Since we are taking a class about techno trends, and social media are very trendy right now, I thought this might be useful for all users. When you post something, remember the 'eye in the sky,' or Big Brother, or just your employer - someone is watching, so don't pour out your soul in the virtual world, you just never know what might come back to haunt you...

From Yahoo News:
Debt Collection
Social media has become a key tool for collection agencies trying to track down debtors, says Michelle Dunn, CEO of the American Credit and Collections Association and author of "Do's and Don'ts of Online Collections Techniques."
"If they don't have a good phone number or the mail's being returned, a lot of them use Facebook to find out if they have a different address or their employment information," Dunn says.
Many bill collectors who think they've found a debtor on a social media site will keep an eye on that individual's online presence, Dunn says.
"They don't necessarily have to post anything to them; they just watch what that person is posting," she says.
Setting a social media profile to allow anyone -- not just friends -- to look at postings can make your profile a particularly rich source of information, she says.
"People post things about if they've gotten a new home or a new vehicle," Dunn says. "People just post such private things about their lives, and the whole world is watching."
Privacy laws should preclude a collections professional from contacting and humiliating you on your social media page, Dunn says. However, some debt collectors violate those legal and ethical boundaries and assume false identities as a means of getting information, she says.
Scams
Social media sites ask for, and often get, a large amount of personal information from users. Unfortunately, identity thieves may use that information to perpetuate scams, especially if you use personal information when creating security passwords, McCarthy says.
"If you have a public Facebook profile that gives your birth date and your parents' names and that kind of thing, they can provide the answers to security questions that your bank might have on its Web site," she says.
Even if your profile is private, identity thieves may find other ways to get your information, Beal says.
"We see spammers, we see hackers, we see people trying to sell products using fictitious profiles," he says. "There was a study done a few years ago where one group created a specific fictitious profile and the number of people that accepted their friend request ... was pretty high."
For this reason, be careful about adding social networking "friends" you don't know in real life, says Beal.
"Social networking is not a popularity contest," says Beal. "I don't add anyone to Facebook or LinkedIn unless I know them."
And remember, just because a social media site asks for information doesn't mean you have to give it, Beal says.
Finally, McCarthy recommends never sending money to someone who asks for it over a social media service. Smith says that there have been reports of scammers hijacking accounts and posing as friends.

This is the shallow one:

I can't think of anyone more shallow than Paris Hilton; she is one my 'favorites.'
Why do we need to know where she goes and what she wears?
Why does she have the same fake smile when she poses? (- I realize these are rhetorical questions, but please allow me to release frustration this way...)

She has some nerve launching a new line of footwear; it's enough we see her everywhere and she is rich precisely because people 'follow' all her moves...now she wants to make even more money out of us?

Please don't buy her shoes...nor Jessica Simpson's (another girl on my 'preferiti' list)

How far can they go??

I read this article on yahoo with growing anger and amazed that a government can exert such power on its people [and wondering why these people don't fight back].
Is this the 21st century? Coming from an ex-communist country I resent this even more. I grew up surrounded by censorship and sensing people's fears: the newspapers reported what the government allowed, the only TV station, as well; people afraid to talk in the street, to debate, to discuss and question the president's decisions.
Now and adult, and a journalist, this has a double a impact.
Reading this brought back gruesome memories and made me appreciate with more fervor the country we live in.

