Again, here are the links to and summaries of my most recent 10 posts on SocialMedia.net:

The Microsoft and NBC Universal News joint venture MSNBC has acquired the Newsvine community of citizen journalists for an undisclosed sum. Newsvine, based in Seattle, publishes stories from both the mainstream media and a community of users together on the site. Users can vote on their news stories of interest, similar to the Digg [...]

Six civil servants in the agriculture ministry of the Japanese government have been reprimanded for their combined 408 edits to the Wikipedia. The most prolific of the six made 260 changes to pages related to “Mobile Suit Gundam”, a Japanese animation show (or “anime”) about giant robots. A representative for the ministry, Tsutomu Shimomura, said: “The agriculture [...]

Nova Spivack’s “best official” definition of Web 3.0 was posted today in response to Jason Calacanis’ “official” definition of Web 3.0. You can also read Tim O’Reilly’s reply to Nova’s Web 3.0 definition. The picture on the right is Nova’s graph of the current and envisaged evolution of the Web (with versions). As [...]

The event “Graphing Social Patterns: The Business and Technology of Facebook” is being held this weekend (October 7th to 9th) in San Jose, California. This is a conference for both technology and business people on how to build and distribute applications for the social networking platform Facebook. There will be some interesting speakers at the [...]

Via Computerworld, I’ve been reading up on a forthcoming social semantic website called Baagz. As presented recently at DEMOfall, Baagz is a new service from French company Exalead that aims to bring together semantic search and social networking. How does it work? Users gather their interests into a bag (called a Baag, hence [...]

There have been a variety of figures bandied about for the ratio of content contributors to browsers / lurkers on social media sites. From CNET News.com: A recent Hitwise study indicates that as few as 4 percent of Internet users actually contribute to sites like YouTube and Flickr, and more than 55 percent are men. […] To [...]

From the Houston Chronicle, we read of a case in Paris, Texas where a defamation lawsuit has been filed by a hospital there to reveal the identity of a blogger who has been severely critical of the hospital and their practices: A state district judge has told lawyers for the hospital and the blogger that he [...]

Jessica Zenner, an employee of Parker Services (a technical recruitment contractor for Nintendo) was fired on the 31st of August by her employer following concerns expressed by Nintendo about posts on her blog “Inexcusable Behavior“. On the blog, where she talks about herself, her friends and co-workers (none of whom are mentioned by name), Zenner [...]

Sun has launched a social (and organisational) networking service called OpenEco.org, which is aimed at helping companies and organisations to improve their environmental footprint through best practice sharing. The site was launched at a New York event attended by members of the Carbon Disclosure Project, and a presentation was given by former US President Bill [...]

Here are two news stories of note related to social networks during the past few days. Firstly, rumour has it that Microsoft is cosying up to Facebook and wants to negotiate some small stake in the site for around $400 million. Secondly, and certainly more exciting from my POV is the story that Google is thinking about [...]