| You might want to think twice the next time a stranger asks to befriend you on a social networking site. If this IT World article is to be believed, that stranger might want to use innocuous personal information to create a convincing clone of your identity on another social network. Why clone your identity? To use it in nefarious . . .
Who will win in Texas? The MySpace poll. (Earlier) Do fewer ad-clicks really matter for Google? (Earlier) Can everyone learn from online classes? (Earlier) Company charges for “privilege” of stopping junk mail-outs to customers. (Earlier)
There’s been plenty of buzz this week over a paper by U.C. Berkeley PhD. student Danah Boyd, who argues that Facebook users are more socioeconomically advantaged than those on MySpace. According to Boyd, the Facebook crowd “tend[s] to come from families who emphasize education and going to college … They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors . . .
Looks like all that time spent on MySpace could start earning you college credits. Via Andrew Lavallee at the Wall Street Journal: More and more universities are incorporating curricula on social computing, allowing students to study subjects like online communities, social networking and user-contributed content as part of graduate and undergrad programs. This month in Scientific American, Cornell economics professor . . .
More bad news on prostate health: The latest study by researchers at the National Cancer Institute found that lycopene, the antioxidant widely hailed as a prostate cancer inhibitor, may actually increase the cancer risk. In a study of more than 28,000 men, researchers found no significant correlation between incidents of prostate cancer and the concentration of lycopene in the subjects’ . . .
Nice post here at Complete that breaks down Web traffic not by unique visitors or even page views, but by time spent at a particular site. The winner, by a gigantic landslide: MySpace. Most of the rest of the top 20 aren’t that surprising (Yahoo!, Amazon.com, Facebook, eBay, etc .). It’s interesting to me that only one bank made the . . .