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A new study shows that brands that are more engaged in social media also experience greater financial success than those of their non-engaged peers. While this may actually be an implication of greater innovativeness, the brands that were the most engaged with social media saw their revenue grow over the past year by 18% while the least engaged brands saw losses of negative 6%.

From ReadWriteWeb

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing, Google launched Google Moon, or at least a Moon within Google Earth.

There is a 3D model of the moon with current and historic images, panoramic, street view-like photos, and models of numerous lunar landings, as well as guided tours with videos.

Google Blog post about the Moon feature

danah boyd gave a presentation at the Personal Democracy Forum about how young people's class play out online in social networking sites.

The 2009 CITS Design Charrette Changemakers took place in April. This short video features some of the participants' thoughts on the event.

TweetPsych uses two linguistic analysis methods, Regressive Imagery Dictionary (RID) and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), to build a psychological profile of a person based on the content of his or her tweets compared to a baseline score based on over 1.5 million random tweets.

RID is a text analysis tool of 3,000+ words from 43 categories of cognition and emotion. LIWC is a text analysis tool that calculates the degree to which people use different categories of emotion and self-reference words.

Our UC neighbors at Irvine have published a study reviewing the One Laptop Per Child program (
Wikipedia) that gives a $100 PC to children in developing countries.