The $1.6 Billion Woman, Staying on Message//

Sheryl Sandberg, Mark Zuckerberg’s No. 2, has helped steer Facebook, Inc. to its once-unimaginable height. Her message is about women and how, in her view, they must take responsibility for their careers and not blame men for holding them back.

Given that Ms. Sandberg is Facebook’s chief operating officer, and that all of Wall Street was hanging on last week’s news, you might think that she was absurdly off-topic. But Ms. Sandberg sees herself as more than an executive at one of the hottest companies around — more, too, than someone who will soon rank among the few self-made billionaires who are women. She sees herself as a role model for women in business and technology. In speeches, she often urges women to “keep your foot on the gas pedal,” and to aim high.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/business/sheryl-sandberg-of-facebook-staying-on-message.html?pagewanted=all

If Wikipedia were a book it would be 2.25 MILLION pages. If facebook were a country it would be the world’s third largest. Plus other hard to believe facts: http://snip.it/snips/82820

Big brain, lots of friends?

Scientists have linked the size of the part of the brain that lies just above the eyes with sociability. The bigger that orbital pre-frontal cortex, the bigger a person’s social circle.

This area of the brain is key to “mentalising” - the ability to interpret another’s thoughts and emotions and a skill crucial to making and maintaining friendships.

http://www.iol.co.za/scitech/science/discovery/big-brain-lots-of-friends-1.1228141

Dr Joanne Powell, of the University of Liverpool, said: “What this tells us is that the size of your brain determines your social skills and it is these that allow you to have many friends.”

But, does this also extend to Facebook friends?

I’m newly addicted to Pinterest! I love it in my personal life, but I’m thinking it could also be very valuable for helping my nonprofit tell its story. Here’s a page with marketing ideas for Pinterest.

Facebook, Twitter, MySpace create social search tool

Following complaints that Google’s new social search tool gives skewed results instead of the most relevant ones, a group of social networks have banded together to offer an alternative.

Engineers at Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace created a proof of concept that lets people use Google to get search results from those sites as well as LinkedIn, Flickr, Quora, Tumblr, Foursquare, Crunchbase, FriendFeed, Stack Overflow, Github, and Google+. The results show the highest social media results for a given search and not just the Google+ results that Google’s new Search Plus Your World does.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57364111-93/facebook-twitter-myspace-create-social-search-tool/

Dubbed “don’t be evil” in reference to Google’s much-maligned motto, the tool is a browser bookmarklet, or small piece of code, that runs in Chrome, FireFox, or Safari, but not Internet Explorer. When you do a search, the software automatically checks Google for the social profiles associated with a search query typed into the search engine and replaces the Google+ profiles that Google now features with the ones ranked highest in its own search results.

A battle is brewing.

The new (green) economy, according to Jeremy Rifkin:

How’s this for a disruptive model. Economist Jeremy Rifkin says in the future power will be green, cheap and distributed peer-to-peer. Imagine the internet, only for energy.

Here’s Rifkin’s vision: The Facebook generation seizes the initiative, tearing up conventional thinking about where energy comes from and how it’s delivered. They apply all their nous in sharing information and building seamless networks to create a new, resilient energy economy in its place, powered entirely by renewables – solar, wind, water and tidal, biomass and more besides. This will be nothing short of a new industrial revolution, says Rifkin, and its impacts will be as dramatic and sweeping as any that have gone before.

http://www.greenwisebusiness.co.uk/news/the-futures-lateral-the-new-green-economy-according-to-jeremy-rifkin-2978.aspx

“Great economic revolutions happen”, he says, “when new energy regimes emerge that facilitate more complex civilisations and more energy flow. In turn, they require communication revolutions to manage them. And when communication and energy revolutions come together, historically, they change the economic footprint.”

Jeremy Rifkin, maverick economist and adviser to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and a clutch of EU leaders.

Chinese Websites and Users in a Panic over Phishing, Hacking!

China search giants Baidu and Sohu working with Chinese government and financial institutions to prevent further phishing attacks.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/30/us-china-internet-idUSTRE7BT07M20111230

The Global Times newspaper on Friday described the state of Internet security in China as “very dangerous,” saying that public data leaks had “struck Chinese society’s alarm bells.”

Details below…

“Freedom: who could object? Yet this word is now used to justify a thousand forms of exploitation. Throughout the rightwing press and blogosphere, among thinktanks and governments, the word excuses every assault on the lives of the poor, every form of inequality and intrusion to which the 1% subject us. How did libertarianism, once a noble impulse, become synonymous with injustice?

In the name of freedom – freedom from regulation – the banks were permitted to wreck the economy. In the name of freedom, taxes for the super-rich are cut. In the name of freedom, companies lobby to drop the minimum wage and raise working hours. In the same cause, US insurers lobby Congress to thwart effective public healthcare; the government rips up our planning laws; big business trashes the biosphere. This is the freedom of the powerful to exploit the weak, the rich to exploit the poor.”

The power of social media for fomenting social protest…

I’m on Facebook occasionally — okay, a lot — and this infographic from lab 42 totally caught my eye. They asked 500 social media users a bunch of very personal questions. Here are the answers…

You can also find it at: http://blog.lab42.com/the-relationship-status-update