The Internet is the most popular source of news after television, and reading the news is becoming increasingly social, according to a new report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project examining how people consume news.
The Internet now outranks print newspapers and radio in popularity as a source of news. Sixty-one percent of Americans said they read news online, while 54 percent said they listen to news on the radio, 50 percent read a local newspaper and just 17 percent read a national newspaper. One-third of cellphone owners read the news on their phones.
Facebook, the popular networking site, has 350 million members worldwide who, collectively, spend 10 billion minutes there every day, checking in with friends, writing on people’s electronic walls, clicking through photos and generally keeping pace with the drift of their social world.
Make that 9.9 billion and change. Recently, Halley Lamberson, 17, and Monica Reed, 16, juniors at San Francisco University High School, made a pact to help each other resist the lure of the login. Their status might as well now read, “I can’t be bothered.”
What happens when you mix visual puzzles with social photo-sharing? You get Photograb – the game where you play your friends’ photos to sharpen your visual skills. Have some brain-stimulating fun with your photos – start Photograbbing!
Hotseat, a social networking-powered mobile Web application, creates a collaborative classroom, allowing students to provide near real-time feedback during class and enabling professors to adjust the course content and improve the learning experience. Students can post messages to Hotseat using their Facebook or Twitter accounts, sending text messages, or logging in to the Hotseat Web site.
Workplace communication used to be simple. Now the options have grown.
A survey by Forrester Research, however, shows that many information workers are using new technology only selectively. The most popular forms are e-mail, word processing, Web browsers and spreadsheets. While 87 percent of the workers use e-mail, only 26 percent use instant messaging.
Whether that is good or bad is an open question. Depending on the worker, adding a new technology can increase efficiency, or it can turn into time-wasting distraction.
Some 19% of internet users now say they use Twitter or another service to share updates about themselves, or to see updates about others. This represents a significant increase over previous surveys in December 2008 and April 2009, when 11% of internet users said they use a status-update service.
Twitter and Facebook ask users to answer the question: What are you doing right now?
But for many urbanites in their 20s and 30s, two other questions are just as important: Where are you, and can I come join you?
For them, a fast-growing social networking service called Foursquare is becoming the tool of choice. A combination of friend-finder, city guide and competitive bar game, Foursquare lets users “check in” with a cellphone at a bar, restaurant or art gallery. That alerts their friends to their current location so they can drop by and say hello.
“It’s planned serendipity,” said Emily Woolf, 24, a strategic planner living in Brooklyn who checks in on Foursquare when she wants to grab coffee or a drink with friends. “At this point, I don’t even bother texting or calling my friends. I just check Foursquare to see if they’re nearby and go meet them.”
Two tech-happy English professors have started a group blog that provides tips for making the most of Internet tools for teaching and research. With 10 regular contributors, the blog is getting 10,000 page views a week.
Tech Tips: Secrets of the Google Search Box
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