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Positive information seems have the greatest level of impact - especially on students. Some 62% of students reported getting info that leaned them into voting for a candidate, while only 41% were persuaded by negative information that caused them to not vote for someone.

they attribute the price rise to two distinct causes: “the price peaks are due to speculators causing price bubbles, and the background increase… is due to corn to ethanol conversion.”

The OECD Trade and Agriculture Directorate cleared speculators of any blame in its own investigation into the 2008 commodities bubbles, without fingering a culprit of its own.

customer support and product management reported infrequent use of social media to contact customers (3.1% and 2.9%, respectively).

Twitter is overwhelmingly the most popular social media site accessed at work for both personal and professional use at 70%, followed by Facebook at 65% and LinkedIn at 51%.

Corporate intranets and other internally built systems came in a distant fourth at 19%.

Businesses have recognized that resistance is futile. The survey found there was no difference between light and heavy use at companies with monitored, blocked or restricted sites.

“Employees will use social media during the workday,” said Flip Filipowski, CEO, SilkRoad Technology. “These findings make it clear: Companies can either find ways to use social media to achieve measureable business results, or they can ignore it at their own peril. There is a common misperception that people only use social media for personal reasons. This research proves that people are looking to social media to help them be better at their jobs — including connecting with co-workers and customers.”

In his own study, Macy analyzed words expressing mood in 500 million tweets sent between February 2008 and January 2010. He found that people’s mood, as measured by their tweets, tended to be elevated in the morning and to decline as the day progressed. Weekends tended to be “happier” days, although mood peak started later in the morning, possibly reflecting twitterers' tendency to sleep in. Most remarkable, Macy said in an interview with Science magazine, was that the tweets showed a similar pattern across the 84 countries where the tweets originated, suggesting that the daily mood curve is fundamentally human rather than cultural.

e-diplomacy is the talk of foreign ministries the world over, as foreign affairs is increasingly conducted in 140 characters or less.

"The process of involvement in the United Nations has one unfortunate property: that it politicizes everything," Cerf told Walden. "All the considerations that are made, whether it's in the ITU or elsewhere, are taken and colored by national interests. As a long-standing participant in the Internet Architecture Board and the Internet Engineering Task Force, where we check our guns at the door, and we have technical discussions about how best to improve the operation of the Internet, to color that with other national disputes which are not relevant to the technology, is a very dangerous precedent. That's one of the reasons I worry so much about the ITU's intervention in this space."

Internet Service Providers have claimed that they need to be able to control the growing traffic online, and content creators fear that the result could be a two-speed internet.