There was a new study released by the MacArthur Foundation revealing that teenagers socializing on the internet is an integral part of their development, and is just not as bad for them as we have previously thought.
The study, started in 2005, had 5000 hours of researchers observing how teenagers interact on sites like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and other social networking sites.
“It might surprise parents to learn that it is not a waste of time for their teens to hang out online,” said Mizuko Ito, University of California, Irvine researcher and the report’s lead author. “There are myths about kids spending time…
Yelp.com and CitySearch.com are competing to be the go-to search site for everything local.
While both sites offer virually the same concept, they each have different features, some of which might help you to make up your mind about which service works better for your needs.
Yelp.com says real people, real reviews drive their site. It works better for larger, metropolitan areas. I searched my local area, and there are some reviews on the site, but many of them are random and there are only a handful of restaurant reviews for my area.
Yelp offers the option of receiving weekly emails detailing what…
Soldiers and their families have often struggled with a way to stay in contact while separated from each other. Sometimes, spouses can go weeks and months with not word from their significant other.
TroopTube was developed as a way for troops to upload and share videos and information, from where ever they may be.
TroopTube is the new online video site designed to help military families connect and keep in touch while miles apart. The site is designed for easy use, so you can quickly upload videos and share the simple joys of each day with each other, either privately or with the…
Sony is tempting the users of their Playstation Network with a virtual world.
Home is a series of virtual spaces and places. It’s different from Second Life in that you choose which space you want to visit, and then teleport there, instead of walking or flying like in Second Life.
The PlayStation Network, which currently has about 13 million PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable registered users, is integral to Home. The PSN is the network that users access to play each other in online matches, download games or videos to the hard drives of their consoles, and records a player’s success in…
As do many other professions and specialties, stockbrokers have a place to connect with other stock brokers and commiserate about how crappy the market is right now.
Traderplanet.com is an online resource, like MySpace, but with tutorials and experts involved.
They want to teach people how to trade the markets and how to be successful.
Understanding stock trading is an intense and lifelong process - Experienced and successful traders often spend their entire careers learning about the market. No matter how successful those traders may become, there is always more to learn and new opportunities to take advantage of. The information available to you, as…
We all know the story…
CD sales are sky diving, P2P services are incredibly popular, record labels are stubborn, and music fans are getting sued.
Can this nightmare ever be fixed? The Electronic Frontier Foundation has created a plan that in theory could work to combatant the nightmare we’ve all heard above. Their proposal, “A Better Way Forward: Voluntary Collective Licensing of Music File Sharing” breaks down an innovative plan that seemingly could work.
In brief, the plan is to have file sharers pay a small fee every month to a blanket or collective liscense that is almost exactly the same as what radio…
Several years ago, a husband and wife team decided to try something new. She was a blogger and knitter, and he was a code monkey (his term, not mine). They realized there was a need for a way for knitters and crocheters to connect, but realized it would be a huge undertaking.
In May of 2006, they opened Ravelry up for beta testing. In essence, you emailed jess and hoped that you would get an invite. It took several months for some of the testers to get their invites, but once they did, it was worth it. Right now, new requests are handled within…
A public relations colleague of mine made a tweet on Twitter yesterday about some work with elephants and a circus. No, seriously, sometimes you just can’t make this stuff up.
Anyway, her tweet reminded me of a funny definition of public relations I’ve often shared with my journalism and public relations students at Michigan State University.
I emailed it to her and she responded that she’d heard it before and loved it. A few hours later, she sent me a tweet about how our “conversation” had prompted her to blog about the topic. In her blog, she gave me credit for prompting the blog…
Google has paired up its Translator with its personal RSS aggregator, Reader. I use Google Reader everyday. I think its such a great application. Instead of having to navigate to fifty different blogs a day I’m provided with a space where I can see all of their updates in one spot.
Now that Reader has the ability to translate, internet users around the globe will no longer be held back by language. I’m interested to trying this out. I would love to read about digital media from a Japanese blog or band reviews from a French music site.
Keep it up, Google!
I learned…
Gerd Leonhard, media and technology futurist, posted to his blog a very interesting article on what he thinks are the developing trends in business communications. He goes over a brief history of communications spanning from the phone to social media, and then shares a very intriguing graph of where he believes communications are headed.
As you can see, phone and email use are way down, while social networks and media are the main tools of communicating.
Mr. Leonhard says that already the #1 way that people reach him is through his various social networks. He says a great advantage of this is the…
