A new path to social media insight at Vision Critical

People who post frequently on Facebook and Twitter are more than 3 times as likely to care about being the most fashionable person in the room, compared to more passive social media users. That was one of the surprising findings that came out of a major social media...

Stop worrying about your kids’ online future

I’m one of more than a thousand Internet experts who contributed thoughts about our emergent digital world to the 2012 Elon University-Pew Internet & American Life study on the future of the Internet. My comments were picked up in the Globe and...

3 reasons to check out the latest research on social media and food

In the past, ethnicity and family traditions dictated the foods we prepared; we bought our groceries at a neighborhood store; we learned our recipes from “mom” or a cookbook; and we ate our meals together around a table. In contrast, today social media introduces us...

Social e-books as online communities, for AOIR 2011

Tomorrow I’m off to the conference of the Association of Internet Researchers, an event I’ve always wanted to attend and this time actually get to present to! I’m part of a session on Books and Publishing, where I will be talking about the e-book...

10 ways academics can use Twitter

M.H. Beals has a terrific overview of Social Media for Researchers and Academics, based on a one-way workshop held at the Institute for Research and Innovation in Social Services in Edinburgh. Her post provides a great roadmap of the different ways academics can use...

Social media insights from recent research

The more time college students spend online, the worst they do in their first semester….but they end up with better social lives. Facebook activism doesn’t detract from offline activism: people who are politically active on Facebook are actually more...

“Since I started blogging…”

I overhear more and more conversations about how people cope with their lives online. We talk about our day-to-day strategies for coping with e-mail overload. We gossip about our friends’ Facebook profiles and worry about whether we should be joining the latest...