Heavy winter snowfall in the northern Midwestern US, followed by warm temperatures, rain, and more snow has caused ice jams in the Red River, which have in turn begun to cause flooding in Minnesota and the Dakotas. The Associated Press is reporting that Fargo, North Dakota, residents are using e-mail and social networking sites to […]

Information released this morning by digital measurement company ComScore says that people’s use of mobile devices for accessing news and information on the Internet “more than doubled” from January 2008 – January 2009. Over a third (35 percent, or 22.4 million) of the 63.2 million people who accessed news and information on their mobile devices […]

Uptime and performance monitoring service Pingdom has done a study of social network uptime in 2008. They looked at some of the more heavily-used sites – Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, Friendster, LiveJournal, Orkut, Bebo, Hi5, Windows Live Spaces, Last.fm, Classmates.com, Reunion.com, Xanga and Imeem. Twitter and LinkedIn experienced the greatest amount of downtime in 2008, […]

Google today launched an official blog about the social web. Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager for Google Friend Connect, writes: “We think the web is better when it’s social. …[W]e are developing tools to make ‘any app, any site, any friends’ a reality…. “We will write about social initiatives within Google, such as Google Friend […]

It was a nice surprise last week to hear podcasting event pioneer Brian Russell being interviewed on American Public Media’s Marketplace program. As you may remember, Russell organized one of the first “open space” podcasting conferences, PodcasterCon, back in January 2006 (about 8 months before the first of dozens of PodCamps debuted). He was also […]

John Havens, Director of Partnership Marketing & Integration at Blog Talk Radio, has an interesting lineup for his “Tactical Transparency” show, Friday, January 30.  He’ll be talking about “Transparency in Social Media,” plus the specific return-on-investment of his guests’ on- and offline marketing and community work. Havens’ guests this episode are John Andrews, New/Emerging Media […]

Adult use of social networking sites has more than quadrupled in the past four years – from 8% in 2005 to 35% now – according to a report by Pew Internet. Highlights of the research report: While media coverage and policy attention focus heavily on how children and young adults use social network sites, adults […]

According to a new report by Pew Internet, Amercian voters expect Barack Obama’s administration to communicate directly with them using new media.

In the election, Obama was everywhere – Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Myspace and even texting to phones.

Is this what you want or expect from your President?

ComScore has published its take on the top social networking sites for November, and it continues to be dominated by social media sites, like Blogger, MySpace, WordPress.com and Flickr: Top Social Networking Sites Blogger (222 million) Facebook (200 million) MySpace (126 million) WordPress (114 million) Windows Live Spaces (87 million) Yahoo Geocities (69 million) Flickr […]

Six Apart, the creators of Movable Type, have introduced an add-on that turns Movable Type into a social networking platform.  Motion is a Movable Type application you install and run on your web server. Motion will be freely available in early 2009 for any licensed user of Movable Type Pro.  According to Six Apart, “We looked at […]