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"On this week's show, Nora sits down with Bill Wasik and Hal Niedzviecki to talk about why the heck we post regrettable videos on the internet. It's one thing to do the embarrassing or foolish or inappropriate thing, but it's a whole other problem when we record a video and upload it on YouTube for the world to see."

What types of news stories do consumers share and discuss the most? What issues do they have less interest in? What is the interplay of the various new media platforms? And how do their agendas compare with that of the mainstream press? To answer these questions, the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism has gathered a year of data on the top news stories discussed and linked to on blogs and social media pages and seven months' worth on Twitter. We also have analyzed a year of the most viewed news-related videos on YouTube. Several clear trends emerge.

"To those who Twitter, the reporter who investigates a story before offering it to the public must also seem tediously ruminant. On Twitter, the notes become the story, devoid of even five minutes of reflection on the writer's way to the computer. I can see that there are times -an airplane landing in the Hudson, a presidential election in Iran-when this type of impromptu journalism becomes a necessity, and an exciting one at that. Luckily, reporters still exist to make sense of information bytes and expand upon them for readers-but for how much longer?"

"Social media strategy doesn't require dozens of corporate subcommittee meetings and a 70-page master plan. In fact, all you really need is one sentence that can keep you on target and on customers' minds."

Probably the most important reading we will do in terms of "foundations" of social networks. Take your time with it and read it closely.

"Social network sites (SNSs) are increasingly attracting the attention of academic and industry researchers intrigued by their affordances and reach. This special theme section of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication brings together scholarship on these emergent phenomena. In this introductory article, we describe features of SNSs and propose a comprehensive definition. We then present one perspective on the history of such sites, discussing key changes and developments. After briefly summarizing existing scholarship concerning SNSs, we discuss the articles in this special section and conclude with considerations for future research."

Great series on of blog posts on the use of social media in the 2010 elections. I used these as assignments in my social media class. See the post on the Tea Party in particular.

Wall Street Journal's take on the #cnnfail event.

"When thousands of Iranian citizens flooded the streets to protest the controversial results of last Friday's presidential election, news viewers in the U.S. rushed to Twitter to protest what they saw as a lack of coverage of Iran on CNN."

NYU professor and Internet thinker Clay Shirky gave a talk Tuesday at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, our friends just on the other side of Harvard Square. His subject was the future of accountability journalism in a world of declining newspapers.

The community around Wordpress is excellent providing free themes and plugings in nearly any form ans shape to meet your specific needs. Further on you can achieve amazing things if you know a few Wordpress hacks and have learned some basic programming skills in PHP and SQL. Many programmers have put together solutions that address need on a blog that are not offered out of the box in Wordpress and you can easily use these in your own templates. This articles provides a list of some of the most essential wordpress hacks available.

From the site: The new head of MI6, Sir John Sawers, is at the centre of a security breach after his wife published family holiday photographs and other personal details on the Facebook website.

"I have written before about Shiv Sena's militant approach towards Orkut communities critical of the party, its leader Bal Thakeray, or its Hindutva ideology. Caste-based communities on Orkut are another disturbing example of online communities mirroring the dysfunctions in Indian society."

"Iranians are blogging, posting to Facebook and, most visibly, coordinating their protests on Twitter, the messaging service. Their activity has increased, not decreased, since the presidential elections on Friday and ensuing attempts by the government to restrict or censor their online communications."

In 10 questions or less, Hunch will offer you a great solution to your problem, concern or dilemma, on hundreds of topics. Hunch's answers are based on the collective knowledge of the entire Hunch community, narrowed down to people like you, or just enough like you that you might be mistaken for each other in a dark room. Hunch is designed so that every time it's used, it learns something new. That means Hunch's hunches are always getting better.

"CoTweet allows multiple people to communicate through corporate Twitter accounts and stay in sync while doing so. With CoTweet, you can: * Engage people throughout your company - Share the job of being on duty. Tap the collective wisdom of people across functional areas like marketing, PR and customer service. Assign tasks and track follow-ups. * Focus on the conversations that matter - Know when you need to jump in. Track your exchanges through simple case management. Schedule updates to make company announcements. * Keep your brand human - Automatically include signatures in your updates to identify who's talking and keep conversations personal."

" Traditional celebrity lives and dies based on raw numbers: how many magazines mention them, how many television shows feature them, how many people talk about them around the water cooler. Internet fame can be more intimate, Weinberger says, more of a personal connection between the one and the few."

Shirky isn't concerned with what's on TV. What galls him is how much we watch, regardless of what's on. Television, he writes in "Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age," has "absorbed the lion's share of the free time available to citizens of the developed world."

Essay on peep culture by Hal Niedzviecki, author of Peep Diaries (one of our texts.) Good overview of the themes in the book.

NYT how-to on strategies for effective use of Facebook - includes privacy settings, user lists, tagging options

"In this week's podcast, Hal Niedzviecki, writer, culture commentator, editor and publisher of Broken Pencil magazine, muses on the current 'peep culture' and the future of reading."

Interesting research from Fred Stutzman: "By giving "real estate" to Facebook, third party sites have created a one-way mirror, allowing Facebook to peer in on what we're doing. If you're logged in to Facebook, and you visit a third party page with a social plugin, Facebook knows where you've been."