Social networking websites are a great way to stay in touch with friends and family, but they can also pose a serious identity theft risk. Keep reading for great tips on how to enjoy social networking websites, while still protecting yourself from online identity theft.

Because many social networking sites are viewable by anyone as a default, any information you enter into your profile could be easily searched and available to the world. Most people give little thought to posting their birthday, where they were born, and full name, but sometimes even this small amount of information can be all a professional identity thief needs to access your identity.

One of the simplest ways to increase security is to set your profile page to private. Most social networking websites, like MySpace or Facebook, will allow you to control who can and can’t see your profile. By only allowing your personal friends access to your information, you’re significantly reducing the risk.

Another easy way to protect your identity is simply to not include private information in your online profile. Don’t post your address and phone number where the world can see it. Consider this, if your address or city is posted and you write a post on your profile that reads “will write soon, am off to Denver for 10 days,” not only will a potential identity thief have your address, but also the knowledge that your mailbox will be unsupervised for the next 10 days. So not safe.

Finally, before posting anything online, really consider whether or not its necessary. Ask yourself if you’d write that information on a bathroom wall or distribute it on a flyer. If the answer is no, then perhaps you shouldn’t be posting it at all. Remember, social networking can be fun, but make sure you’re the one in control.

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In the past few years, the anti-corporate movement (including those opposed to globalization) has gained a bit of steam.

What many people in the movement promote now is called Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), the idea that corporations should be responsible to all of society and the environment, as well as to shareholders.

It’s a shame they’ve gained momentum. After all, without modern corporations we would all be poorer, and in particular, few of us could expect to retire comfortably. More than anything else, modern corporations exist to provide pension income.

Sure, corporations used to be owned by a few, extremely rich people. But, with the widespread adoption of pension funds and mutual funds, corporations now belong mostly to working people.

While it’s true the average working person has far, far less wealth than the average billionaire, there are many, many times more working people. That means company and government pension plans can invest vast sums of money into capital stock, making working class people the largest shareholders of many corporations.

From a communication perspective, I’m interested in knowing why Corporate Social Responsibility gets such good media coverage and so much attention. I’m also interested in knowing what we, as communicators, can learn from them.

For starters, the anti-corporate movement has a simple message: “Corporations have too much money and power; working people don’t have enough,” or some variation on that theme. On the other hand, my defence of corporations above is anything but simple, even though I’m pretty good at capturing ideas in words. Did your eyes glaze over as you read my description?

The ‘anti’ movement also enjoys the luxury of making a good (poor working people) versus bad (rich corporations) argument. That’s a moral argument, one that adds spice to any news story. On the other hand, the ‘pro’ side works largely with rational discourse and the ideas of economists.

Third, the protestors bring passion to the anti-corporate message. After all, this is a battle of good against evil, isn’t it? Again, the defenders of modern corporations and globalization have to rely on the prosaic science of economists.

Fourth, the label ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ also helps the anti-corporate movement. Not only does the name act as a unifying point for its advocates, but it also implies that CSR is a good thing. After all, who could be against ‘social’ and ‘responsibility’?

Now, despite their high media profile and ubiquitous presence, the advocates of CSR have a problem. They may be able to win the attention of reporters and editors, but they haven’t had much clout with the real decision makers, the people who run companies, pension plans, and mutual funds.

And, the decision makers aren’t likely to be swayed. They understand the role of corporations, and they know where their responsibilities lie. Even widespread public sympathy for CSR isn’t likely to have much effect, since they report to shareholders, not to society as a whole.

So, perhaps the final lesson we’ll take from the anti-corporate movement today is that, sometimes, great communication can only take you so far by itself.

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Basically, a social network is made up of individuals or organizations that are connected through various social contacts ranging from casual acquaintances to family members. Social networks are established to encourage connections and communication to occur on a wide variety of levels.

