What Does Social Networking Do For You? If you can’t answer that quickly and calmly, here’s your chance to gain some clarity personally, as well as helping social networkers in general!

…the first comprehensive survey of how people use social networks to manage personal and professional relationships. Are social networks delivering the value you expected when you joined? Whether you use social networks for business or pleasure, your perspective is vital to the success of this unprecedented study…produced by My Global Career on behalf of Gigaom’s Found | READ

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Of the most popular social networking websites, Bebo is today named in a report as the top performer, beating its rivals Facebook and MySpace. Computing Which? publishes the results of an independent test assessing the 10 most popular sites for ease of setting up and using the site, the range of features, and the way the sites protected privacy and security, including how easy it is to remove personal details.read more

Flock is one of those things that I actually discovered months ago and thought… “hey, cool…that’s different!” …downloaded it… installed it… then just a few minutes ago, finally started really taking a look under the hood. I owe it all to Veronica Belmont of Mahalo Daily…she inspired me with the video below…to take a closer look…at Flock, that is:)

An open source browser that innovates on the Mozilla architecture, Flock was built on the idea that people use the Web in very different ways than they did ten years ago. Self billed as “The Social Web Browser”, Flock was the winner of Mashable’s 2007 Open Web Awards for “Judge’s Choice for Applications and Widgets”.  CNET also calls “Flock One of the Top Web 2.0 Hits of 2007“…and Webware even created: A Newbie’s Guide to Flock. On the other hand, one reviewer from FastCompany.com described Flock as having “too damn much going on…a frenetic window full of potential distractors.”

What can I say besides “Different strokes. . .”, “One man’s junk. . .”, and now. . . “What the Flock?”

Flock has picked up some steam lately, with a new version that’s more stable than before, and is filled with tons of social networking goodies. We headed over to their HQ to find out what makes this browser so different (and fun).

Tags: Flock, Mozilla, Firefox

Another new niche search engine named pipl.com is focusing specifically on “people information” that is hidden in “The Deep Web“. It is estimated to be 500 times larger than the surface web which is the focus of traditional search engines. A significant component of the information that pipl.com collects comes from hundreds of millions of social network profiles. If you haven’t already, you’d be wise to first do a search on you own name and see what it already makes available to the public about you. Then read the “5 Facts…) if you’re so inclined.
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Ever wonder or even worry if you’re Do(ing) the Right Thing (Spike Lee) when it comes to properly giving credit for information in your blog posts that you either quote or paraphrase? It’s formally called “attribution” and it basically means giving credit where credit is due. It’s the opposite side of the fence from plagiarism, which basically means stealing content from others. It’s convenient, but not necessarily valuable or correct, to just give a “read more” link to the original source of your reference. Unfortunately, that’s more than what some of us may have done a time or two as we matured in our blogging abilities. Believe it or not, there are kind people out there whose passion it is to encourage a higher caliber of blogging by using attribution, amongst other skills, properly. Jonathan Bailey at BlogHerald and PlagiarismToday is one of those people. How to Provide Attribution in the Blogging World is an excellent tutorial worth reading…a few times at least!

In light of recent content attribution controversies, this article provides some simple steps to help bloggers determine proper attribution for material they include in their blog postings. read more@blogherald.com

A little more serious than a David Letterman “Top Ten List”, these ten items predicted to become a bigger part of your future are mostly internet related. One of my favorites in particular is subset of “Peer to Peer Lending” known as Micro Lending/Micro Finance/Micro Credit… which involves the making of small loans directly to poor, would be entrepreneurs in third world countries globally.  Kiva.org is the entity mentioned here, but there are several others and the creator of the concept (Muhammad Yunus) actually won the Nobel prize in 2004 for creating and developing it.  It works undeniably… and more people need to know about it.

So Google and Wikipedia took you by surprise? Nick Galvin looks into his crystal ball and explains what you need to know to survive the next decade…read more@smh.com.au