"Have you actually tried to set up a Facebook page for a company lately? It’s gotten so comically, hella complex."

At The Guardian, journalists who identify themselves as Guardian employees in their Twitter bios are advised to include a disclaimer such as, “These are my personal views and not those of my employer.”

Yeah, that's because the legal department would rather not carry all employees at all times on their libel insurance. So if you work in the media, at some places you're encouraged (sometimes even commanded) to use things like Twitter—but also apparently sometimes you're encouraged to actually make a disclaimer that your social media output isn't "work product." Shady! So then when you get sued, well, off you go, enjoy hiring your own defense. It's [...]

Apparently, if Facebook wanted to repair its reputation, all it had to do was seem like it was helping to topple an authoritarian regime. Now that the U.S. media is loudly pushing the idea that social media can change Egypt—and next, the world!—it makes Mark Zuckerberg's tendency to monetize every aspect of our online lives seem less important.

But the same apparatus that causes commentators to overstate Facebook’s importance to the Egyptian protests makes the service a growing threat to our ability to control our own identities. Facebook makes other people’s previously-invisible mass of interpersonal interactions into something visible—something that can be quantized, aggregated, sold, tracked and controlled. [...]

Maybe what I am about to say will come as a surprise to some. But it's something I've known about myself for years.

I have a hard time networking with white guys. And I think they have a hard time networking with me, too.

I’m not saying I don’t have any white male friends—I do. But within my social network, the ratio of white men to any other group is disproportionately small.

I’m so bad at networking with white guys that even the most serendipitous circumstances are foiled. I once had an interview with a Boston-based founder of a certain “game layer on top of the world.” I [...]

Happy Internet Week! In case you don't know, Internet Week is "a festival celebrating NYC's thriving Internet industry & community," according to the website of Internet Week Dot Com.

If you wanted to, there's a talk tonight at the Internet Week, except it's not on the Internet, it's in real life, called "Will Tweet for Food: Writing Your Own Ticket in the Digital Age." There's tickets, and you can write them.

But even more notable are two new developments in this wonderful age. There's Sonar, which shows you people not in your networks who are around you and using Foursquare or Twitter. They call this "extreme networking." (They [...]

Hey, "the revolution of media becoming social" (and freeing itself from the tyranny of copyediting, apparently) gets its 45,385th chance to shine today! Say goodbye to reading magazines just to read them or maybe reflect on their content and start metamicroblogging and adding the "Tw" prefix to already made-up words and campaigning to become the mayor of your local Starbucks. Or, you know, you could just book a train ticket.

This graph about the work life of a "social media manager" is horse pucky. "Social media managers" don't go out to lunch—they con an acquaintance at another business into bringing over their own lunch, then they tell all their friends and enemies about how they got the lunch for free, then they live-cast themselves throwing it up later, because puking's just another word for "free viral video." But other than that, it's totally on the money. And also THE WORST. UGH. (via)