"Club Penguin is a leader among a tidal wave of new community Web sites designed specifically for tweens and even younger kids: think of it as MySpace in braces. At Club Penguin, which launched in October 2005 and had 4 million unique visitors in January, according to comScore Media Metrix, your 8- to 14-year-old can waddle through a virtual world as a flightless waterfowl, interacting with other penguins of her choice."

Your igloo or mine

Picture courtesy of Newsweek

John Breslin informs us that there is a Social networking seminar on next Wednesday the 7th of March.

"It’s a late announcement but we will have a special seminar on social networks here in DERI, NUI Galway next Wednesday.

I’m pretty excited by this, and we should have some interesting talks by various guest speakers, with some breakout sessions in the afternoon.

Our main guest speaker will be Valdis Krebs, an expert on social networks who has worked on over 500 projects in this area."

Via Cloudlands

Picture courtesy of Blog-edu

"Researchers at Rutgers are leading an effort funded by the Department of Homeland Security to research techniques for monitoring social networks news articles, Web blogs and other social media for indicators of potential terrorist activity.

The Rutgers Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science will lead the team made up of researchers from the University of Southern California, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Pittsburgh. The group includes researchers from AT&T Laboratories, Bell Labs’/Lucent Technologies, Princeton University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Texas Southern University. Rutgers will get $1 million per year for three years. The DHS will fund the entire team $10.2 million over three years.”

Via Tim Finin

Thanks to Smita for the article