Source: Catchfire Media

• 10 Historical Events Affected by Social Media (Mashable): This is a slideshow showing photos and tweets from events, such as the Japanese earthquake in March and the Haiti earthquake in January. It poses the question, what would other major events have looked like, such as Katrina and Sept. 11, 2001, if social media had existed as it does today.
• Facebook Timeline Designs (Mashable): Also a slideshow, this article is all about inspiration. While we experimented and discussed early on the implementation of Facebook’s Timeline on users’ profiles, these 10 images really take the timeline to the next level.
• Here’s How People Look at Your Facebook Profile (Mashable): Do you ever wonder what people take away when they glance at your Facebook profile? Is it your cute profile picture, the number of friends you have, your latest status update? This article discusses a study that captured where participants’ eyes lingered and the order in which the page was scanned. Sounds like an old study done for advertising firms on what catches people’s eyes, but it is interesting and worth a look.
• Drug Cartel Murders Another Blogger (Read Write Web): It’s a scary time to be a blogger or a journalist in Mexico and in areas of the Middle East. Following attacks on free speech is an important part in protecting democracy and our ideals. I’m glad these stories are being followed and written about by sites with large audiences.
• High School Student Punished for Joking Tweet about Gov. Brownback (Forbes.com): Speaking of free speech, this 18-year-old high school senior was disciplined by her school after sending out a tweet critical of the governor during a visit to the Kansas state Capitol. What ensued was Twitter stardom for the teen and some really bad press for the governor and his staff.

Enjoy reading and please share any of your favorite social media stories!

Mashable just released the top 10 remarkable Twitter stories of 2011, and I have to say, some of them truly are remarkable in how they show the power of social media. I mean, really, try to imagine how much longer it would have taken the world to find out about Osama bin Laden’s assassination?

Some of the stories are truly amazing, like the trio of Londoners who used Twitter to recruit volunteers to help clean up after the summer riots in that city. And there’s a photo that went viral taken by a passenger on an airplane who saw the space shuttle’s return to earth from her window seat on her way to Palm Beach, Fla.

While this top 10 list is certainly worth a look, and about 10 minutes of your time, it also provides an opportunity to reflect on your own social media moments of the year.

Here’s my top 10 social media moments in order of impact on my life:

1. Landing in the Detroit airport on 9/11/11, I tweeted about police coming aboard to take me and my row mates into detention
2. Following the beginnings of the Occupy Wall Street movement on Twitter in September and October.
3. Saying goodbye to Iowa through Facebook uploads as I drove from Des Moines to our new house and life  in Ohio.
4. Finally getting a smartphone and connecting to my social media sites from anywhere at any time.
5. My husband, after much caterwauling, joined Facebook in the summer. He still has no idea what Twitter is.
6. In April I had my first opportunity to live Tweet from an event for work and even created our own hashtag! It was as exciting as waking up on my birthday to cake and ice cream.
7. To ward off the winter blues in January and February, I created Ridiculous Outfit Monday with blog posts and Facebook posts.
8. As part of my late winter boredom, I posed a diversity survey to my Facebook friends, trying to see if my FB social circle was as diverse as I thought it would be.
9. As news of Steve Jobs death spread over the Twitterverse, it affected me more deeply than I thought it would.
10. The introduction of Google+ sparked interest in late spring, and the new network continues to confound me.

What are your top social media events of the year?

The downward spiral I experience each day as I sit all day at my desk tweeting, facebooking, surfing the net, (and of course doing my writing job), isn’t just in my imagination.

In a recent article in Newsweek, Dr. Andrew Weil, author of the book Spontaneous Happiness, explains that those who are living in industrialized nations in this Internet age are actually at higher risk for depression than those in poorer, less modern environments. He says we are experiencing a “nature-defecit,” and that as society immerses itself more and more in technology and other socially isolating activities, we are creating a fertile ground for depression.

When you think about it, even supposed “social” networking is many ways a form of social isolation. Sending tweets and commenting on Facebook posts is by no means as stimulating as actually going out and spending real time with a person.

The brains and bodies of humans — who evolved to thrive in nature and bond with others — are just not equipped for 21st Century life, says Weil.

More and more of us are sedentary, spending most of our time indoors. We eat industrial food much altered from its natural sources … We are deluged by an unprecedented overload of information and stimulation in this age of the Internet, email, mobile phones, and multimedia, all of which favor social isolation and certainly affect our emotional (and physical) health. Behaviors strongly associated with depression—reduced physical activity and human contact, overconsumption of processed food, seeking endless distraction—are the very behaviors that more and more people now can do, are even forced to do by the nature of their sedentary, indoor jobs.

To create a better balance, Dr. Weil recommends: “Increasing aerobic exercise, improving sleep, spending more time in the sun, eating more fish to boost intake of omega-3 fatty acids, socializing more, and not dwelling on negative thoughts.”

