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"With Hurricane Sandy approaching the New York metro area, the nation's eyes are turning to its largest city. Photos of storms and flooding are popping up all over Twitter, and while many are real, some of them -- especially the really eye-popping ones -- are fake.  This post, which will be updated over the next couple of days, is an effort to sort the real from the unreal. It's a photograph verification service, you might say, or a pictorial investigation bureau. If you see a picture that looks fishy, send it to me at alexis.madrigal[at]gmail.com. If you like this sort of thing, you should also visit istwitterwrong.tumblr.com, which is just cataloging the fakes. The fakes come in three varieties: 1) Real photos that were taken long ago, but that pranksters reintroduce as images of Sandy, 2) Photoshopped images that are straight up fake, and 3) The combination of the first two: old, Photoshopped pictures being trotted out again."

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Instant access to information has change the world. In the early days of the Internet, people buzzed about the "Information Superhighway." Thinking back to the early 1990s and the first iterations of America Online and Netscape, everything seems so...quaint. In the mid-1990s, it took two minutes or more for a modem to make a connection and boot the World Wide Web for your "surfing" pleasure. Two minutes is an eternity in today's Internet and communications landscape. The ability to send messages and find information in real-time has certainly changed the way we work and live.

grey matter density of the amygdala, which was previously shown to be linked with real-world social network size, was also correlated with online social network size

There exists a pool of several hundred studies on media violence. These studies have always been inconsistent, despite some unfortunate claims by some scholars to the contrary. Recent reviews of this research, ranging from the 2001 Department of Health and Human Services report on youth violence through recent reviews of video-game research by the U.S. Supreme Court and the governments of Australia and Sweden, have all concluded that the research is inconsistent and weakened by methodological flaws.

Is there a bright line between what you say in "real life" and what you say on social media sites like Twitter? If you are a public figure, a journalist, or an employee at a corporation, do your tweets reflect on your organization or are they merely personal opinions best ignored? Is a tweet "newsworthy" or is it something you say in the privacy of your own internet? Derek Andersen of Startup Grind thinks I'm "clueless" (and apparently every other author at Forbes) because I blogged about a tweet that one of EA's product managers made about Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. In the tweet, Kevin O'Leary called the franchise "tired." To me, this was an interesting display of rivalry.

The New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell is a very smart writer with a knack for smart, provocative, "contrarian" statements. One such argument that gets digerati in a tizzy is the idea that social media actually doesn't help bring down oppressive regimes, despite all the hype. That debate is back in the news with the protests in Egypt. We'll say right off the bat that we're skeptics that social media can bring down oppressive regimes. We believe Twitter makes a tangible, positive difference in the real world, but probably not quite at the level of regime change. But Gladwell wrote a blog post yesterday on social media and Egypt that just doesn't make any sense.

"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."

Sorry Packers fans, I gotta break it to you: The real winner of this year's Super Bowl was Twitter, proving again that social media can deliver record audiences. The faceoff between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Green Bay Packers marked the biggest Super Bowl since 1987, according to Fox.

Admittedly, it can be difficult to quantify a specific profit or revenue impact from some types of experience enhancers-more robust "voice of the customer" programs, more polished customer statements, better trained front-line personnel, streamlined customer touchpoints, a more user-friendly website, etc. The financials surrounding such initiatives are much less precise than those of hard-dollar initiatives, like the renegotiation of real estate leases or the consolidation of corporate functions. Of course, that doesn't mean customer experience investments have any less of a compelling return than these other endeavors. It just takes a little more work to quantify it. And, frankly, in some cases, it requires a leap of faith.

