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"In a move to boost sales through social recommendations, online shoe and clothing retailer Zappos, which is owned by Amazon, has added a new feature called "PinPointing" that offers recommendations based on Pinterest accounts. Unfortunately, the feature doesn't work very well yet."

These Tubes Are Old!: Vintage Website Ads

He likens today's Facebooking, Tweeting, Flickr-ing, FourSquaring generation to our grandparents' generation. Imagine a small town where everyone knows everyone else: comings and goings, who's having babies, who's cancer is in remission, who's family is coming to town for Thanksgiving, and who's family is not (and therefore should have an invitation extended). We want people to know where we are, what we're doing, and whether we need help. It's more than just a megalomaniacal existence, it's a need for community. A virtual community, if you will.

One take on what trumps what in the Age of Digital Information.

Give a penny, take a penny - that's the concept behind Jonathan Stark's new "experiment in social sharing." He has put a picture of his Starbucks card online so that anyone in the world can use his account to purchase a cup of coffee. Just save the photo on your smartphone, go to your local Starbucks, and scan the barcode. Simple as that. You'll have a free cup of piping hot coffee.

The mass media, including interactive social-networking tools, make you passive, can sap your initiative, leave you content to watch the spectacle of life from your couch or smartphone. Enlarge This Image Apparently even during a revolution. That is the provocative thesis of a new paper by Navid Hassanpour, a political science graduate student at Yale, titled "Media Disruption Exacerbates Revolutionary Unrest." Using complex calculations and vectors representing decision-making by potential protesters, Mr. Hassanpour, who already has a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford, studied the recent uprising in Egypt. His question was, how smart was the decision by the government of President Hosni Mubarak to completely shut down the Internet and cellphone service on Jan. 28, in the middle of the crucial protests in Tahrir Square?

When the camera switches on in one of the busiest courtrooms in Massachusetts, murder arraignments, traffic and drug cases heard there will become fodder for a new experiment: how bloggers and other citizen journalists can cover courts using new media and social media.