A basis for the theory of social networking was a study performed by Stanley Milgram in 1967 that established that any two random United States citizens are connected to one another by a series of six intermediaries, on the average. This idea was made more popular by the play and subsequent movie, “Six Degrees of Separation”, as well as the television show “Six Degrees”. Current Internet experiments continue to explore this concept, such as the Ohio State Electronic Small World Project and Columbia’s Small World Project. These experiments currently confirm that five to seven degrees of separation are sufficient to connect two people through the Internet. This also serves to confirm the potential effectiveness of Internet social networks to build new connections between people.

The first Internet social network began in 1995 and has 12.9 million visitors today. This makes it difficult to comprehend the rule of 150, also known as the Dunbar number, that states that the size of a genuine social network is limited to about 150 members. Over 200 Internet social networking sites exist and the number of members that belong to most them steadily increases.

In an Internet social networking site, a group of founders sends messages to invite members to join the site. Those members then invite additional members and the links continue to grow. Some social networking sites offer viewable profiles for members, address books and online social connections on a social or business level. Many Internet social networks are open to the public.

Internet social networks are a convenient way to link with new people, both personally and professionally. Consider that the senior director of Nielson/NetRatings, Jon Gibs, states that Internet “…social networking is not a fad that will disappear. If anything, it will become more ingrained in mainstream sites.”

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Are you interested in meeting new people online? How about people that share the same interests as you? If so, one of the best ways to find those individuals to use online social networking websites. Social networking websites are often compared to neighborhoods or communities, but ones that are online. If are interested in making use of these popular websites, if you haven’t been already, you will need to find a social networking website to become a member of. One of the websites that you may be interested in joining is Orkut.

Orkut, sounds interesting doesn’t it? With other popular websites such as Yahoo! 360, Friendwise, Classmates, and MySpace, there are many who wonder how Orkut became the name of this popular online community. Orkut is named after the individual who created it. That man was an employee of Goggle and he is known as Orkut Buyukkokten.

If the name of the website doesn’t automatically draw you in, there is a good chance that the website features will. Like many other social networking websites, Orkut has a number of different member benefits. These benefits are what makes it worthwhile to become a member of this popular social networking website. As popular as Orkut is and as much as you would like to join, there are special procedures that you must follow. Unfortunately, Google does not allow just anyone to become a member, you must be invited.

Current community members are the only ones who can extend you an invite. This means that you should not waste your time trying to convince Google to let you join. Being invited to join Orkut really isn’t as difficult as it may sound. Orkut is so popular that there is a good chance that you know someone, if not personally than online, who can extend you an invite. By performing a standard internet search, you should also be able to find Orkut members who would be willing to extend you an invitation, without even knowing who you are.

Although many internet users refrain from joining Orkut, just because of the invitation requirements, there is a good reason for limited membership. Orkut is a social networking website that is free to use. Unfortunately, free means that many people would wish to use the website. Many online social networking sites, that are free to use, have literally become ridiculous. A large number of internet users get joy out of creating fake accounts and causing online controversy. Google decided to make Orkut a special membership online website to prevent instances like that from happening.

Orkut, like many other online social networking websites, has a number of different purposes. Of course, the main purpose of Orkut is to allow you to connect with your friends, especially the ones that have extended an invitation to you, but you can do much more than that. Once a member of Orkut, you can easily famialrize yourself with other website members who share the same interests as you do. This will not only help you make new friends, but it may also result in the finding of your next romantic partner. That is what is nice about Orkut, once you are a member, just about anything is possible.

If you are interested in learning more about Orkut, before trying to obtain an invite, you will want to visit their online website. You can do this by going to www.orkut.com.

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This article will be in two parts because Social Bookmarking affects two totally separate and distinct groups of people. They are of course internet users or surfers on one hand and then on the other there are webmasters and blog owners. In Part One, we will focus on the users and surfers.

For all intents and purposes, Social Bookmarking sites are not that much different to Search Engines, but they offer users so much more than the traditional Search Engine site.

To demonstrate the differences, let’s talk about Google for example as a search engine and how it works compared to Social Bookmarking site such as Furl or Delicious. I don’t have any intention of getting into all of the technicalities here, but more of an overview to demonstrate the benefits of Social Bookmarking to users.

