Organization-wide overview of policy concerns by Christine Pierpoint.

Jolie O’Dell on the effect of adding the Facebook Like button to your site.

Ros Hodgekiss.

Diaspora is now available as a developer release.

Good advice on how universities should approach social media.

A data typology for social media internetting.

The infamous study in authoritarian role-“playing.”

Interesting demographic data on who is using what social site. Data comes from Google Ad Planner, and is for the US only.

Mark Neustadt on the need for colleges and universities to engage in social media.

New awesome from Patrick Moberg. MySpace is my favourite.

Paul Krugman on the effects of the recession on social mobility via transfers from community colleges to state universities.

Josh Keller on the sudden closure of California’s social mobility route from two-year community colleges to baccalaureate programs at state universities.

Web app from the MIT Media Lab that attempts to assemble your online identity.

Chris Messina is highly skeptical about Opera Unite (especially the idea that it obviates central corporate servers—content is published on Opera’s proxy servers and URLs must be in the operaunite.com namespace), but he does like what it does with activity streams.

Social site status-synching service (by the sea shore).

WordPress’s version of Drupal’s Organic Groups, I think. The site intro calls it a “suite of WordPress plugins and themes” that extend WordPress MU.

Firefox extension by Glenn Jones that uses the Google Social Graph API to identify people based on the rel="me" link attribute. Easy to use—for example “Ctrl + I” (Mac) or “Alt + I” (Windows) on someone’s Twitter profile page—it pulls in available data from the present site and any other social web sites it can. According to Google’s API, the plugin can identify public URLs that belong to the person being looked up, and publicly declared connections between that person and others. Quick feedback on the identifying information you publish about yourself online.

Bruce Schneier on how strangers usually help one another.