I for one am determined to try his suggestions (and here are a few of my own). But since I have no choice to be stuck in front of a computer for the next 8 hours, I think I’ll start small, by setting a photo of a sunny beach as my desktop wallpaper. If that doesn’t work, I’m totally taking a nap.

More on the topic:
Log Off. Reboot: A break from modern technology is good for your health

While we at BTWWTF?!?! have many opinions on Facebook friends and the process of unfriending, we are more interested to hear how you — our faithful readers — fared of National Unfriend Day. Did you trim much Facebook fat or were you an unfortunate trimee? Do you think Jimmy Kimmel should have thrown in a free Whopper? How long do you think it will be before National Unfriend Day becomes a Hallmark holiday? Let us know your thoughts and opinions on National Unfriend Day  in the comment section below:

Related articles

• Delete Your Fake Facebook Friends on National Unfriend Day [VIDEO] (mashable.com)
• WATCH: Why You Should Just Unfriend Everyone On Facebook (huffingtonpost.com)
• If You Lost any Facebook Friends Yesterday, Blame Jimmy Kimmel (socialtimes.com)
• It’s National Unfriend Day, Charlie Brown [video] (holykaw.alltop.com)
• Jimmy Kimmel to Facebook: it’s the second National UnFriend Day (zdnet.com)

Ways in which FB is not like real life: You can like everything, you can’t dislike anything, and you can’t like anything (or anyone) more than once.

This status update didn’t get much of a response; some of her updates get dozens of comments and likes. But it inspired me to think deeper about this virtual life we have created on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn, YouTube…and the list goes on and on and on.

I sometimes get so sucked into my computer, that is, my own virtual reality, that I  neglect what is happening beyond my screen and outside of my online networks. Certainly I know the weather in San Diego is beautiful because my Facebook friends who live there told me so. I also know a friend who just had a baby in San Francisco is looking for recommendations on how to get her baby on a good sleep schedule.

But what is going on with my neighbor? Is it actually sunny and warm outside of my house?

It’s not that I don’t participate in the outside world of real life, but sometimes the virtual world is just so much more accessible and interesting. But it is also limiting.

There is nothing more fulfilling than having a wonderful conversation with a friend who is actually sitting across from you, moving her lips and talking. Maybe it involves sipping on tea that I steeped in my own kitchen. There’s no way I could get the satisfaction of watching my kids play with each other in harmony while staring at my computer screen.

Some things in real life are invaluable. But still, I wouldn’t trade the informative network I’ve got on Twitter, or the ability to sort of keep in touch with my myriad friends and foes on Facebook. And sometimes, too, I get looped into a YouTube feed that is inspiring or funny.

What I’m saying is it’s great to have both, and the virtual world and the real world have their own rules and quirks. Maybe I can’t unlike something on Facebook, but I can unfollow someone on Twitter and never hear from them again. It’s not so easy to do that with a pesky neighbor.

Source: Technorati

The paper I wrote in an advertising seminar examined the relationship between the primary campaigns of the Democratic candidates in 2007/08 and social media. Early on, Barack Obama’s campaign captured the social media wave, and it played a big role in his overall win of the White House.

Now that social media has been flushed out for another four years since the primaries campaigns of 2007/08, I wonder how big stake Twitter, Facebook and the like will play in the current races. It’s interesting to look at the shift at where people are getting their political information these days, and which sources they most trust.

According to the article mentioned above, a growing number of people first get their political information from the Internet. Twenty-eight percent of people trust the political conversations they have online, which drives their vote. While television appears to remain the dominant provider of political information, younger generations are taking to the Internet and social media to get their political news.

Ad Age goes so far as to say social media will make or break the 2012 election.

The next occupant of the White House isn’t going to get elected solely because of a brilliant social-media strategy — but without such a strategy, candidates will not be able to enter a dialog with the majority of swing voters.

In my grad school paper, I concluded that political campaigns were using social media to have an interactive relationship with the voters. The medium is the best suited for give-and-take. Now that it is something we expect, I wonder how much more attention the presidential hopefuls will pay to social media this time around.

When television replaced the radio as the preferred way to communicate with voters, candidates were judged on their appearance more than their diction. It stands to be a reason why Nixon lost to Kennedy in 1960. With social media, perhaps candidates will be judged on their ability to respond directly to voters and engage in a more personable and friendly manner.

I can catch up on the latest news through my Twitter feed and see photos of my nieces birthday party on Facebook. I have a great social life. It’s all on my computer.

One new social network wants us to put down our laptops for a few minutes and actually visit with the people who live closest to us: our neighbors.

Nextdoor.com, a startup in Menlo Park, offers neighbors and community members a new platform to share local information about events, social gatherings and promote communication across the fences. I love this idea.

