I am happy to support the “conventional wisdom” of my new media-savvy friends and colleagues when it comes to the bone-headed behavior of the music industry. This month alone, we’ve watched the threat to raise royalty rates for webcasters take center stage. And though a reprieve has been granted, it ain’t over yet. But today I’m taking time off form being smugly confident that the attempts to suppress content that wants to be in the wild always indicates stupidity or malevolence. Sometimes, knowledge should stay under raps, and sometimes, decisions about sharing should belong exclusively to the content’s creators and distributors, not for their benefit, but for the benefit of content consumers.

Various leak and hacker rumors about the ending, or even the full contents of J.K. Rowling’s final Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows have been flying around the net for a couple of months. This week, bad copies of the book apparently found their way to BitTorrent sites, having been photographed by pinheads with too much time on their hands. While this is annoying for Potter fans like me who do not wish to be spoiled, avoiding the leaked information has been relatively easy. But yesterday, a New York Times review apparently based on an early copy of the book found in a bookstore, changed all that. Details of the book’s plot are now a mere click away, and easily stumbled upon by accidental readers. The review also appears in today’s Audible NYT digest, my usual first source of news, each day. This is not good.

And isn’t it interesting that The Times managed to show restraint while David Pogue carried an iPhone, weeks before its release. That review didn’t appear until Apple’s embargo was lifted. I guess Steve Jobs is more intimidating than J.K. Rowling and all of her magical characters.

Harry Potter fan sites have begun a letter-wiring campaign aimed at shaming The Times. I’m with the fans.

A few people have made the sanctimonious and self-serving argument that J.K. Rowling and her publishers’ insistence on complete secrecy about the contents of Deathly Hallows is an unrealistic attempt to stifle free flow of infuriation, akin to the RIAA’s obsessive crackdowns on licensed music performance and distribution. Are they afraid they’ll lose book sales?

I don’t think Rowling and company are worried in the least about revelations of Deathly Hallows plot points harming book sales. I cannot imagine a scenario in which a person who would otherwise buy the book would choose not to do so because the text was available via BitTorrent, or because of the contents of a Times review. To be sure, they’re preserving the anticipation of the seventh book, and pumping the hype associated with its launch into the marketplace, but lose book sales? No way. I think the extreme security measures, and threats of lawsuits are all about giving fans what they want, a spoiler-free experience. For once, the interests of the content distributor and the content consumer are the same.

Dislaimer: In the following paragraph, I make an allusion to someone I know who is more famous than myself. I tend to avoid that practice and believe it should be employed as sparingly as possible. I have now exhausted my quota for July.

In the too-cool-for-Harry Potter tech world, this week has brought more speculation about the identity of Fake Steve Jobs, ginned up by more people with too much time on their hands, and a desire to stir things up for the sake of site traffic. A decent percentage of the blogosphere churn continues to point to Mac author Andy Ihnatko as the man behind the very popular and very funny FSJ blog, but the evidence seems awfully flimsy. I know Andy slightly–back in the day, I interviewed him once for my podcast. And I have absolutely no doubt that being Fake Steve Jobs is completely within his talents. But I’d just rather not know who’s been writing all that great FSJ stuff. And judging by commenters to this post, I’m not alone. It’s a pulling the mask of the Lone Ranger moment. And if it is you, Andy, deny deny deny.

OK, OK, I didn’t manage to get this post up yesterday. We had a busy time proofing our excellent August issue. The irony of blogging taking second place to making the magazine is not lost on your humble editor.

Now let’s get back to the notion of social networks taking over the world, specifically, replacing email.

It’s natural, especially in a blog culture that, like journalism, values “new and improved” as much as any advertising slogan writer. Myopic visions of the future, and the belief that today’s “big thing” is tomorrow’s “game changer” are part and parcel of a 24/7 blog cycle. I wish more people would give these ideas some thought before jumping on these faddish trains of thought.

So now social networks like Facebook, Pownce and Twitter are supposed to be replacing email, just as they are supposedly undermining traffic in the blog world. I say bull puckey.

From where I sit, the elephant in the social networking room is that while folks feel quite comfortable predicting that networks will turn existing communication methods on their heads, they’re also whining about social network fatigue. Which is it guys? Do you love the synergy, interactivity and other buzzword compliant attributes of Facebook, or are you sick of fielding friend requests? Have you turned your email client off in favor of Twitter, or do you still need Outlook or Apple Mail to read corporate memos or links to forwarded YouTube videos? It’s way too early to draw any conclusions about how social networks in general will supplant email or anything else. We still don’t know which metaphor or technology will “win”.

I’m not a social network curmudgeon. If you read this blog,you know I’ve had a public infatuation with at least two social networks. And lately, I’ve been using them to communicate with people who write for this magazine, or whose stories I would like to tell you, our readers. My Facebook profile effectively answers the questions generated by so many cold emails “Who are you?” And that saves time. I’ve also been able to “put the word out” on Twitter in a couple of cases. That’s very cool, but highly dependent upon the people I need watching their Twitter stream, or surfing over to Facebook. I submit to you that many people are more likely to do these things today than they are in six months or a year.

Much more fundamentally, email works! Everyone knows how to use it. Filters make it possible to keep messages organized, threaded, flagged and (hopefully) spam-free. Email is available everywhere. Email is easy to use. Email does not depend on a friend request. In short, email isn’t broken in a way social networks can fix. I think I’ll hang onto my accounts for a little while longer.

Like the provocative headline? I’ll break every rule and tell you right off that I don’t answer the question in this post. I can’t. And neither can you, or your favorite A-list blogger.

There’s chatter in the “big think” part of the tech blogosphere about social networking. It’s not just about how bloggers have discovered (as I have) Twitter, Facebook et. al. The buzz is all about how blog traffic is down, and social network traffic is up. Coincidence? Those who have been commenting on the trends don’t think so.

I don’t feel qualified to speculate on the relationship between those trends, but I will point out that the observations and come from the tech blogging world, where social networks are not just tools, or alternatives to blogs: they’re tech companies and interface innovators, run by people the tech blogerati hangs out with while they’re in line for their iPhones.

I’m not sure, for example, whether business bloggers, knitting bloggers, empowerment bloggers, music bloggers, cat bloggers or sports bloggers (to pick some categories at random) are observing the same traffic pattersn, nor whether their readers have defected to social networks. It sounds, especially in areas like music, where MySpace has a demonstrated pre-eimant position, like an interesing hypothesis, but I think it’s too big a generalization, too, and perhaps one that could stand some time (maybe six months or so) in the oven allowing it to become fully baked.

Tomorrow I’ll be back with some observations on the questions: “Are social networks replacing email?”