My latest for iMedia Connection. Go read it if you’re curious about zombie social networks. Really, they exist and they offer serious business opportunities. If I were laughing, it might not be so funny.

Special thanks to all the people who helped out: Benjamin Christie of Gourmet Ads, Greg March of Wieden+Kennedy, Larry Weintraub of Fanscape, Ryan Stoner and Shervin Samari of OMELET, Doug Schumacher and Jennifer Sparks of Basement Inc, and of course my very understanding editor, Lori Luetchtefeld.

Here’s my latest for iMedia Connection, the online trade covering the marketing and advertising industries. It’s the first article I ever pitched (not counting little things) that I got approved, wrote, and then published. I’m pretty proud of that. The article is a quick look at a couple of different ways companies are trying to monetize the micro-blogging service. Here’s an excerpt:

Like MySpace and Facebook, the young social networking tool has to grow up, move out of its parents’ house, and probably engage in a little youthful experimentation.

Is Twitter for marketing? Bringing in customers? Developing a brand? Improving company performance in other ways? Since Twitter is such an open-ended tool, there’s no obvious approach to using those 140 characters to benefit your business, but many companies have been willing to take a chance and see what it can deliver. That means trying new things and diving in without a life preserver.

Read the rest right here.

The blogosphere and twittersphere have been, um, a-twitter this week about the future of the newspaper world. The Chicago Tribune is going tabloid. Gasp! The Atlantic says the NY Times could be out of business by May. Oh no! The Seattle PI is going to either close or be sold. Oh my! BlogTalkRadio purchases a controlling interest in Julius Genachowski’s FCC? Not yet…

New media guru Jason Preston of Eat, Sleep, Publish and the Parnassus Group, stops by to talk this week’s madness. Can newspapers, like the Seattle PI, survive as online only? What’s the future model for advertising? Can they change the approach to gathering content, even including – and paying for – writing from users (a.k.a. crowdsourcing)? How can advertisers and newspapers engage with social media to actually speak to their readers? And what are the WSJ and the Financial Times doing right, so they can charge for their content?

Ted Johnson, our usual moderator, is out this week, taken ill by a rare strain of “I’m going to the Inauguration in DC and I need to get better!” Look for next week’s awesome show Wednesday with both Ted and Maegan live from our nation’s capital, while Teresa infiltrates the CNN-Facebook inaugural experience.

Listen to the show here, subscribe to the iTunes podcast, or use the Blog Talk Radio player:

Wilshire & Washington, the weekly Blog Talk Radio program that explores the intersection of politics, entertainment, and new media, features co-hosts Ted Johnson, Managing Editor of Variety; conservative blogger Teresa Valdez Klein (www.teresacentric.com), and liberal blogger Maegan Carberry (www.maegancarberry.com). The show airs every Wednesday at 7:30am PST on BlogTalkRadio.com.