SociaLens

"With the rise of texting, instant chat and transcription apps, more people are ditching the venerable tool that once revolutionized the telephone business, displaced armies of secretaries and allowed us to eat dinner more or less in peace. The behavioral shift is occurring in tandem with the irreversible fading of voice calls in general, prompting more wireless carriers to offer unlimited voice minutes. In data prepared for USA Today, Vonage, an Internet phone company, says the number of voice-mail messages left on user accounts was down 8 percent in July from a year ago."

"Australian-based collaboration design specialist Matt Cooperrider has begun to explore an idea that I think the GeekDad readership is more than well positioned to help with. As well as being one of those out-of-the-box thinkers and generally smart guys, Matt is also a role-player and geek at heart. He has begun a new project called Play to Decide which will research how role-playing games can be used to support organizations and communities in democratic decision-making and the collaboration that follows. "

There's a bottom-line reason most industries gave up crunch mode over 75 years ago: It's the single most expensive way there is to get the work done.

To get its employees on board with social media, FedEx's team "realized we needed to go a lot deeper" than just one hourlong workshop. So team members ended up developing an online curriculum with 17 courses. In about 18 months, more than 500 employees had completed the coursework, Horne said. "This is probably one of the best investments we could have ever made," she said. To convince leaders that investments in social media platforms made sense, Horne said she and her IT partners discovered some of the "hidden dollars" that departments were spending to build their own, ad-hoc technology to connect and seek out experts.

Guy Adams is The Independent's Los Angeles bureau chief. During the Olympics so far, he has carved out a nice spot on the how-much-NBC's-coverage-sucks beat. Now his Twitter account has been suspended-supposedly because NBC had it cut off after he complained

Suspended British journalist who criticised NBC's Olympics coverage is restored to Twitter, but the backlash shows the social network's growing pains

In March of 1961, nine years after the publication of Charlotte's Web, author E. B. White received a letter from a young fan named Cathy Durham who wanted to know when, if ever, his next children's book would see the light of day. His reply ultimately prompted another letter explaining information overload as it applied to a popular writer of kids books a half-century ago.

"We like to think that more information drives smarter decisions; that the more details we absorb, the better off we'll be. It's why we subscribe to Google Alerts, cling to our iPhone, and fire up our Tweetdeck. Knowledge, we're told, is power. But what if our thirst for data is actually holding us back? What if obsessing over information actually reduces the quality of our decisions? That's the question raised by Princeton and Stanford University psychologists in a fascinating study titled On the Pursuit and Misuse of Useless Information."

"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."

Should you start Eric Decker or Demaryius Thomas? Those types of decisions, if made during the work day, could cost employers $6.5 billion in lost productivity, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

"Effective teamwork among an organization's top management makes employees happier and more productive, with positive benefits to the organization."

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.

Companies that build systems that people use have power. But they have to be very very very careful about how they assert that power. It's really easy to come in and try to configure the user through force. It's a lot harder to work diligently to design and build the ecosystem in which healthy norms emerge. Yet, the latter is of critical importance to the creation of a healthy community. Cuz you can't get to a healthy community through force.

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.

New technologies bring with it a requirement for new abilities. Back in 1954, dialing a phone was new and potentially confusing. Bell created a 10-minute film to explain it all.

The iMedia 25: Brands Redefining Social Media list recognizes the brands that have done the best job of engaging consumers through the myriad social media platforms. But beyond mere engagement, these brands have used big ideas, bold action, and smart thinking to leverage passionate online audiences in a channel that is still quite new. Collectively, these are the brands that move, shape, lead -- and listen to -- the conversations that define social media.

According to an article that appeared in the Tennessean, two members of the Perry County Vikings - brothers Rodney and Ryan Belasic - were ruled ineligible by the Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association because of residency issues. The reason questions about where the two brothers' eligibility came about from Facebook posts made by their mother. To play football for a county high school in Tennessee, the entire family must reside within the county lines, and thanks to complaints about the brothers not cleaning their room while visiting their mother in Henry County, something she complained about on Facebook. This, naturally, caught the eye of interested parties, opening the door for the TSSAA's eligibility investigation. It was believed that entire family had moved counties, but the mother's Facebook chatter revealed that wasn't the case

I was inspired by C.C. Chapman's post about how Ragu hates dads. He pointed out that the Ragu sauce Twitter account was out there spamming the heck out of dad accounts on Twitter. So, I looked around. I wondered, "Just how many other grocery shelf products are botching their chance to capture our attention on Twitter?"

Social media websites, such as Facebook and MySpace, may reveal information that could identify underage college students who may be at risk for problem drinking, according to a report published Online First by Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

Do you know what the numbers 5683 and 3327 mean? According to a recent study, if you are a person who frequently sends text messages, your brain knows what these numbers mean and is unconsciously influencing how you feel about phone numbers you dial.