Growing up in California, I lived next door to my grandparents. We knew our neighbors across the street and a few families up and down the street. But besides with my grandparents our neighbors and us were nowhere near the closeness of holding a block party or even asking for a spare cup of sugar.

When my husband and I moved with our two kids to Iowa so he could start medical school, we were introduced to a Midwestern lifestyle that not only promoted neighborly relations, it was abnormal to not know your neighbors. Our property was demarcated by cyclone fences. There was little privacy, and we could see into backyards several houses down in either direction.

We met our rear neighbors while mowing the back lawn. We shared a driveway with neighbors to the north. The neighbors to the south became such close friends that we not only swapped cups of sugar, but we talked about digging an underground tunnel to connect our basements so we would be able to visit when the weather became harsh.

I loved the feeling that people in the neighborhood knew what was going on. I loved that when we left for vacation or even just a long weekend, we had the security of knowing our neighbors would alert us if anything went wrong with the house. In fact, on one extended trip to California, we received a call from a neighbor telling us their tree had almost fallen on our roof during a recent thunderstorm. They didn’t want us to come home alarmed that part of the tree next door was gone.

Now, living in Ohio, I feel a similar closeness to our neighbors. But, if and when we move back to California when my husband is finished with his residency in Ohio, I wonder if my new sense of neighborliness will be squashed by the cold, high walls of the California neighborhoods I have inhabited.

Nextdoor.com could be the answer to breaking down these proverbial fences and really getting to know the world outside our computers—through our computers.

"Wanna byte?" -- Winning caption submitted by Sandrala

Thank you to all the participants in our first-ever caption contest. This photo was so good, we just had to put it out there.

We had so many great entries, we found it difficult to pick a winner. But the winning caption we agreed upon was “Wanna byte?” submitted by a semi-anonymous user going by the name “Sandrala.”

We also loved Rivki’s from Life in the Married Lane: “The underground world of apples who refuse to participate in Rosh Hashana.”

And Trevor Boelter from October Ghosts: “All right you, Fuji’s – the next dancer up is iTunes… get those bit coins out for lovely iTunes…”

Howard Freeman, from Wallustrations, made us chuckle with: “Call tech support, I think your Apple has a worm.”

Leslie scared us a little bit with her caption: “I am SO ready for archery practice, but no one is answering my craigslist ad!”

And Caroline made us wonder if we needed to hit the gym a little harder with: “You need to work on your core.”

Tracy Andropolis had us thinking of writing a clever short story told from the perspective of an apple: “See, I told you, the recipe for the apple pie is right here! Here she comes with the knife, run for it!”

And Meg Cook made us want to drop what we were doing and play a board game with “Apples to Apples.”

There are many other great responses posted on the comments section of the Caption Contest post. Please check them all out!

We had so much fun doing this and were able to use social media to get the word out, so that was fun, too.

Rules:

1. Leave your recommended captions in the comment section below
2. Enter as many times as you’d like.
3. The winning caption and captionista will be featured on our blog and our Twitter feed with a link to their blog or website of choice within 24 hours.
4. The rules and the prizes are subject to change. But probably won’t.
5. Like what you see here? Give us a tweet! Or better yet, subscribe to our blog (in the sidebar on the left)!

All about apples:
Quick and easy apple pancakes: recipe, fun facts

Well, as I just witnessed on CollegeHumor Sketches on Hulu.com, when someone walking down a sidewalk shouts out “My eyelashes are legit today. ROAR” tweeted by “Jersey Shore’s” Snooki, it sounds a bit more ridiculous out load than it would being read in a Twitter stream. (Though the tweet is ridiculous in itself.)

My husband recently noted that Twitter is the epitome of vanity. How is it that someone can be so full of herself that she must declare to the world how important it is that her armpits smell like “Sponge Bob fever” (@SolangeKnowles).

If I were to set up a soapbox on the corner of my street and shout out my latest tweets:

“Great! RT @AP: BREAKING: Ohio governor announces he’ll sign executive order cracking down on dangerous exotic pets.”

“& how many Iraqis? RT @washingtonpost: 4,478 members of the U.S. military died in #Iraq since the war began in 2003″

“RT @CommonDreams: Obama: Reject the #TarSands Pipeline http://ow.ly/74P59#NoKXL”

“Obama announces withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq by January http://yhoo.it/mX0UVY#hooray! #itsabouttime”

Try saying those out loud. Strange, isn’t it?

Of course, I’m not a celebrity, so I would never tweet like @KourtneyKardashan:

“Do ants have dicks?”

And maybe that’s what people who follow celebrities want to know. Maybe this is just another human quirk that I have yet to understand.

“I hate leprachauns. LOL” (@Shaq)

“I can’t believe my grandma is making me take out the garbage. I’m rich! F$&#k this! I’m going home. I don’t need this shit” @50cent

But, @50cent has 5 million followers. I have 862. ‘Nuff said.