With Google, a web site owner purchases a domain, writes a site (let’s say it’s about dog training for the purpose of this example), buys some hosting and puts the site live online. They may or may not choose to submit the site name to Google, but one way or another Google will eventually find the site sitting on the web. Google will then analyse the coding of the site, the keywords used (dog training) and their density in the text and headings, the titles and descriptions for the site and through the awesome power of their secret algorithm place the page somewhere in their index. And guess what? This is all done by a computer that has no regard for the aesthetics of the site, the richness of design or the quality of the graphics used. Quite simply, to some extent it could well be another machine generated site out to make a quick buck with Adsense ads.

Social Bookmarking sites on the other hand provide a refreshing change for user oriented search. If you haven’t seen a Social Bookmarking site, go to one of the most popular sites Delicious. (You can’t put links in articles, so search it on Google.) To detail all of the available features at these sites is well beyond the scope of this article. It would require a small ebook. The most important thing to note however is that if you search sites by popularity, this means that they are ranked by the number of users that have them bookmarked and not by some machine. This is people power in action. Real human beings have viewed these sites and considered them good enough to add to their own personal bookmarks.

Another very popular site is Furl and for blogs, well you just can’t beat Technorati.

You can perform searches on these sites in the same way you would perform a search on Google, but you can have sites ranked by most recent, popularity and tags.

The tags are the most interesting feature of these sites. When you go to the tag area, the site will show a “tag cloud”. Your screen will show a range of tags which are in different colors, size and intensity. The larger the tag and the brighter the intensity the more popular the tag is.

In order to use a Social Bookmarking site, you need to register, which is free and set up your own account. Then when you bookmark a site in your own account, you allocate it tags, similar to how you set up categories in your browser. But tags provide a much better system because unlike a browser, you can use more than one tag. For example, if you have a category on your browser for clothing and you come across a site, you might well bookmark it and place it in that category. If you’re anything like me and have heaps of categories, it can be easy to forget where that site was bookmarked. But with social bookmarking you can tag the site with “clothing”, “fashion” and “footwear” for example and when you select any of these tags in your own bookmarking area the site will be listed.

One of the other great features about these sites is that your bookmarks are with you wherever you go and not just on your own computer. You just have to log on to your account and there they are.

To sum up then, social bookmarking is the future of search. It is powered by humans, assessed by humans and voted on by humans. These sites provide a great means of sharing quality content sites so start bookmarking today.

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Scared to go out to a meeting to speak to a client? Need to deliver a speech but feel like fainting at the thought of going in front of the class to present? Scared to attend a social gathering for no apparent reason? You might be suffering from social anxiety disorder.

Social anxiety disorder, also known as social phobia, is a kind of mental disorder where the sufferer experiences a severe or unreasonable fear of social gatherings where there is a possibility that one may get embarrassed or ridiculed. Most of the time, these anxieties arise from an intense fear of being closely watched or scrutinized – from the simple things like the way they dress, talk or act; to important job functions like performing in front of a crowd, giving a presentation, or finishing an interview for a job application. This kind of phobia gives sufferers a feeling of being trapped or shut away from the world.

They say social anxiety disorder is closely related to shyness. However social phobia differs in the sense that this disrupts normal socializing functions. It is true that everyone goes through a stage of shyness in their life, overcoming it is a different thing. When it becomes too much that it interrupts your daily life and relationships to the point where you are sick with worry, it is time to seek counsel. It is good to know the signs and symptoms of social anxiety disorder to be able to determine and treat this said condition before it worsens.

People with social phobia manifest 2 basic kinds of symptoms: emotional and physical. The emotional symptoms include: an intense fear of being in situations in which you don’t know people, fear of situations in which you may be judged, worrying about embarrassing or humiliating yourself, fear that others will notice that you look anxious, anxiety that disrupts your daily routine, work, school or other activities, avoiding doing things or speaking to people out of fear of embarrassment, avoiding situations where you might be the center of attention. The physical symptoms include: Blushing, profuse sweating, trembling or shaking, nausea, stomach upset, difficulty talking, shaky voice, muscle tension, confusion, palpitations, diarrhea, cold and clammy hands, and difficulty making eye contact.

