Brad Stone’s Bloomberg BusinessWeek article about Facebook’s advertising strategies gets at several different ways that marketing through social media is nefarious. Leigh Alexander on how to evaluate an individual’s relative normalcy using their Facebook page. Ironically, Facebook and its 500 million friends remain largely a mystery. What Twitter learns from all those tweets: The company's head of analytics explains how Twitter mines the data users produce. If you like how the Internet remembers every single detail of your life, does that make you a hoarder? Little Brother is Watching: In the Web era, we are eroding our privacy all by ourselves. In the same vein as the popular Do Not Call list, privacy advocates would like a Do Not Track that would allow people to opt out of having their online behavior monitored. A review of Personal Connections in the Digital Age by Nancy Baym. Online as much as in the real world, people bunch together in mutually suspicious groups — and in both realms, peacemaking is an uphill struggle. Top 10 Internet-fueled conspiracies: From JFK to Obama, Roswell to Da Vinci — the great paranoias all prosper on the Web. The most important, and salient, impact of the web on viral public opinion shaping may be the UFO phenomena — an entirely new intellectual discipline, called Exopolitics (the political implications of Extraterrestrial presence), has evolved. From Nerve, a look at the most inexplicably popular YouTube videos of all time: The bizarre appeal of beef in a tube, and other internet mysteries. A review of Watching YouTube: Extraordinary Videos by Ordinary People by Michael Strangelove. A review of YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture by Jean Burgess and Joshua Green. Is Hulu winning the video wars? YouTube may soon be dead — ready yourself.
