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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

Twitter continues to grow and grow!

CITS now as a Twitter account as well. Follow UCSBCITS.

A few recently Twitter highlights:

- The Pew Internet and American Life Project released new data this week:

"As of December 2008, 11% of online American adults said they used a service like Twitter or another service that allowed them to share updates about themselves or to see the updates of others."

Social network sites are of great interest to researchers. Usage statistics are quite difficult to find, as these sites grow so quickly. Additionally, the difficulty in measuring "use" include defining heavy versus light use as well as determining real profiles versus fake profiles and multiple profiles.

A mashup, according to Wikipedia is "a digital media file containing any or all of text, graphics, audio, video, and animation, which recombines and modifies existing digital works to create a derivative work." Every year DJ Earworm creates a mashup of the top popular songs of the year and makes it available via MP3 file.

Web-based journalism is often discussed as an entirely separate sphere from traditional print-based journalism. In particular, blogging and other web-based citizen-based reporting is sometimes seen as less credible, perhaps due to the lack of an editorial filter. Some argue that the line between the two spheres is blurring. Mark Glaser gives this quiz:

How indistinguishable are large independent blogs and traditional media sites? Take the following quiz:

If one had to think of the countries in which blogging is most popular, the United States, Canada, the UK would likely be the first to pop into one's head. Then perhaps Latin American countries, China?

In fact, the country with the third most bloggers in the world is Iran, according to Wikipedia. Technorati rates Farsi as the tenth most popular language of blogs in its 2008 state of the blog report. Even the president has a blog.