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The online social network, which once dominated the field now lorded over by Facebook, will use information that users volunteer on the site -- and the celebrity pages they check out -- to recommend movie trailers, recently released songs and video games to them.

If it doesn't make MySpace more attractive to users -- and, not incidentally, advertisers -- the social network could be in danger of settling into a period of gradual decline, like the other senior citizens of the Internet: America Online and Yahoo.

Results show that the variable that best predicts the chances of a community to survive is its level of heterogeneity: the greater the member turnover, the higher the chances that the group will sustain itself over time. On the other hand, the number of members and the number of actual message posters do not predict the chances of survival.

According to the current study, another reliable predictor is the number of messages that are posted between members of an online community.

slow-changing facts are what I term “mesofacts.” Mesofacts are the facts that change neither too quickly nor too slowly, that lie in this difficult-to-comprehend middle, or meso-, scale. Often, we learn these in school when young and hold onto them, even after they change. For example, if, as a baby boomer, you learned high school chemistry in 1970, and then, as we all are apt to do, did not take care to brush up on your chemistry periodically, you would not realize that there are 12 new elements in the Periodic Table. Over a tenth of the elements have been discovered since you graduated high school! While this might not affect your daily life, it is astonishing and a bit humbling.

For these kinds of facts, the analogy of how to boil a frog is apt: Change the temperature quickly, and the frog jumps out of the pot. But slowly increase the temperature, and the frog doesn’t realize that things are getting warmer, until it’s been boiled. So, too, is it with humans and how we process information.

discussions about “digital citizens” run into the same problems as those about digital natives: there may simply be too much economic, geographic, and demographic disparity within this group to make meaningful generalisations.

While the "good guy/bad guy" and "don't be evil" quotes may seem too cute by half to some, Wong and Whitten made a strong pitch for the truth of both slogans. In their view, Google really is fighting the good fight when it comes to your online privacy.

Some might contend that the recognition that a woman of less than conventionally attractive demeanour could still charm and fascinate dealt a blow to cynical judgment by appearance. I doubt it. Physical perfectibility, and one's individual responsibility to achieve and maintain it, remains another entrenched value of contemporary culture. From supermodel Kate Moss's sun-seared wrinkles "exposed" in Heat magazine, to footballer Cristiano Ronaldo's sculpted abdominals displayed like a gauntlet in the latest Armani underwear campaign, both women and men are informed that, while they may not have time, energy or organisation to change the world, it is beholden upon them to change themselves. The language of positive collective action is co-opted for frantic personal primping: because we're worth it.

Three-dimensional virtual environments (3dves) are the new generation of digital multi-user social networking platforms. Their immersive character allows users to create a digital humanised representation or avatar, enabling a degree of virtual interaction not possible through conventional text-based internet technologies. As recent international experience demonstrates, in addition to the conventional range of cybercrimes (including economic fraud, the dissemination of child pornography and copyright violations), the 'virtual-reality' promoted by 3dves is the source of great speculation and concern over a range of specific and emerging forms of crime and harm to users. This paper provides some examples of the types of harm currently emerging in 3dves and suggests internal regulation by user groups, terms of service, or end-user licensing agreements, possibly linked to real-world criminological principles. This paper also provides some directions for future research aimed at understanding the role of Australian criminal law and the justice system more broadly in this emerging field.

In a networked era, there will be no destination, but rather a network of content and people. We cannot assume that content will be organized around topics or that people will want to consume content organized as such. We're already seeing this in streams-based media consumption. When consuming information through social media tools, people consume social gossip alongside productive content, news alongside status updates. Right now, it's one big mess. But the key is not going to be to create distinct destinations organized around topics, but to find ways in which content can be surfaced in context, regardless of where it resides.

Making content work in a networked era is going to be about living in the streams, consuming and producing alongside "customers." Consuming to understand, producing to be relevant. Content creators are not going to get to dictate the cultural norms just because they can make their content available; they are still accountable to those who are trafficking content.

In the study, 19 participants with SSD ranging in age from 63 to 94 played an exergame on the Nintendo Wii video game system during 35-minute sessions, three times a week. After some initial instruction, they chose one of the five Nintendo Wii Sports games to play on their own - tennis, bowling, baseball, golf or boxing.

Using the Wii remote - a wireless device with motion-sensing capabilities - the seniors used their arm and body movements to simulate actions engaged in playing the actual sport, such as swinging the Wii remote like a tennis racket. The participants reported high satisfaction and rated the exergames on various attributes including enjoyment, mental effort, and physical limitations.

The discoverability of new people to follow is better than on any other service. People actually have conversations, rather than one-off posts followed by sporadic heckling. There's no sophomoric "poking," Mafia wars or invitations to inane "causes" to wade through every day. You can fine-tune the signal-to-noise ratio on Buzz very easily.

Then it hit me. Rather than controlling, containing or eliminating Buzz, why not open the Buzz floodgates and do a scorched-earth on everything else?