of your Web site’s space and effort should go into an admittedly incremental revenue stream? Until mobile demonstrates its ROI in revenue and audience development, it will remain in the backwater of most media brands.

In a curious bit of digital hopscotch, SmartMoney Magazine tries to tie together print, mobile, email and Web in the next issue. A new Text4More program will ask readers of a magazine-within-a-magazine feature on retirement to use SMS for more information. Sending “Retire” to SMONEY (766639) will prompt you for an email address, where SmartMoney will send a PDF of more content sponsored by Genworth Financial. That PDF in turn will have active Web links to even more information online. Is this a tortured way to integrate platforms? Hard to say. In the mobile world of SMS marketers, print is notoriously poor at pushing people to a short code. TV, outdoor advertising and radio are much stronger. The argument is that you can respond to an ad or promotion immediately, without a need for email access, and the content gets delivered to you to read at your leisure on the screen.

Whether such a scheme works with specific ads and editorial remains to be seen. Cumulatively, a program like this can be helpful to a publication that is trying to build a mobile database. For instance, when we texted SmartMoney it was too early to get the email link from the upcoming issue, but the company informed us that we now were enrolled in SmartMoney “club,” which we imagine involves subsequent text messages. You can opt out with the standard return message of “stop,” of course, but over time SmartMoney could build a new database of cell phone numbers it can hit with links to content, promotional offers, etc. In fact, some publishers with active text alert campaigns are using the regular text messages as an ad platform, selling small text ads into the bottom of each alert. Ultimately, anything that helps publishers secure another touch point to their readers is a help.

Fall Fashion Week has become an eyeball sweepstakes online in recent years as most of the major style brands vie for traffic. While many fashionistas already have their bookmarked circuit of blogs and sites to consult whenever a new style hits, other casual observers probably rely on a simple Google search to get the latest. In fact, some media brands brag about their high placement on a “fashion week” query at Google, suggesting that their brands have become synonymous with the event – or at least in the eye of the search engine algorithms.

And so I did my own search this weekend to find what I guess to be the official Mercedes Benz-sponsored site has floated to the top of the organic listings. Tis a pity, because it is the butt-ugliest of the relevant destinations. Using an election year motif of campaign-style buttons and signs, and without a single frock in evidence on the home page is a staggering misstep. NYMag.com once again wins the top slot among organic listing from branded media. Both Elle.com and Glam.com bought their way in with paid AdSense placements. You need to plug in the more specific “Fashion Week Spring 2008” query to bring back a deeper trove of media hits, including InStyle.com, NYTimes.com, and the Coquette blog within the Glam Network.

Fashion Week, with its scores of designers and thousands of runway images, has to be a bear to program. Most sites like Elle.com and NYMag.com feature directories that let the user drill into specific designers. There is still something to be said for instant gratification, however. While visually less polished, the Coquette blog at least fills the landing page with select images from the runway in a long scroll.

Odd as it may seem, I find the show most accessible through CondeNet’s Style.com Mobile app on the iPhone. We covered this is a news note the other day. But in using the phone application over the weekend I found that the drill downs into designers, thumbnail galleries of fashions and snarky comments from the staff on the back side of the images were superb. The blog entries kept me up to date on the dish. For the casual observer this was a more compact and edible Fashion Week. Mark my words, mobile design imposes an information discipline on digital content that many Web sites forget. A slimmed down but well-wrought mobile application could easily trump and pre-empt a brand’s Web coverage.

Part of my repertoire of standard questions for business information publishers these days is whether they have any plans to invest in mobile presence. The answers are familiar. “Well we are looking into it but that probably is a year or two out.” What they really mean is that they have no idea whether their target audience even wants or needs their business information delivered on handsets. I think this is a terrible misfire. Business users are the target market for the most advanced multimedia phones on the market, smart phones and Blackberrys. Consulting email on a handset has become de rigeur, and I hear from mobile marketers that they see increasing click throughs on email links coming from handsets. In other words, people are not only scanning their email on their smart phones; they are using email as an entryway to the mobile Web. Perhaps publishers should be checking their own server log to see what browser actually hit their sites. They may be surprised.

Publishers might want to check out a smart but very straighforward extension of a B2B brand at Linux Journal’s mobile site, m.linuxjournal.com. While I think the site should have put breaking news on top (why are pub still so inlove with their own features?) the basic layout is simple and effective. You get your headlines, your reviews and blogs — all thr drive by content a user might want to check between flights or over coffee. You can share any content and push article to the social media hubs. There is even a handly link to the brand’s video via the YouTube Mobile site. This is cool and smart. It really doesn’t take much to develop soemthing like this. Given the incredible penetration of WAP-ready phones in the business arena, I still wonder why we don’t see more of it.

Surely I date myself in recalling that great early debacle of Web content, Time Warner’s Pathfinder portal. Veterans of the digital space will recall a day when old media brought to the new medium a staggeringly naïve sense of entitlement. This was before Yahoo, Google, AOL, eBay, Amazon, MySpace, PerezHilton, BlackPlanet, MarketWatch (oh, why go on?) and countless other endemic Web brands taught established players brands that the online game had different rules. Pathfinder.com was Time Warner’s attempt to pull together all of its great magazines into a single multi-branded news and information portal that would serve the breadth and depth of user interests. No one cared. In what was the first sign of the Web’s disruptive force, the failure of Pathfinder demonstrated how little muscle the lumbering media conglomerates could flex here. Who cared that all of these different brands were Time Warner properties? Consumer didn’t identify with media goliaths. They identified with individual brands. And the coming years would show how little loyalty people showed even towards specific magazine titles online.

And so it is with a bit of nostalgia that I happened upon the “Breaking News” widget from Time Inc. that pulls together in a single box RSS streams from CNN Money, EW.com, SI.com and People.com. The ClearSpring widget is a pleasant enough looking portable news service that can go on most personal portal, blog or social network pages. What someone wants those particular brands in one package is a bit beyond me. Somehow the People and EW reader don’t seem to fall into the same target demo as CNN Money and SI. This looks and feels a lot like a mini-Pathfinder – just as misguided but somehow tolerable because of its meager ambitions. Other than their common corporate source, the brands don’t really go together. To its credit, the widget does let you choose your individual feeds and the default view, so you can filter it down to specific brands. But since that is the case, why not offer a universal widget that offers a customized view of all the Time and CNN brands? Of course, the widget is sponsored by Sony and its ubiquitous HDNA campaign, so we imagine Sony is picking up the bill here anyway.

Which is not to say that Time Inc. fails to leverage its multiple brands. In fact, the Time Warner sites as a whole are tremendous traffic drivers that can help push eyeballs from one brand to another.  To be sure, synergy is not the passé concept we may supposed. But this widget does remind us how far we are from the age of the dominant media network. People don’t buy into CBS, Time Warner, Fox, etc. as trusted sources of all information. If anything, the trend is moving in the opposite direction. In spin-off and acquired brands like TMZ (AOL) and MySpace (Fox), the media conglomerates almost try to hide their connection with their own progeny rather than confer some sort of provenance. The rapid decline and fall of Pathfinder was the first tremor in a media earthquake that continues to shake out. We still don’t know how consumers relate, let alone build loyalty to, medis brands in the Internet age.