strawberries dipped in chocolate! is there anything better?

Here is what I am reading today including the news on the Tsunami in Japan:

“OK. Now I want you to focus on Facebook. Do you think that women post lots of pictures of themselves to compete for the attention of others–men, for example? I worry that your answer to both these questions will be “yes.” I worry even more, because your views might be confirmed by research from a couple of academics at universities in New York, Texas, and Hawaii. For their work, published in a journal called “Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking,” makes for troubling reading. Apparently, women who tend to judge their own self-worth more on appearance tend to post more pictures of themselves on Facebook. The study’s results suggest they do this to compete for, as they say in marketing, eyeballs.”

“A decade ago, just 13% of Americans said they got most of their news about national and international news from the internet, placing it behind television, newspapers and radio as a main source for news. In 2010, the internet is the main news source for 41% of the public, and it is slowly closing in on America’s news king, television — which is still the main, though declining, news source for 61% of adults. As has been the case since 2008, more Americans now cite the internet as where they get most of their news than cite newspapers (currently 31%), which have seen their popularity as a main news source substantially decline as the internet’s popularity has risen.”

“For example, if you need massive pageviews for your site or a client’s site, Facebook and Twitter are just so-so for referring their users to your content. If you want to see really big clickthroughs, you should optimize for StumbleUpon and Digg. And if your goal is search engine optimization, don’t think that Facebook’s “no-follow” links are doing you any favors; instead, focus on Flickr and YouTube to see your desired results on Page One.”

“Twitter’s trending list are dominated by Japan’s earthquake which includes #tsunami, #prayforjapan and #japan. Following the stream of tweets helps users to understand the story in real-time. 4 hours ago, BBC tweeted that Tsunami warnings were issued for Guam, the Philippines, the Marshall Islands, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Nauru, Micronesia and Hawaii.”

“There are seven stages to social media engagement from shallow monitoring to deep peer to peer economies. How deep is the rabbit hole of social media? Is your organisation doing the minimum they can do, or are they quite advanced?”

Social media and the web have become the go-to for real-time information when disasters strike.”