Basically, this phobia manifests a symptom of being overly anxious around other people. Sufferers think that other people are more confident that they are, that other people are better them. They feel uncomfortable being around people that it makes it difficult for them to eat, drink, work, asking questions, asking for dates, even going to the toilet, when other people are around.

The good news is that there is a cure for this condition. For the past 20 years, a combination of talk therapy and medications has proven most helpful to limit the effects, if not cure, this mental condition. Certain anti-depressants (Paroxetine, Sertraline and Venlafaxine), anti-anxiety medications, and beta blockers are used to help Socio-phobic people to balance certain chemicals in the brain and minimize panic attacks during periods of heightened anxiety. Talk therapy teaches people with social anxiety disorder to react differently to situations that trigger their anxiety. The therapist helps the patient confront the negative feelings about social situations and the fear about being judged by others. Patients learn how their thinking patterns add to the symptoms of social anxiety disorder and how to change their thinking so the symptoms begin to lessen.
To be shy is quite normal, everybody has gone through a similar phase. Getting past that stage is the difficult part. Ultimately, it ends up to building your confidence to a certain level for you to be comfortable enough to move normally. In case you’ve been diagnosed as a socio-phobic, it is nothing to be ashamed of. With a little bit of therapy, proper medication, and enough support from people who believe in you, you’ll slowly be able to do socialize and function normally within a group without being too anxious.

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While social networking sites can be an exciting place to meet up with virtual friends and exchange ideas, they also increase your exposure to less-than-friendly people with other intentions on their minds. Kids especially are particularly vulnerable to the many sexual predators who stalk social networking sites looking for likely prey. Parents need to understand that these risks are real and take the necessary precautions.

Talking to your kids before-hand about the dangers of social networking is the best way to them safe. Lay the ground rules for internet online usage, but make sure you tell kids why it needs to be done. How much you tell them and the boundaries you decide to set depends on your kids’ ages and their computer know-how, and will have to be reviewed regularly as they grow.

Here are some of the precautionary measures that need to be re-enforced no matter how old your kids are.

Remind them to never share personal information about themselves or their family with any stranger online. Information including their real name, address, name of their school or even sports clubs that they play for can be used to find anyone offline.

Discourage your kids from using their real names or any other screen names that could be directly linked to them. For people who want to, it can be very easy to combine the clues and figure out who the person is and where they can be found.

Install internet filtering software on your computer to restrict access to unacceptable site. Regularly monitor the chat rooms that your child frequents, even if it is a kid-friendly site. Restrict access to your child’s website and only allow family and friends from their school or local club to view it and to post their views.

Most important of all, encourage your kids to come to you if something does happen that makes them feel in the least bit uncomfortable or threatened. Kids need to learn to make their own judgments but they also need to know that you are there to support them when things go wrong. And a lot of things could go wrong when kids use social networking sites.

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To many, the phenomenon known as Web 2.0 is as abstract as a Miro painting. His paintings make perfect sense if you understand each of the elements, language, social implications and context. Surprisingly those exact elements identify the key to understanding how Web 2.0 and the nature of social causes have grown in unison.

The common goal behind all social causes is to raise awareness or consciousness surrounding a particular issue, motivating thought and taking action. In order to be effective, it requires committed people with incredible focus and an interested audience. In the past, these movements burned an incredible amount of time simply reaching out, trying to spark interest, educate and usually exhausting resources preventing asking for the support required to further the cause.

In the past many grassroots efforts were reduced to door-to-door strategies, calling people at home or soliciting outside sympathetic storefronts. Results do vary, but more often than not, an eye roll or an apology was the response rather than a smile or handing over cold-hard cash. For the larger, better-funded social causes, the vehicle became traditional media, fighting for the attention of the would be philanthropists among a saturated sea of competing messaging. Reality was, most of these efforts invade inconveniently upon a persons day and going in for the “ask” is less effective without the common interest. It can be hit or miss, really.

