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This is Vivalogo's list of best free, downloadable, open source social networking software.

This study examines the content of MySpace pages to reveal the types of personal information users disclose on their pages and the types of communication users engage in via through their MySpace accounts. The researchers performed a traditional content analysis on MySpace user profiles to learn about user characteristics and about the types of content posted on profiles pages. Findings showed a clear pattern of use of the site for creating and developing personal identities and relationships online. Findings show a high degree of control by users over private information, with very few users posting personal information such as telephone numbers and addresses. The results of this research contribute to an understanding of the use of MySpace as a social networking site, a communication tool, and a means of self-disclosure and identity formation.

In this article, I argue that online social networking is anchored in surveillance practices. This gives us an opportunity to challenge conventional understandings of surveillance that often focus on control and disempowerment. In the context of online social networking, surveillance is something potentially empowering, subjectivity building and even playful - what I call participatory surveillance.

The Wall Street Journal is borrowing elements from popular Internet hangouts like Facebook as it seeks to boost usage.

WSJ.com, one of the few news sites to restrict many of its stories to paying subscribers, is changing its layout to help nonpaying visitors navigate and identify free, ad-supported content. Those visitors will see a different home page from users who sign in as subscribers.

The new "Journal Community" is coming Tuesday as part of the site's first major revision since 2002. There, paying subscribers create personal profile pages with their real names, job details, interests and photo, much as users can at Facebook and the professional-networking site LinkedIn.

Community members will be able to comment on individual stories, create discussion groups on specific topics and ask one another for advice on such topics as starting small businesses or finding a place to take clients during a business trip, say, in Prague.

The Journal's online audience has been growing fast, and nonpaying visitors make up the lion's share. WSJ.com has 4.7 million visitors in July, nearly twice July 2007's total of 2.4 million, according to comScore Inc. Only about 5 percent of the site's users are paying subscribers, the Journal said.

Today, we're announcing a new logs retention policy: we'll anonymize IP addresses on our server logs after 9 months. We're significantly shortening our previous 18-month retention policy to address regulatory concerns and to take another step to improve privacy for our users.

Back in March 2007, Google became the first leading search engine to announce a policy to anonymize our search server logs in the interests of privacy. And many others in the industry quickly followed our lead. Although that was good for privacy, it was a difficult decision because the routine server log data we collect has always been a critical ingredient of innovation. We have published a series of blog posts explaining how we use logs data for the benefit of our users: to make improvements to search quality, improve security, fight fraud and reduce spam.

Over the last two years, policymakers and regulators -- especially in Europe and the U.S. -- have continued to ask us (and others in the industry) to explain and justify this shortened logs retention policy. We responded by open letter to explain how we were trying to strike the right balance between sometimes conflicting factors like privacy, security, and innovation. Some in the community of EU data protection regulators continued to be skeptical of the legitimacy of logs retention and demanded detailed justifications for this retention. Many of these privacy leaders also highlighted the risks of litigants using court-ordered discovery to gain access to logs, as in the recent Viacom suit.

 Facebook Inc. has grown 153% during the past year, propelled by the soaring growth of new in virtually every market outside North America, according to a report on social networking released Tuesday by ComScore Inc.

While the growth in the number of new social networking users leveled off to 9% in North America between June 2007 and June 2008, growth in several other regions soared by well over 30% during the same period, according to the ComScore report. For example, the number of new users in the Middle East and Africa grew by 66% during the year, while usage in Europe grew by 35% and in Latin America by 33%, the report noted.

I'm a huge fan of social networking, loving the opportunities it gives me to interact with friends online, make new contacts, and keep in touch with people who I wouldn't otherwise be able to. But I'm 31 years of age, and am able to control my own online persona. Which is why I find the idea of social networks for babies an utterly bizarre and contemptible one.

This handbook offers a guide to those who want to help media professionals provide reliable information about public health issues.  It is based upon experience from the 'other side' of the news desk.

The female condom - currently the only female-controlled method of preventing HIV - is rarely available to women who need it. Blaming poor marketing and insufficient investment, activists at the International AIDS Conference in Mexico City said failure to promote the female condom had hurt global HIV prevention efforts.

"When the female condom first came to us, it was marketed to sex workers, women in bars, and other women thought to be at high risk of HIV or to have loose morals," said Gladys Chiwome, of Zimbabwe's Women and AIDS Support Network, which promotes the use of the female condom in the southern African nation. "As a result, women who thought they were safe, such as married women, were, and still are, reluctant to use it."

British Sky Broadcasting (Sky) is working with Pluck - the industry-leading provider of social media capabilities to publishers, brands and retailers - to embed an array of innovative social media tools across its range of digital media properties. The new functionality, which will roll out across the portal this autumn, will be positioned under the new Sky Community platform.

Incorporating the likes of skynews.com, sky.com and sky.com/showbiz, the Sky Portal currently ranks as the 6th most popular commercial website network in the UK (ComScore). The incorporation of new social networking functionality - including cross-site user profiling - will help support greater audience engagement and provide improved levels of integration across the portal.

The first Sky website to launch with the new social media capabilities will be the award-winning Sky News site ( http://www.skynews.com/). Sky News has launched a variety of social media features across the site, including blogs, discussion boards and user comments, designed to give people more of a voice in shaping and contributing to the news agenda. The Sky News site will also host a user-generated 'citizen journalism' section in which people can share videos, photos and comments on breaking news events. By the autumn a range of other Sky properties - including Sky.com, Sky