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Reporter shocked by article comments write tribute to hit-and-run victim. DSN Blog Management Rule #1: Only approve comments that add VALUE to the discussion!

Great blog post on why Twitter is so important. Twitter also distancing itself from "social networking".

A Weavr is essentially a smart avatar, a fictional character that you create, with any attributes you like. You then set your character free online, to roam the internet for information relevant to those attributes. According to the parameters you have set, it will return with images, tweets, blog posts and even venue details as it lives its digital life. "It started really as a wild idea," says David Bausola of Philter Phactory. "The biggest users of the internet are bots, so we wanted to give people their own bots. One of my early ones is based on Inspector Morse. The internet's full of stuff about Morse, so my bot constantly trawls the internet for mentions of Oxford, or the murder scenes, or Morse's favorite pubs, and brings them back to me. It's creating its own narrative."

The All Facebook blog reports on the work of Robin Dunbar, professor of evolutionary anthropology at Oxford University. According to Prof. Dunbar the maximum number of meaningful friends you can have is about 150.

Some great points on social media from the New Zealand State Services Commission wiki. Make it findable. Search is good, but tangible evidence that the discussion is happening is better. 'Most viewed' or 'latest discussions' are simple ways of showing that evidence, and are based on how people click their way through your site. Make it navigable. Create linkages between related contributions, so that one contribution leads to another, which leads to another, and so on. This breaks down isolation between participants, gives them a sense of discovery and encourages them to respond to new things they've found. Tagging and tag clouds are one great way of making user-generated content navigable, by helping people see connections between their ideas and the ideas of others. Make it portable. Prompt people to bring the discussion into their own context -- at home, at work, or on other sites. This will draw in more people to the discussion and help everyone feel connected to what's happening on their own terms. APIs, widgets and gadgets are key tools for doing this. Make it personable. It's important to know that there is a someone -- not a something -- behind the ideas. Social media, like blogs, are compelling because they have personality and a sense of authenticity behind them. Seek ways for people to add personality to their contributions.

A list of sites based on highest visitor engagement. Worth studying the top sites for ideas on improving community engagement in our network.

30 women in India in 30 different regions video blogging everyday about issues that effect them. An awesome example of deep social media!

This is a great site everyone, please check it out!

Here are some of the interesting sharing trends that AddThis noticed in 2010. Great information.

Americans spent nearly one-quarter of their time online visiting social networks and checking blogs, according to a report by Nielsen. Facebook was named the top social media destination, taking up more than 53 million minutes from 140 million visitors in the United States for the month of May. Blogger was the next most popular destination among American social media users. But the Google-owned brand's audience of more than 50 million in May was nearly three times smaller than Facebook's, according to Nielsen's quarterly social media report.

Coder Dojo, a successful Irish not-for-profit, is branching out to the U.K. to help schoolchildren learn how to program.

An app that allows U.K. asthma sufferers to manage their condition is officially launched today. Developers say that other European countries will be added shortly. A recent survey in the U.K. shows that almost 50% do not have their asthma under control. MyAsthma is aimed giving sufferers a simple objective test to allow them to measure their condition and manage it.

Bran Cohen has turned his attention to developing a more efficient means of video streaming, again using peer-to-peer methods.

Social networking is generally more common in higher income nations; however, this is largely driven by the fact that wealthier countries have higher rates of internet access. People in lower income nations who have online access use social networking at rates that are as high, or higher, than those found in affluent countries.

Technology Review published by MIT, describes an experiment which shows bots may not simply be a form of irritation. The research project started when a group of freelance web researchers created "sophisticated Twitter bots, dubbed 'socialbots,' that can not only fool people into thinking they are real people, but also serve as virtual social connectors, speeding up the natural rate of human-to-human communication."

Facebook has been making an effort to attract journalists through its subscribe feature. Apparently it has had some considerable degree of success. Those using the tool have reportedly seen an average increase of 320% since it was launched in November. Naysayers suggest this increase is more to do with quantity than quality and Twitter remains a better tool for journalists. Elsewhere, funnily enough, teenagers seem to be saying something fairly similar. Conversation is better on Twitter. The Next Web describes how some journalists are complaining that they are collecting thousands of followers through their Facebook "Subscribe" buttons who appear to have no interest in their work. These new subscribers, they say, leave comments that are irrelevant, "spammy" or even obscene.

 Pwnedlist.com tells you if your user name or email address has been revealed in one of the recent hacker attacks on, for instance, Gawker or Sony's gaming division. It is worth knowing, especially if you use the same details to log into a variety of sites. All you have to do is type in your email address or user name into the box on Pwnedlist.com and it will tell you if it has appeared in any of lists of data that have been dumped onto the Internet recently.

Free, teach-yourself-web-development materials covering a wide range of topics including HTML5, JavaScript, PHP, and Ruby on Rails

Create your own online radio show by calling this service.

"So I offer up a different call. In high school, teach students how to apply technology. Teach them how technology fits with their domain of interest. Teach them how to use the components not how to build them. Those students that want to become more technical can choose to learn down the stack to real engineering (aka CS, CE, EE) or up the stack to become expert in technical domain applications (IS, CIS, Project Management, Bioinformatics). There are FAR FAR FAR more jobs out there today for someone with the technical skills to build a SharePoint portal, or light up a CRM instance or build a bioinformatics database than there are for someone who can build the next Python compiler. Let's stop trying to train the mass of high school students to become preservation carpenters, and instead make them very good contractors."

People are realizing the desktop computing era is over, just as all of us have known all along :)