ReadWriteWeb posted an interesting article on Twitter usage stats ... see more at: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/as_facebook_ages_gen_y_turns_to_twitter.php.

Thought this was an interesting post discussing teens and twitter usage (doesn't seem to be their cup of tea yet!). Go to: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/13/why-teens-arent-using-twitter/.

Well, this is what MAY be happening on Facebook. Statistics from this article: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebooks_own_estimates_show_youth_flight_from_sit.php indicate that this may be happening. It makes sense, as what self-respecting teenager would like their parents or grandparents on their "friends" list.

Interesting stuff (I'm still not on Facebook, nor do I anticipate joining anytime soon).

Ok, even though I'm not a big participant in Social Media, other than searching databases for media monitoring projects.

Even so, this article about Social Media's possible effect on the mind caught my interest. Read more at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/feb/24/social-networking-site-changing-childrens-brains.

Teens seem to be spending a lot of time online (31 hrs!) ... see: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/4574792/Teenagers-spend-an-average-of-31-hours-online.html for the complete article.

This link came across my desktop today, and thought it was pretty interesting, and a bit of a warning to all of the bloggers, tweeters, facebookers, etc. ... you never know who's watching your blog!

Read more at: http://shankman.com/be-careful-what-you-post/, certainly don't do what this fellow did! Especially be wary about posting about current or former clients, employees, etc.

Have a great week!

Thought this is worth a mention ... Whostalkin, is a new social search engine (http://www.whostalkin.com/). It searches conversations from many of the major social search engines.

Quick post on Joongel (www.joongel.com), a meta search engine that aggregates and searches the ten most popular sites in many categories, including:

1. Images
2. Music
3. Videos
4. Shopping
5. Social
6. Q & A
7. Health
8. Torrents
9. Gossip

I like how Joongel lists the sources they search; this is helpful to know, and it can actually help you find new sources to monitor. Thus far, I've found Joongel valuable for scoping out topics and doing preliminary research; I usually like to use advanced search facilities on the individual search engines or online services when I'm working on a project. Joongel offers a web-based search on their site, as well as desktop and browser plugin versions.

I've bookmarked Joongel and will no doubt use them again.  

OK, so it is still an alpha product ... however, Me.dium still is worth a look for their social search that taps into their main product's data. While it is not comprehensive, it could be another tool for monitoring "buzz" on the internet. Basically your search results are influenced by what people are currently browsing/searching on the internet ... if a topic is popular, it will appear higher in the search results. Read more about the release of this engine at: (Me.dium press release) and search/try the service at: http://me.dium.com/search. Note that Me.dium also uses Yahoo's BOSS (build your own search service) api for content ... hopefully Yahoo will be able to remain independant of Google so they can continue to provide these tools.

Just checked out Iterend (http://blogs.iterend.com/en/), a new search engine (currently) focussing on Blogs. They're still in private beta, and it looks like their index is not quite that large, but I found what was retrieved by my sample searches to be relevant. They also have the standard tag cloud, as well as categories for the blogs. Of particular interest to reputation and media monitoring companies is the API, which allows you to integrate Iterend's results into a custom application.

If they can make sure their final index is not full of duplicate and spammy entries, they'll have a nice contender for blog search.  

VideoSurf, a new video search engine is currently in beta at: http://www.videosurf.com/ .

This site offers many features:

• Ability to start videos at certain segments
• Searches multiple video sources (Google, YouTube, MySpace, etc.)
• Short text description included
• Ability to run alerts against search strings

This is another site to watch ... video search needs improvement.

Read about "The State of the BlogSphere 2008", a report compiled by Technorati at: http://www.technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/ .

Social media searchers have another tool in Social Mention (http://www.socialmention.com/). Social Mention has tabs for searching blogs, mico-blogs, bookmarks, comments, events, images, news and videos. They search web properties such as: Google blog search, Twitter, Delicious, FriendFeed, Flickr, Digg, YouTube and many others. Searching is via a simple search box, and advanced search options are available. Of particular interest is the availability of an API; media monitoring companies may be able to tap into Social Mention's database to search for further analysis.

Overall, this could develop into a good tool; I'd like to see a search option that combines all of the tabs. 

While I don't "tweet" quite a few others do ... so if you're looking to monitor social media, you'll want to search Twitter as well. Luckily Twitter has a nice (free) API for searching their db. Access it at: http://search.twitter.com/api.

Cognition, a NLP and Semantic search company announced Tuesday that they could map more than 10 million semantic connections, enabling them to help other companies build search engines that "understand" the query. This is a company and technology to watch; they offer API access to their system to help developers build "web 3.0" tools. Check them out at: http://www.cognition.com/.