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Are you looking to take advantage of social media for your business or organization? With easy-to-understand introductions to blogging, forums, opinion and review sites, and social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, The Social Media Marketing Book will help you choose the best--and avoid the worst--of the social web's unique marketing opportunities.

In today's networked world, connecting with customers has never been easier. Savvy marketing professionals know that they must engage with individuals directly on the Web, and smart businesses know that their customers can be their best friends--with benefits. Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo cover all of this and more in their new book from No Starch Press, Friends with Benefits: A Social Marketing Handbook.

A friend of mine, who has achieved repeated success in high-tech startup land, said that if you want to be successful, focus on segments where <10% of the crowd currently adopts the solution, and by virtue of dramatically simplifying the approach, you can toggle adoption rates to closer to 90%. Enter Posterous, a micro-blogging tool (it's free) that does a few things really well.

Social media expert Tamar Weinberg cuts through the hype and jargon to give you intelligent advice and strategies for positioning your business on the social web in her new book from O'Reilly, The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web. In this excerpt adapted for the web, Weinberg discusses what power account holders should do to build credibility, establish identity, and make them memorable among the community. Weinberg offers 10 easy to follow rules. "Anyone, however, can follow these rules on social news sites to become a respected and valued participant of the service."

Social networking sites face a unique economic challenge when it comes to monetizing the value they create. Any attempt to capture a piece of the value they create inevitably damages that value.

In Foreign Policy, Evgeny Morozov writes about Twitters power to misinform in the context of the emerging Swine Flu crisis. In his article he brings up concerns about the use of Twitter to spread misinformation and makes some broad generalizations about the motivations of the average Twitter. In this article, I response to some of the things Morozov has to say about the validity of analyzing Twitter trends.

I will be presenting Psychotronica: Exposure, Control, and Deceit at the Hack in the Box Conference in Dubai (20th - 23rd April 2009).

The Internet, ironically, has been abuzz this week with dire news about how the Social Media and the Internet itself is stunting our mental growth, is turning us into idiot savants, Aspergers and reverting our brains to a more primitive state. The first such statement came from Lady Greenfield, an Oxford University neurologist, baroness, and director of the Royal Institution in England, who warned that sites such as Facebook and Twitter were contributing to the decline of critical skills in children who used them heavily, claiming that repeated exposure could effectively rewire the brain.