From the Article:

LinkedIn Corp. and Twitter Inc. have announced a partnership that lets users instantly post status updates on both of the social networks.

The two Bay Area companies announced the deal late Monday, but the details of the formal agreement are confidential, said Krista Canfield, LinkedIn’s senior public relations manager.

LinkedIn and Twitter said they would roll out the new services “gradually over the next couple of days.”

[Snip]

LinkedIn now offers its own status updates. But as LinkedIn co-founder Allen Blue explained, “The idea is simple: When you set your status on LinkedIn, you can now tweet it as well, amplifying it to your followers and real-time search services like Twitter Search and Bing. And when you tweet, you can send that message to your LinkedIn connections as well, from any Twitter service or tool.”

Source: Seattle P-I

See Also: You can learn more and view the video mentioned in the article here (via LinkedIn Blog)

From the Article:

The use of social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook to promote businesses has exploded over the past six months, according to the results of a study that were released today.

People using Twitter to get the word out about their company, sales and promotions jumped more than 250% from this past spring, according to a study done by Palo Alto Networks, a maker of firewall technology. The number of companies using facebook for such tasks grew by 192%, the sudy found. The report said that workers are using social networks as promotional vehicles both with and without management knowledge.

[Snip]

Use of Twitter and Facebook both for business and personal use has definitely have been on a significant upswing over the past year-plus.

Just last month, Experian Hitwise, an Internet monitoring firm, reported that visits to Twitter, the fourth most popular social networking site, increased by 1,170% in September compared to the year-earlier period.

In the same time frame, market leader Facebook saw its already impressive market share increase by 194%, letting it easily maintain its recently attained place atop the U.S. social networking market. Facebook, which grabbed its 300 millionth user in September, captured 58.59% of all U.S. social network visits last month, compared to 19.94% the year before.

See Also: Access the Official News Release and Find a Link to the Complete Report (via Palo Alto Networks)

Source: Computerworld

Many libraries have built or are planning to build wiki’s for the communities they serve. OF course, building a wiki is it is one issue but getting the community involved in adding new data, editing older date, etc. is a completely different issue. Like we have said many times on ResourceShelf, creating and and/or buying content (book, DVD, online database, etc) does not guarantee that the community will use it.

On the Nieman Journalism Lab blog, you;ll find a post titled, “Welcome to Davis, Calif.: Six lessons from the world’s best local wiki.” It offers several suggestions about how to make your community wiki a dynamic and robust resource used used by the entire community.

Sections of the article include:

+ “Wikis need content to breed content.”

+ “Business information is the holy grail.”

+ “A wiki’s strengths kick in after one year.”

+ “Start with a subculture, then build out to a general audience.”

+ “Keep your content open source, no matter what.”

Access the Complete Nieman Center Blog Post

Source: Nieman Journalism Lab Blog

From the Wikimedia Blog Post:

Maybe you’ve been editing Wikipedia for years. Or maybe you made your first edit a few days ago. Whatever your experience, you likely know at least one central fact about editing – that it can be difficult for newcomers to master the skills necessary for contributing to Wikipedia.

We want to change that, and we need your help. That’s why Wikimedia is kicking off a new project, the Bookshelf Project, developed to extend the reach and improve the quality of Wikipedia articles by increasing participation. We’re designing the Bookshelf Project to create a core set of public outreach materials designed to recruit new, high-value Wikipedia contributors. The idea is that by increasing potential contributor awareness, fostering excitement, and providing the training tools new editors need to get started, we’ll draw many more new editors than we do today. And we believe recruiting new high-value contributors to Wikipedia will necessarily increase the usefulness and quality of our encyclopedia.

[Snip]

Now we already know that many Wikipedia readers have never thought about editing the encyclopedia – even though there’s lots of information available about how to do so. Our goal is to reach out to those editors more actively – both to make them feel welcome and give them a great set of starting tools. We hope to seed the knowledge and enthusiasm about contributing to Wikipedia in such a way that it propagates itself.

[Snip]

The Bookshelf Project will include materials to help journalists and other communications professionals do their jobs more easily, including techniques and information to help them be sure the information they use and the copy they write is accurate and up to date.

Much More in the Complete Post

See Also: Silicon.com Interviews Jimmy Wales

In the interview Wales talks about Wikipedia editors and his desire to have a wide variety of people add and edit type the encyclopedia.

From the Interview

This small group mentality can be a blessing when editing articles but it is also one of the site’s biggest weaknesses: Wikipedia’s pool of contributors can tend towards the homogenous – or “a certain type of person”, in Wales’ words.

“Right now a lot of the Wikipedia editing is done by people who are very technologically savvy,” he says. “What we see is 20s and 30s computer geeks, mostly male – tragically 85 per cent male.”–Jimmy Wales

New Stats from Rapleaf

In our last post, [An In-Depth Look at AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Email Users – Part 1: Age and Gender] we analyzed age and gender of AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo users. For this post, we sampled the same 120,000 users and studied their online social media profile counts and friend counts across 25 social media sites in order to gauge how active these email users are on the social web.

Unlike age and gender data, online activity and friend counts do not have clear trends across email service providers. What the data seems to suggest is that Hotmail users tend to have slightly more social media profiles, and Gmail users tend to be slightly better connected overall.

[Snip]

The vast majority of email users have two or fewer social media memberships and less than 50 friends online. Gmail users tend to be slightly better connected while Hotmail users generally have more social media memberships. Marketers interested in word-of-mouth advertising on social media should focus their efforts on the 7% of users with more than 150 friends to engage influencers.

The complete results contain numerous charts and graphs.

Source: Rapleaf