When a large brand like Pepsi or Old Spice decides to use video, there are a lot of factors they have to consider: What message is their video expressing? How will it affect their customers? When should they release it for maximum impact? Small businesses have to contend with all those same issues, but with smaller staffs and less money. Despite the challenges, there is value in video for small businesses, even if you're a video greenhorn. We found four businesses that have had real world success thanks to video

If you didn't hear, yesterday Charlie Sheen joined Twitter. Today he very well may reach 1 million followers (as I type he's already passed the 900K mark). How did it happen?  Why all of a sudden did he wake up and decide it's Twitter time? And how was it that Charlie Sheen went from non-twitterer to hardcore twitterer overnight?  Short answer: he got a lot of help from a team of experts at Ad.ly, a small Beverly Hills start-up that focuses on celebrity endorsements via Facebook and Twitter.

Surprisingly, a study of deception in e-mails versus phone calls found that people were more honest in e-mails because they can be documented, saved and aren't real-time communication scenarios, which is when most people drop white lies. Technology isn't the gateway to rampant deception; instead, Toma and Hancock both suspect that our distrust of communication technology is more likely rooted in our fear of it. "We've evolved as a species that talks face to face, and evolution is a slow process, and we're interacting in a new environment where our basic assumptions are undercut," Hancock said. So, in a way, it's natural to expect people to lie more online. "Every time a technology is new, it elicits great fears. Many people are fearful about what it's going to do," Toma said. "So I think fears about deception stem from this general fear of technology and certain features of technologies that make it easy to lie."

Brad Feld, a venture capitalist, recently had a very uncomfortable experience with social media. The final quote from his account of the experience highlights the need to experience media to understand it: "I guess it's a good thing that this just happened and caused me to think harder about the implications. One of the reasons I immerse myself in this stuff is to understand the products and services, but also to understand the impact on humans and our society. While it's easy to think intellectually about privacy, it's a whole different deal when you have to process the ideas in the context of real issues that you encounter."

I have always believed that collaboration is most meaningful when you are really creating something together and when you are sharing your thoughts before they are finished products. If I am only willing to show you something that is a polished document, you might edit or change it a little, but you are not really doing it with me. People have to trust each other to do that. It is risky to show people your unfinished thoughts. Technologies for a long time could let you do that; people did not always do that. Social software, to the extent that it is helping people build trust and be comfortable with more casual, lightweight communications, could make it possible for more of our attempts at collaboration to be real collaboration.

Stories last. Stories exist in all cultures. By definition, they entertain, educate, preserve, and even help carry on values within communities like Fogo Island. Branding appeals to our emotions and our reason. Stories speak to our deepest questions about our own existence. Stories stick because they hold real value. By definition, they entertain, but they also educate, and even instill moral values. In fact, the best stories guide our actions. They become the source code for who we are and who we want to be. For corporations to survive, they need deeply compelling stories at their heart.

What superficially looks like shifts in the technological capabilities are really transformations in how businesses organize and execute. The fifth shift in this case-after the mainframe, the departmental computer, the PC, and the Internet-I will reiterate is social business. I would say what it has changed is the base nature of how humans interact with each other. These other technologies are certainly fantastic innovations that will accelerate how we get or deliver messages. But consider this: having common languages across cultures certainly accelerated how we communicated with each other, but as we can still see, the real trick is the ability to convey meaning.

I am not Jonathon Paige. There is no Jonathon Paige. There is no SummerHoopScoop. In fact, there never was. A little over two months ago the college basketball season ended and the long off-season of recruiting events and commitment speculation began. Messageboards and popular basketball news sources began to populate with recruiting interviews, videos, news stories, and rumors. The summer circuit circus began and college basketball fans dug in for the slow rolling waves of recruiting information to parse through. Of course, the real issue is-- who's information can be trusted? Sometimes it feels to fans like recruiting services and "experts" are just sorting through twitter feeds and regurgitating third-hand information. However, a funny dynamic develops as a result. When a recruiting "source" brings good news to a fan base, it is instantly credible and plenty are willing to defend the source with recollections of previous information provided that proved correct. When a recruiting source brings bad news, it is open season. "Never heard of this guy"... "probably some opposing fan base's blogger" .... "I doubt he knows what he is talking about." In short, fans believe what they want to believe. So, out of boredom and sincere interest in the relationship between the internet, recruiting services, and consumers, I created Jonathon Paige.