High School Social
With blogging down among today’s youth and social networking up, some new sites are trying to allay parents’ worries

It’s apparent that blogging has dropped out of favor with kids today: Among those in the 12-to-17 age range, blogging fell by half from 2006 to 2009. Young people prefer sites such as Facebook and Twitter, but social networking sites bring concerns for parents. Surveys in both the U.S. and Britain reveal that a majority of parents of teens [...]

Last week, Facebook launched the new “Send” button, which will replace the “Send an email to a friend” button. It looks fairly similar to the “Like” button. If you click on it, a pop-up will appear and you will be able to send the article or page to friends, groups or any email address you like. One improvement is that you can now add a personal message. It’s actually pretty similar to a “recommend button.” Read more on Mashable.
Social responsibility [...]

…Moving from drawing people to a brand destination to bringing the brand to them wherever they are
The following article was originally published on ClickZ.asia.
Conventional Search Engine Optimization (SEO) focused on using various simple and not-so-simple techniques to optimize the Web pages of one’s website(s) so that when folks searched on Google and other search engines, the brand’s websites came up high enough in the rankings for people to notice and click through to from the results.
This was great, but [...]

The Purrfect Celebrity
In the world of Internet celebrities, Japanese feline Maru Desu reigns supreme. Maru is the star of two movies (I Am Maru and I Am Maru 2), a YouTube channel with more than 89.5 million views, Facebook, Twitter and blog pages, a Fresh Step commercial, and his very own Wikipedia page. After Japan’s recent earthquake the social media universe lit up with messages of concern for Maru’s safety. Don’t worry; his mysterious owner posted a picture to let [...]

Let’s start with Twitter this week instead of my usual (Facebook).
During the last few weeks there were some management changes at the top of the micro-blogging service (which is now worth more than $5 billion, by the way). And I recently found different stories about how it was started. For one version, Business Insider’s article called “The real history of Twitter” is a very interesting read.
How do I get people to watch my video and to talk about it? I [...]

All a Twitter
Is Twitter’s recent bazillion-dollar valuation just the latest version of mo’ money, mo’ problems?

With what might be described as a revolving door at its top spot, since co-founder Jack Dorsey’s return after a few years’ absence and fellow co-founder Evan Williams’s seemingly hasty exit from the site’s day-to-day operations, Twitter might be seen as a tad unstable these days. Add to the mix the reappearance of Noah Glass, a Twitter co-founder who’d been pushed from the company [...]

Let’s start this week’s blog post with “happy” news—at least for the Germans (like me). According to a study, Germany is the happiest country on Twitter. Alex Davies, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Cambridge, analyzed the tweets of 25 countries (countries where there was enough tweeting to make the rating possible). The parameter to determine the levels of happiness was the high-level correlations between words and emoticons like or . By the way, the saddest [...]

Active Participation
Social media has changed the way activists operate, and now some platforms are changing the way they operate because of activists

Though Malcolm Gladwell still won’t change his stance regarding the impact of social media on political movements, most of the rest of us have no doubt that social media has been a boon to socially conscious behavior. In the Middle East, the long list of revolutions that have been triggered by or fueled with SoMe continues; in Bahrain, [...]

Let’s call this Week in Social Media the “Visual Week.” I found quite a few interesting and funny infographics and videos, all of course concerning our favorite topic: social media.
What would Facebook look like, if it was a city? Actually, it would be humongous, with its 600,000,000 inhabitants (20 times bigger than the most populous existing city). Have a look at this infographic on getsatisfaction.
LinkedIn has recently surpassed the 100 million user mark—and to that, we say congratulations! Mashable marked [...]

Can the digital age and that most old-school of pastimes, running, co-exist? I say, absolutely!
I like my Mac and my Android phone, and I love my boyfriend’s iPad, but I am also in the midst of training for the New Jersey Marathon. How am I getting motivated to get off the screen and into my running shoes? Besides the fact that I am naturally a “can’t-sit-still” type of person, I’ve combined my two worlds into one, with great results.
It all [...]