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I wasn't surprised by most of their findings, but one of them did make me raise my eyebrows: Teens from lower-income are more likely to blog. Because of how Pew collects data, they cannot answer the question "why?" when they find such correlations, but I figured that my qualitative data might provide some insight and so I went back through my data. When asked about blogging, most of my MySpace-dominant users would immediately talk about the blogs that they kept on MySpace while my Facebook-dominant teens would talk about how Xanga was "so middle school" and that "everyone stopped" because "it just felt really weird writing about my day to people that I didn't even care about." And then it clicked. As I pointed out last summer and Eszter saw in her survey, the MySpace/Facebook split is correlated with socio-economic status. Because MySpace supports blogging and Facebook does not and because many of the teens who were once on Xanga are now using one of the SNSs, it makes sense that teens from lower-income households are more likely to blog now. They are blogging on MySpace. Now, that outta be interesting when these kids hit college where blogging is used as an educational tool.

Sept. 27: What's in a Blog? (Kevin Champion) If such key phrases as "web 2.0" or the "democritization of the internet" are appropriate for our internet lexicon circa 2007, then blogging must be a part of the conversation that got us here. This talk explores the concept of the blog in real examples, from creating a blog, to basic blogging, to expanding the definition of what a blog is. From community portal, to dynamic database, to collaborative organizer, along the way we will find out that a blog is not just a "web log" anymore.

Oct. 4: Social Bookmarking (Adam Bohannon) Social bookmarking is used to collect and organize on-line research materials, allows groups to collectively gather Internet information, and is an easy way to keep and access your bookmarks on any Internet-connected computer. This presentation will show you the conveniences, benefits, features, and even how to create a social bookmark using tools such as Diigo, del.icio.us, and Digg.

Shelfari empowers you to show off the books you are passionate about. Build your shelf in Shelfari and then embed your shelf in your blog, website, or social networking site of choice.

According to recent reports, there have been significant privacy concerns at the Facebook HQ. It seems that Facebook employees get a great perk – spying on whomever they want. It seems that an employee can learn a lot about you, without you ever knowing it. Not only that, but they can see information on whose profile you’ve been looking at. Do you really want that information tracked?

Every time you sign up to play Texas Hold’em or hit your friends with rotten pumpkins (if someone makes this app), you’re giving away all of you personal information to these application providers. How often do you when you play games on yahoo, or MSN first give away all of your information? There are even more applications that exist solely to extract your personal data, and to be used for whatever they want.

Now, although not a surprise, the latest deal with Microsoft may make the internet a smaller place. Next time you’re searching on the internet and you find yourself being served advertisements for beer when you’re on a random florist website, it may be thanks to your Facebook cookie. When Facebook launches their new “SocialAds” platform on November 6th, it will unleash a network of sites with information not only on your browsing habits, but on all of your personal information.

Dr. Shweder says that many Westerners trying to impose a “zero tolerance” policy don’t realize that these initiation rites are generally controlled not by men but by women who believe it is a cosmetic procedure with aesthetic benefits. He criticizes Americans and Europeans for outlawing it at the same they endorse their own forms of genital modification, like the circumcision of boys or the cosmetic surgery for women called “vaginal rejuvenation.”

A Silicon Valley start-up called Nanosolar shipped its first solar panels -- priced at $1 a watt. That's the price at which solar energy gets cheaper than coal. Curious that this story is not on every front page.

While other companies have been focusing their efforts on increasing the efficiency of solar panels, Nanosolar took a different approach. It focused on manufacturing.

Nanosolar has developed proprietary process technology that makes it possible to produce 100x thinner solar cells 100x faster.

It seems that while most faculty (and, I would add, many students) assume that people drop out because they aren’t up to snuff, it may in fact be that the best students are finding that it is graduate school which isn’t up to snuff. Especially women.