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This is worth reading and thinking about on both a governmental and at an organizational level. As elements in a system become more interdependent, and as the speed and scale of financial, informational, contractual, physical transactions between the elements of a system increase, the system can become more prone to big shocks from relatively small disruptions.  If Churchill said in the age of radio that "..A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on" what would he have said about organizations in the age of mobile devices, Twitter and YouTube?

ONE HAS LATELY heard much of the hashtag. That is, the Twitter symbol #, used to categorize a tweet. Charlie Sheen's first tweet, for example, was famously: "Winning ..! Choose your Vice... #winning #chooseyourvice." #Winning has gone on to live in irony across the Twitterverse, in mockery of the eternally less-than-winning Sheen. But even President Obama recently urged students to tweet their senators about raising the interest rates on federally subsidized student loans with the hashtag "#DontDoubleMyRate." The new thing, however, is using the word "hashtag" in conversation. Especially if you are under a certain age, you may be catching people saying things like, "I ran into that guy I met-hashtag happy!" or, in response to someone complaining, "My flashlight app isn't working," perhaps you have heard the retort, "Hashtag First World problems!" A college student not long ago reported a favorite witticism to be appending observations with: "Hashtag did that just happen?

It's an age-old tale: CNN anchor meets girl by harassing her on Twitter; girl refuses to accept anchor's further advances; anchor has a Twitter temper tantrum. On Sunday, Piers Morgan joined thousands of Twitter users in mocking 21-year-old Georgia Ford for tweeting, "'Is Wimbledon always held in London?"

Despite a shaky economy, many web companies are in hypergrowth.  This is reminiscent of the five-year period over a decade ago when companies like Amazon, Netscape, eBay, Yahoo, Google and PayPal were built. One challenge, which isn't new, is the battle for consumer attention.  If you're looking to grow your user base, is there a best way to cost-effectively attract valuable users?  I'm increasingly convinced the best way is by harnessing a concept called social proof, a relatively untapped gold mine in the age of the social web. What is social proof?  Put simply, it's the positive influence created when someone finds out that others are doing something.  It's also known as informational social influence.

It is a constant complaint: We're choking on information. The flood of data on the Web has reached mind boggling proportions, and it shows no signs of stopping. But wait, says Harvard professor Ann Blair - this is not a new condition. It's been part of the human experience for centuries.

In the digital age, we increasingly use written language in place of face to face chat or phone calls. But the advantages email, chat, and text give us in speed come with limitations in communicating emotional tone. Enter emoticons and emojis. Not just a playful supplement to language, these new tools allow for complexity in tone and emotion never before possible in written language, as well as provide new opportunities for creative expression. Rapidly spreading throughout culture, emoticons and emojis fill a void in written language that few realized we so desperately needed.

Interesting thoughts on heightened consumer reactions to re-branding in the age of "Cognitive Surplus" (Shirky) or "Participatory Culture" (Jenkins)

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

An anonymous user created a Twitter account, @superinjunction, with the apparent purpose of posting six tweets about the subjects of various injunctions; including actors, a soccer player and a chef. Now, according to Forbes, the Twitter scoop is "forcing British lawmakers to think about whether such a thing is still feasible in the age of social media, and if it is, how to enforce it."

According to the U.S. Census Bureau's official "Population Clock," around 311 million people live in the U.S. at this moment.  Now here's the interesting thing: new data from Edison Research and Arbitron indicates that more than half of Americans over the age of 11 have a Facebook account.

Here is a quick take on potential sources of high-quality digital learning media-which I'll define (for simplicity's sake) as age-appropriate, highly engaging, and efficacious for learning.

It's critical to distinguish a consumer's increased ability to amplify a brand's successes and failures from his or her actual control over the story a brand tells. In the purest sense, consumers have always wielded immense influence with their wallet. That their votes are now cast on public websites long before the ballots are counted on confidential P&Ls only makes it easier for marketers to react more quickly. If brands were in "control" back when their only option was to launch expensive print, TV and out-of-home campaigns -- and then wait several months to see the sales data -- then, by comparison, modern media has made them practically omnipotent.

Canadian researchers have found the first evidence that older brains get more benefit than younger brains from learning information the hard way - via trial-and-error learning

As they grow, children learn a lot about the world from what other people tell them. Along the way, they have to figure out who is a reliable source of information. A new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that when children reach around 4 years, they start noticing whether someone is actually knowledgeable or if they're just getting the answers from someone else.