From Yahoo News:
What Internet? China region cut off 6 months now

By CARA ANNA, Associated Press Writer Cara Anna, Associated Press Writer – Wed Jan 20, 2:23 am ET
LIUYUAN, China – They arrive at this gritty desert crossroads weary from a 13-hour train ride but determined. The promised land lies just across the railway station plaza: a large, white sign that says "Easy Connection Internet Cafe."
The visitors are Internet refugees from China's western Xinjiang region, whose 20 million people have been without links to the outside world since the government blocked virtually all online access, text messages and international phone calls after ethnic riots in July. It's the largest and longest such blackout in the world, observers say.
Every weekend, dozens of people pile off the train in Liuyuan, a sandswept town on the ancient Silk Road that's the first train stop outside Xinjiang, 400 miles (650 kilometers) east of Urumqi, the regional capital.
"We must get online! We must!" said Zhao Yan, a petite, ponytailed businesswoman from Xinjiang's capital, Urumqi. She has rented the same private booth in the Internet cafe every weekend since August in an uphill battle to keep her small trading business going.
"If this goes on another couple of months, I'll have to give up," Zhao said. "I can't keep up with the outside world, and I'm losing money."
Xinjiang residents are without Internet links unless they flee to farflung places like Liuyuan. One customer had traveled 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) just to get online.
Authorities unplugged Xinjiang, a sprawling area three times the size of Texas, in an attempt to prevent a repeat of the ethnic rioting between the Han Chinese majority and the mainly Muslim Uighur minority that the government says left almost 200 dead. China's government blamed overseas activists for the riots, saying they stirred up resentment in the Uighur community through Web sites and e-mails.
For many, it feels like being thrown back in time 30 years.
Xinjiang now has no e-mail. No blogs. No instant messaging. The government this month promised Internet access would resume "gradually," but it also said the same thing in July and not much has changed. So far, only four restricted Web sites, half of them state-run media, have returned.
No country has shut down an information infrastructure so widely for so long, said the Open Net Initiative, a Harvard-linked partnership that monitors Internet restrictions around the world. Some former Soviet Union countries have done it during sensitive elections, but "the blackout only lasted for hours or days at most," said Rafal Rohozinski, the group's principal investigator.
The normal Internet in China is already among the world's most restricted.
"The fact that the Chinese authorities had to resort to shutting down and cutting off the entire infrastructure ... is indicative of the difficulty they are having in controlling cyberspace," Rohozinski said.
"You can look at news or movies. That's it. It's all one-way," said a 23-year-old from Urumqi, who sat a few screens away from Zhao and was clicking between an e-mail account and a Russian-language Web site. He'd been online for 11 hours. He didn't give his name because he's half Uighur and was worried about retribution from authorities.
Liuyuan has little more to offer the Xinjiang refugees besides its Internet connection and its steady supply of cross-country trains. "You don't want to stay here," said the desk clerk at the Liutie Hotel, the only guesthouse in town. Most people who get off the train are headed for the famous oasis of Dunhuang, two hours to the south.
On Sunday, most of the Xinjiang customers bolted back home after hearing word that mobile phone text-messaging services had finally resumed. The region's mobile phone users sent 42.84 million text messages the first day of service alone, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported.
Users are still limited to no more than 20 texts per day, with no international service. International calls from Xinjiang were blocked, but the official Xinhua News Service reported that they were now allowed, starting Wednesday.
One Xinjiang woman who wanted to chat with her American husband finally took an overnight bus to neighboring Kazakhstan to get online.
"It's like a social experiment — what would happen if we take away the Internet?" said the husband, Kevin Komoroski, who lives in Missouri. He said their work on her U.S. visa application has slowed to a crawl and now relies on air mail. "No one at any sort of level knows when it will end."
An international scientific conference was relocated outside the region. A board member of an international academic association travels regularly to Beijing, 1,800 miles from Urumqi, to check her e-mail. The Federal Express office in Urumqi tells customers to check orders by phone instead.
The Xinjiang government has said foreign investment and tourism were "seriously" affected last year, though it points to the July violence alone. Import-export business fell 38.8 percent in the first nine months of last year, dropping almost 18 percentage points more than the rest of China, it said in a report this month.
"We're like deaf people now," said Wei Chengzhi, who works in the online service office of Xinjiang Wind Energy Co. Ltd. "We're working on a joint project with a partner company in Shanghai. We can't communicate with them. Nor can we do any online research."
Xinjiang's commerce department says it now offers Internet access to companies that can get approval from the local foreign trade or foreign investment office, but only on weekdays.
One business owner couldn't wait. Just after the riots, Ma Hui and her husband took off on a three-day road trip east to Beijing to keep their dried fruit company going. Since then, her husband has lived in the capital to deal with online orders, while Ma lives in Urumqi and handles the product.
"We've been married three years and we've never lived apart before," she said. "We don't know when to expect the Internet to come back to normal."
One person who doesn't mind the blackout is the owner of Liuyuan's Easy Connection Internet Cafe, who wouldn't give his name but said he was quite happy with the increased business.
As night fell in Liuyuan, Zhao sighed and returned to her work online. She had three more hours before taking the overnight train home to Urumqi, but she expected to be back and online Saturday morning.
It's easy to recognize her fellow refugees by their computer bags, Zhao said.
"You should go to Jiuquan," the next major stop east along the railway, she said. "It's a bigger city, and even more people go there. They check into the hotels and use the broadband."
A faster connection — another 200 miles (320 kilometers) away.