I like danah boyd's work on social media - her writing is very easy to read and always resists & deconstructs the simplifications that the mainstream media come up with in relation to technology and society. This talk is not as research-y as her other papers, but I like it because to a tech-novice such as myself it explains some of the principles behind social networking in easily comprehensible ways. The five properties of social media and three dynamics towards the end of the paper have been helpful for me in thinking about how to understand, and manage, the online mentoring for our social networking project.
This is a very interesting study done by Andrea Lunsford at Stanford which suggests that the rise of social software has had a positive effect on students' writing. Interesting to read some of the things the students valued about their participation in the study - peer feedback, detailed editing-style commentary on their scripts & so on.