The Seven Personality Types on Social Media

Social-media and the law

An English man has unintentionally gotten himself in trouble with the law through the use of social-media. In January of this year, Paul J. Chambers found himself frustrated by a snowstorm that grounded his flight to Northern Ireland to meet a woman he’d met online. In his frustrated state, Chambers tweeted, “You’ve got a week to get your [expletive] together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!” to his 690 followers. It was by mere coincidence that the tweet was even found.. An airport manager looking for Robin Hood Airport-related items saw the post a few days later and reported it.Read more at thenewsaboutthenews.blogspot.com

Web Shames Magazine for Plagiarizing Blogger’s Article

Old media often bemoans the copy-and-paste habits of bloggers and self-professed citizen journalists, alleging that the “re-reporting” they do is more akin to plagiarism than journalism.

Smarting under these kinds of accusations, the blogosphere eagerly took up a story writer Monica Gaudio posted to her blog Wednesday evening in which she described how a for-profit print magazine called Cooks Source published a 5-year-old post she had penned for the blog Gode Cookery. The article was published without Gaudio’s permission.

A friend who had seen the article wrote to Gaudio congratulating her and asking her how she had gotten the article published in the magazine, which has a circulation of about 20,000. “This was news to me, as I hadn’t ever heard of this magazine before,” she said. Read more at mashable.com

Twitter Increases Student Engagement [STUDY]

Communicating in 140-character segments may seem to contradict the goals of generally long-winded academia, but a new study has found that the two are less opposed than one might think. Students in the study who were asked to contribute to class discussions and complete assignments using Twitter () increased their engagement over a semester more than twice as much as a control group.

The study used a 19-question survey based on the National Survey of Student Engagement to measure student engagement at the beginning and end of a seminar course for first year students in pre-health professional programs. Four sections (70 students) were given assignments and discussions that incorporated Twitter, such as tweeting about their experiences on a job shadow day or commenting on class readings. Three sections (55 students) did the same assignments and had access to the same information, but didn’t use Twitter. Read more at mashable.com

92% of U.S. Toddlers Have Online Presence [STUDY]

According to a recent international survey of 2,200 mothers, 81% of children under the age of two currently have some form of online presence — ranging from a single photo uploaded and shared by their parents, to a full-fledged profile on a social networking site. A full 92% of children in the U.S. have an online presence by the time they are two, compared to 73% in western Europe.

The study, which was conducted by Internet security firm AVG, found that nearly one in four children have an online presence before they are even born. On average, 23% of parents share images from prenatal sonograms on the web; a full third do so in the U.S. The practice is even more common in Canada (37%), and significantly less popular in western Europe (13-15%) and Japan (14%). Read more at mashable.com

Users Revolt Against New Digg

Since launching its new version last Wednesday, Digg has been met by a slew of criticism from users unhappy with the latest iteration of the social news site. In a current Mashable poll (open until September 1), the majority of users are saying they prefer the old Digg over the new.

Today, the situation escalated further, as users flooded the site’s Top News page with links to Reddit by digging stories auto-submitted by the Digg competitor. Similarly, a mention of Reddit’s takeover on the Top News page was also doing well on Reddit with user comments such as, “At this rate, by noon digg.com will just redirect to reddit.com.” Other acts of revolt included submissions of content “Not Suitable For Work.” Read more at mashable.com

Gmail Gets a New Contact Manager

Starting today Gmail users will be greeted with a new and much improved version of Contacts designed with two key functions in mind: simpler contact management and a Contacts experience that is consistent with the rest of Gmail.

New features include keyboard shortcuts that mirror Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts, a sort by last name filter, faster editing options, autosaving and custom labels so that users can add their own fields to contact records. Perhaps most notably, the Contacts section looks and feels exactly like the Gmail inbox.

In speaking with Project Manager Benjamin Grol, it became clear that the Contacts overhaul was a necessary upgrade for Google. He indicated that the new version of Contacts makes Gmail a viable cloud-based contact manager for professionals, and indicated that the simplistic feature set was specifically designed with Andriod users — who can sync their mobile contacts with Gmail — in mind. Read more at mashable.com

Twitter Users Who Rack Up the Retweets Top Most Influential List

Got a lot of Twitter followers? So what? Unless they’re listening to what you’re saying and actually passing it on, you’re likely not all that influential, according to a new study by HP Labs.

According to the study, “The correlation between popularity and influence is weaker than it might be expected. This is a reflection of the fact that for information to propagate in a network, individuals need to forward it to the other members, thus having to actively engage rather than passively read it and cease to act on it.”

Dr. Bernardo A. Huberman, the director of Hewlett-Packard Labs’ Social Computing Lab, and his team analyzed 22 million tweets over 300 hours in September 2009 in order to concoct what he calls the IP Algorithm, which highlights influential Twitter users by assigning them both a score for influence and passivity.

Passivity is the tendency of many followers to passively peruse tweets without sharing them (i.e. retweeting them) with their network. According to the study, the average Twitter user retweets only one in 318 URLs.

Those Twitter users who are truly influential are able to break through this blase shell and impel their followers to share their tweets with the rest of the Twit-o-sphere. Check out the most influential Twitterers below (Mashable got a mention), as well as the most popular, yet not-so-influential users. Read more at mashable.com

Flickr Rolls Out Photo Overhaul to All Users

After three weeks of testing, Flickr is rolling out its massively redesigned photo pages to all of its users.

The redesign overhaul focuses three key aspects of the photo page: the navigation, the context behind photos and the size of photos themselves. Flickr () has increased the default view size of photos “by 28%” — that’s 640 pixels wide. You can also darken the background around photos so you can enjoy the images and nothing else.

Navigation has been revamped as well. There are new navigation buttons above each photo to help you browse from one photo to the next. You can also switch between contexts via the new film strip in the sidebar. Finally, photos now carry the “who, what, when, where, and how” of each photo. The company uses this information to help create photostreams and to facilitate photosharing and storytelling via the website’s massive database of images. Read more at mashable.com

Gmail Now Lets You Save Attachments to the Desktop via Drag-and-Drop

Saving dozens of e-mail file attachments to your computer just became a hell of a lot easier.

Google () has added a new feature to Gmail (): the ability to save file attachments by simply dragging-and-dropping them onto the desktop. If you hover over the file icon or the “Download” link for any attachment, you’ll notice the new text prompting you to drag the file to your desktop to save. Read more at mashable.com