How has the gap been bridged? Web 2.0, of course.

Web 2.0, the second generation of web interactivity includes the rise of social networking, collaboration tools, enhanced connectivity, content creation platforms and a vehicle for mass distribution. People have been able to form communities unlike never before, giving strength to the old saying “untied we stand”.

Every day, I log into three or more different websites whose main purpose is bringing like-minded individuals together. Far from being simple communication tools, the online social platforms allow users to create public persona that express likes, dislikes, goals, ideals and values with the intent to connect with others with similar perspectives. Requiring no introduction, the top social networking destinations defined the manner in which we interact with each other online today. MySpace, LiveJournal, http://Tribe.net, and Facebook are among the more addictive Web 2.0 locations, providing individuals and organizations alike the opportunity to correspond with one another through forums and discussions groups on any topic imaginable. Perhaps the most powerful tool on any one of these sites is the search field. With just a few keystrokes one is instantly connected with countless PEOPLE who together form communities of like-minded individuals, share interests from everything from microbrews to machinima, from synchronized swimming to saving the world. These connections are as real and meaningful as if they were in real life.

Thanks to Web 2.0, virtual is real.

People have been coming together to make a change in response to social causes and to create movements surrounding issues throughout history. Today, coming together no longer takes place exclusively in the three dimensional or “real” world. Virtual communities are just as real with real tools and applications to support any cause.

Take the wildly successful example of Kiva, which was founded in order to facilitate peer-to-peer connections between investors and entrepreneurs. Kiva was built as an open platform to allow anyone with $25 to invest in a small business in a developing country. Partnering with microfinance institutions in developing countries, Kiva managed to lower microfinancing as a whole, creating more transparency, thus greater interest. People helping people regardless of their geographical location.

Let’s think bigger, now. Really big. How about UNICEF? Many years ago, their first website comprised of a series of pictures, testimonials alongside a mailing address of where to send donations. Reflective of the early web, a passive experience, to say the least. Now the UNICEF site fully integrates Web 2.0 strategies through interactive games, videos testimonials and features plus the ability to engage with others across the planet on various topical issues. Fully integrated social networking and built in accountability is what makes their current site such a success. Granted, present on every page is the ability to choose your method of contribution, but that’s not all you see. You see the faces of others who are doing their part. You see familiar names and not so familiar stories. You see the accumulated results and how people just like you have made a difference. These strategies make a difference in the countless other success stories pertaining to social causes, both large and small.

The Web 2.0 trend has changed the face of giving and has created new rules effecting all social change from the largest not-for-profit organization to the solitary person with a vision, benefiting both philanthropists and the beneficiaries alike. This is the golden ticket for social entrepreneurs, politicians and grass roots activists. Voice is empowerment. Empowered people create movements. Social movements cause change.

Social movements are happening now, both online and off, strengthened through the language of Web 2.0. This is the context within a new paradigm of interaction and the implications are borderless. However, like an abstract painting, one does not have to truly understand it in order to appreciate it and receive genuine benefits simply from its presence.

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Social bookmarking is a unique and revolutionary way for online users to store, compile, share and search bookmarks of web pages. In this new and modern system, Internet users save links to Web pages that they want to remember and/or share. Many social bookmarking sites have Web feeds, which are provided for their lists of bookmarks, including lists organized by tags.

This service helps subscribers become aware of new bookmarks as they are saved, shared, and tagged by other users. As these services have grown more popular and have evolved further, these sites have added extra features such as ratings and comments on bookmarks, the ability to import and export bookmarks from browsers, e-mailing of bookmarks, web annotation, and groups or other social network features.

Tips In Getting Started with Social Bookmarking

Today, there are many social bookmarking sites on the Internet, and joining them is generally free. Probably the largest site today is del.icio.us. To register, simply click on the “register” link and fill in the information. Members of these sites should also install the two buttons on their browsers at home to make the process of tagging pages easier. Click on the help tab to find out more information.

