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"When you create a new article, blog post, or a new page on your web site (a new URL), the search engine will crawl that URL. They might even see some links form other web sites to that new URL. But if the search engines see real people mentioning the URL and interacting with it, they consider that the URL is validated, socially. The URL is "accepted". And it's that human interaction that the search engines are looking for. If the search engines can figure out some form of social validation of a URL, then most likely it is going to be a page that they will want to show in their search results. Social validation is that human SEO factor that the search engines have been looking to include in their algorithm for a very long time."

In a sure sign that social media is becoming an entrenched pillar of the marketing mix, social media marketing freelance jobs have grown by 67% in the last year. This according to a quarterly report from DoNanza, an Isreali-based search engine which researches work-from-home projects. The search engine aggregates information from freelance sites such as elance, odesk and others on related online projects.

"Survey results revealed engineers' chief concern to be fear of exposing critical company intellectual property (IP), with 58.5 percent of respondents citing security as their primary hesitation. Loss of productivity was a worry for 40.1 percent of respondents, while 29.3 percent said company policy precluded them from frequenting social networking sites on the job."

What's the difference between a CTO and a vice-president of engineering (VPoE)? According to Jason Hoffman and Bryan Cantrill of Joyent, the lines are blurry. At the Monki Gras conference in London on February 1st, Hoffman (CTO) and Cantrill (VPoE), shared the stage and talked about the differences in their roles. In keeping with the generally boisterous nature of Monki Gras, the conversation with Hoffman and Cantrill was a bit more bare-knuckle than your average conference presentation. Perhaps it's a result of their joint suffering under the "Somali warlord style of management" (as Hoffman put it) of Sun Microsystems.

Although it's difficult to predict what the future Internet will look like, it's probably safe to say that certain trends we've seen during the past decade will continue. This means that the Internet will become further integrated into our daily lives, becoming more ubiquitous, available, autonomous, and mobile. The engineers who are guiding the Internet in this direction are doing so by developing mobile agents, which are pieces of software that can autonomously migrate from one computer to another and interact with each other.

The study found that arts and crafts activities - such as painting, dancing and filmmaking - are closely related to success of the scientists, engineers and other innovators who create new companies and inventions that stimulate the economy. Yet during the past decade Michigan has cut funding for the arts by some 90 percent - from about $25 million in 2002 to $2.3 million this year. In Detroit, officials attempting to balance the budget have proposed large cuts to the city's arts and cultural institutions.

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?

Much has been written about employee motivation and retention. It's written by folks who actively use words like motivation and retention and generally don't have a clue about the daily necessity of keeping your team professionally content because they've either never done the work or have forgotten how it's done. These are the people who show up when your single best engineer casually and unexpectedly announces, "I'm quitting. I'm joining my good friend to found a start-up. This is my two weeks' notice." You call on the motivation and retention police because you believe they can perform the legendary "diving save". Whether it's HR or a well-intentioned manager with a distinguished title, these people scurry impressively. Meetings that go long into the evening are instantly scheduled with the disenfranchised employee. It's an impressive show of force, and it sometimes works, but even if they stay, the damage has been done. They've quit, and when someone quits they are effectively saying, "I no longer believe in this company". What's worse is that what they were originally thinking was, "I'm bored". Boredom is easier to fix than an absence of belief.

Scientists and engineers who produce innovative work aren't in it just for the money, according to researchers from Duke University and the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Alex Pang, a visiting fellow at Microsoft Research Cambridge, actively researches this area. Pang proposes a new paradigm called contemplative computing. Today he gave a talk on the idea at the Lift France 2011 conference and has published a PDF of it. You can also find a rough draft of his paper on contemplative computing. So can computers actually help improve our concentration and contemplation, instead of leading us into distraction? The problem, as Pang puts it, is that "Technologies that were supposed to help us think better, work more efficiently, and connect more meaningfully with others now interrupt us, divide our attention, and stretch us thin."