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he Nielsen company's latest report shows that social networking has become ubiquitous while watching TV and while using the bathroom.

"McDonald's is testing the waters for a Twitter hashtag campaign again with its first TV ad directing users to join the conversation on Twitter. The effort, which began Monday, supports the brand's Pro Bowl tie-in. For 20 days this month, McDonald's will drop one ticket a day to the Pro Bowl in Hawaii in a package of 20-piece McNuggets. (The item will contain a paper certificate saying so, in the tradition of Willy Wonka's Golden Ticket.) The brand will also give away one ticket on Twitter and randomly award prizes to people who tweet with the #mcdprobowl hashtag from the ad. Prizes include coupons for a free 20-piece McNuggets, a year's supply of McNugget sauce and personalized tweets from NFL players to fans, among others. Rick Wion, director of social media for McDonald's, says that the brand chose Twitter because of "the amount of conversation going on there" around the game."

"Among the findings: explosive growth in Social TV, which is people watching television while connected to social media on smartphones and tablets."

"The controversial Qatari TV network Al Jazeera has bought Current TV, gaining access to millions more U.S. viewers and taking a major step forward in cracking the longed-for U.S. market. The move is the network's crowning achievement in the U.S. after years struggling to be accepted in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, when Al Jazeera was vilified by the Bush administration for broadcasting the notorious Osama bin Laden videos and other anti-American material. But following the U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq, U.S. relations with the channel improved. Recently Al Jazeera's English-language channel has won several prestigious industry awards, as well as plaudits from senior U.S. policy-makers such as Hillary Clinton."

The wide-ranging inquiry into criminal abuses by the British press has led to testimony about relationships and careers damaged by tabloid excess. Newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. are at the heart of the scandal. A former features editor for one of those papers stole the show at Tuesday's hearing.

The latest on the OPA bill.

the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), currently making its way through the House of Representatives, and its sister legislation in the Senate, the Protect IP Act (PIPA), which are supposedly intended to combat copyright violations on the Internet. Unfortunately, these bills are written so broadly so as to not only eliminate Internet piracy but replace the innovative and democratic aspects of the Internet with a tangled bureaucratic mess regulated by the government and corporations.While holding companies accountable for their role in copyright infringement is important, this legislation threatens to turn the whole Internet on its head, disrupting innovation in business and technology and muting democratic dialogue, by allowing copyright holders to unilaterally impose sanctions on companies accused of copyright infringement without due process. Based solely on an accusation (not a conviction, mind you) of a copyright violation, the U.S. Attorney General, and sometimes the copyright holding companies themselves, will be able to block access to and business transactions with websites accused of such violations. Financial institutions will be forced to stop transferring legal funds to accused websites, search engines will be forced to block accused websites, and advertisers will be forced to stop placing ads on accused websites. Moreover, the bill is written so broadly as to override the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which allows social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter to operate freely. Unfortunately, under SOPA, if a user on YouTube or Facebook were to mistakenly or unintentionally upload copyrighted material to the sites, those websites could also be shut down

We recently looked at the most shared articles in the US on Facebook over the past year. The stories range from cute to thought provoking and represent the type of news people have been sharing and discovering with friends in 2011.   

Yahoo News, The Washington Post,The Independent, and The Guardian have amassed millions of readers for social editions of the publications that launched in September. These publications are all sending large numbers of posts into Facebook news feeds, often to the point of eclipsing other types of content

"Coca-Cola's "It's Beautiful" ad, that aired during Sunday night's Super Bowl, sought to portray ethnic diversity in the U.S. by featuring "America the Beautiful" sung in several languages. The many different kinds of people in the ad - Hispanics, cowboys, Muslims, Jews and Asians - were all implicitly united by their identity as "American." But not everyone was happy with Coke's celebration of diversity in the country. After the ad was aired, Twitter lit up with commentary  under various hashtags (such as #SpeakAmerican) critical of the company. Some commenters found it disrespectful to sing "America the Beautiful" in any language other than English, while others said immigrants need to learn English to live in the United States."

"In the age of tweets, Instagram posts and Facebook invites, many argue today's youth is more interested in social media and the technology that accompanies it than what is going on in real life. While this belief is understandable, it's also worth noting how technology and social media have helped launch several political movements, and continue to contribute to political activism among young people."

"The term 'slacktivism', a portmanteau of slacker and activism, appeared for the first time in the year 2009. It refers to casual or armchair activism, also known as clicktivism. Those who support the latter argument, question the real impact of the anonymous justice seekers whose commitment goes no further than the Facebook wall. They see it as superficial activism, no more than social marketing. For José Manuel Guerra de los Santos, professor in Social Psychology at the University of Seville, this type of behaviour reflects the need for internal reinforcement. "We all like to reinforce our self-worth, our ego, by feeling that we are taking part in meaningful actions. Social media makes it easy for us to fulfil that need." For him, 'social desirability' is a key driver. Supporting a cause is socially desirable. "But what happens next with such people? Will they go to a demonstration, will they get more involved? I don't think so, because it is low-level solidarity.""

"You may have heard that self-driving cars are safer than cars with human drivers. And that's probably true. Still, as driverless vehicles inch closer and closer to the country's freeways and side streets, we'll probably hear more and more about AI-controlled vehicles getting into deadly accidents. Even a perfect driver can't avoid every accident. So if a self-driving car finds itself in a situation where a deadly accident is inevitable, how should it make a decision to minimize the damage?"

"A handful of people working at a handful of tech companies steer the thoughts of billions of people every day, says design thinker Tristan Harris. From Facebook notifications to Snapstreaks to YouTube autoplays, they're all competing for one thing: your attention. Harris shares how these companies prey on our psychology for their own profit and calls for a design renaissance in which our tech instead encourages us to live out the timeline we want."