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