Most Bookmarking Sites Are User-Friendly

Most bookmarking sites are free and very easy to use. It only takes a few minutes to join one of these sites. New members are usually asked to provide their e-mail address and a password. Members can post and review their bookmarks from any computer on the Internet. Individuals can also download and save all of their bookmarks for security. Bookmarks can also be easily transferred from one bookmarking service to another. Sharing is what makes social bookmarking so powerful.

More often than not, it is Web user who allows their tagged bookmarks to be available for public viewing, and this results in links to sites of generally better quality. Some bookmarking sites allow members to rank the site’s usefulness as well. Usually, the quality of a site over time, may be more easily discovered by recommendations from individuals rather than depending on standard search methods like Google, which usually measures the value of a site by the number of visits.

How To Steer Clear Of Unscrupulous Bookmarking Sites And Methods

According to industry analysts, social bookmarking can also be prone to corruption, misuse and collusion, and due to its rising popularity, some users have started considering it as a tool to use along with black-hat search engine optimization methods, to make their Web sites more visible. The more often a Web page is submitted and tagged, the higher the chances it has of being found.

Spammers have started bookmarking the same Web page multiple times and/or tagging each page of their web site using a lot of popular tags, thereby obliging the developers to constantly adjust their security system to overcome abuses. Because of this, some social bookmarking websites were forced to institute safety measures against spam, which caused some problems for people who use social bookmarking for legitimate, non-spamming purposes.

In addition, there are also drawbacks to such tag-based systems as well; no standard set of keywords, also known as controlled vocabulary, no standard for the structure of such tags (e.g. singular vs. plural, capitalization, etc.), mistagging due to spelling errors, tags that can have more than one meaning.

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Social media has significant potential for marketing, but it can also be used as a means of keeping tabs on your extended family members.

Today families are linking together in social media for the purpose of keeping in touch with a cyber focal point. The results are an unusual bit of family connection in an online environment.

Interestingly some parents are getting MySpace or FaceBook accounts to keep track of their teens and those they hang out with in a behind-the-scenes way.

Social media provides an unprecedented opportunity for parents to peek into the lives of their children. Your children will do better with this scenario if they know in advance that you will be monitoring their online adventures. This allows them to be more reserved online knowing you are checking in. It also allows you to read the candid replied of their peers and help your teen to learn how to handle situations they might not even think to bring up to you, but may be important in their personal development.

You will find your child’s peers very open and honest in a social media environment. This can help you track trends that may not be helpful to your teen’s outlook on life.

There was a time when parents could not really follow their children everywhere, but social media allows your child a sense of freedom with the bonus of allowing you to view their lives through a different lens. That doesn’t mean you have to get on their case about every conversation they have, but when an appropriate time arrives you can help steer them in a better direction.

With online security being a problem for parents and threatening emails being sent in cyberspace it just makes sense for parents to be more active in monitoring their child’s online activity. Most teens adjust easily enough and may not feel that your observation of their social media site is an overt intrusion and may even come to welcome your perspective. As with all rules there are exceptions and some children may not be happy with your online involvement.

Your concern, however, may not be as welcome by your teen’s friends, but they too will get used to the idea that you will be a mostly silent observer.

The use of social media is a no cost means of understanding your child, monitoring their friends and stepping in when absolutely needed.

You may be surprised. Your teen may actually supply a backhanded compliment to you in a post – or it might just be flattery because they know you’re reading.

Obviously the sooner you start this the easier it is for your child to accept the fact that their online lives are being monitored, but the alternative may be learning of problems too late and dealing with unexpected consequences instead of proactive parental guidance.

The use of social media may seem foreign to some parents, but it can be a perfect tool in maintaining a discrete distance while stepping up to the parenting plate when appropriate.

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Why would a popular musician or singing group put a social media page together? After all, aren’t they busy enough without adding the interaction that seems to be required of a social media site?

In most cases these artists do not develop these pages as a result of having too much time on their hands. In fact, most of these artists do not have a significant amount of free time to devote to a social media site.

That being said the social media site becomes an incredible means of immediate connection with fans. The social media page contains audio streaming of popular songs, video streaming of current music videos, photo galleries and of course an online blog.

These tools provide a sense of immediate connection between fans and artist. Since the page development of social media sites is all online the artists can update their page from anywhere they can gain an Internet connection (often wi-fi hot zones).

Obviously there are those who have some help in getting everything online and keeping things updated, but the point is a majority of artists have gained a clear understanding that an online community provides an incredible mechanism for marketing to already motivated fans.

Links to a primary site can often result in additional product purchases. Even if the individuals have the most current audio products they may use a social media site as the first step in locating and purchasing items such as t-shirts, hats, sweat bands, posters, magnets and many other branded items from the artist.

A social media site allows these artists to let fans know of significant achievements, news or offer information on the pre-release sale of new audio projects.

Fans take the time to post replies, ask questions and send site-controlled messages to the artist.

In so many ways the world of social media has allowed the famous to be viewed as approachable and friendly. The mystery of the artist is less mysterious and concerts can be viewed by many concertgoers as something a bit like a gathering with friends.

In an odd way the use of social media levels the playing field of the famous and yet-to-be famous. This environment is an odd mixture of reality TV, entertainment report and fan site.

The success of pop culture as a historical phenomenon makes this up close and personal approach to artists and film stars something that is meaningful to fans.

Beyond the unusually profound cultural dynamics of social media, artists and actors understand that this genre provides marketing potential to a highly motivated group of individuals.

Marketing has always been about putting a product in front of people on a regular basis. Social media allows the famous to keep their projects (past, present and future) in front of fans.

The use of social media can render fan sites obsolete because the fans have access to the famous. In turn they also have access to each other.

The example of the famous using social media can provide a reason for individuals to provide a point of connection for their own group of family and friends in a one-stop shop of information and feedback.

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If by now you have not heard of Mspace or Friendster then maybe the world is moving too slowly for you. Young adults (teens and college age adults) are using the world of the internet to communicate in ways we had no inkling of a few years ago.

Social networking is booming as young adults find one another online to chat, post comments, post photos, and share info about the latest happenings in their world to their Myspace pages and Friendster networking sites. It is not always a good thing for sure, but more on that later on.

So how does it work? Well some genius thought up the concept of Myspace, which is basically a free bulletin board for anyone (not just teens) to create a web site that is all about networking and communicating with friends and creating new friends too. Users create a free account, enter information about themselves, in as much or little detail as they want. They then share their site with their friends. Their friends can then post comments on the myspace. It becomes a great big bulletin board of social interaction. The kids are glued to these things and seem to know how to find one another and chase down the latest hot info in a heartbeat.

So what does this mean to communication in the Internet age for teens and young adults? It puts a fancier face on the outpouring of information exchange between teens.

It used to be that only the geeky teens had web pages about themselves. They were the only ones who knew how to build them. Now with these easy to use tools at their disposal every teen or young adult can have a site. That means connections and networking spreads very fast.

The sharing aspect of these sites are not only their good side but also their bad side as well. In the last year many schools and parents have become alarmed at the content of some of these Myspace sites that students have built. In typical teen fashion some kids say on their site what probably should not be said in public. They post as though it were a diary and then it gets spread around. That means that hate and meanness spread within the community quickly. Some schools have cracked down and told students they would be expelled if they do not clean up their sites. Parents, just finding out about the technology and checking it out for the first time become alarmed at the things that are said on these postings.

Of course that aspect comes back to the old thing of parents needing to be in tune with their kids and what is going on in their world. You cannot give a kid a computer and internet access and then walk away and not pay any attention.

The other thing that has raised alarm in this world of social networking is kids will post news of a party in their area, to their site. Instead of getting to “just” their friends it ends up spreading to the whole area. Homes have been overrun by crowds of kids trying to attend parties. One such event even ended with a fatal stabbing when the crowd got to big and unruly.

Now these are the type of things that can happen with or without such social networking sites in teens lives. These sites are not going to fade away. Myspace has over 60 million subscribers and was recently bought by a major corporation. They intend to make a lot of money off these sites for years to come. After all it is a very juicy target market for advertising revenue.

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