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A new study by Anderson Analytics looks into the demographics and psychographics of social networking users on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and LinkedIn with a goal of providing marketers with information about users' interests and buying habits as related to their network of choice. The end result is a detailed look at the profiles and habits of social networking users on the web today.

Some of the study's findings echo things we've already heard. For example, Facebook users tend to be old, white, and rich. MySpace users are young...and fleeing. Other info is new: Twitterers are more likely to have a part-time job, LinkedIn users like to exercise and own more gadgets.

In part 2 of my one-on-one interview with Tim Berners-Lee, we explore a variety of topics relating to Linked Data and the Semantic Web. If you missed it, in Part 1 of the interview we covered the emergence of Linked Data and how it is being used now even by governments.

In Part 2 we discuss: how previously reticent search engines like Google and Yahoo have begun to participate in the Semantic Web in 2009, user interfaces for browsing and using data, what Tim Berners-Lee thinks of new computational engine Wolfram Alpha, how e-commerce vendors are moving into the Linked Data world, and finally how the Internet of Things intersects with the Semantic Web.

A few days ago, we got a chance to talk about the state of blogging and social media in Germany with Marcel Weiß, the editor of Netzwertig.com - one of Germany's most popular blogs. In the interview, Weiß told us that Germany is at least five years behind the U.S. when it comes to social media and its adoption by a larger part of society. Blogs are still considered to be suspect by a large part of the German public and have very little influence, and social news sites and aggregators attract very little attention. With regards to Germany's Internet startup scene, Weiß argues that, with very few exceptions, most companies are also years behind the U.S. and just aren't innovative enough to compete.

Google plans to announce in coming weeks that it is turning each of the one million plus Google Apps customer domains into an OpenID provider, enabling millions of people to log in to OpenID-supporting websites with their work, school or organization ID.

"For these organizations," Google Security Product Manager, Eric Sachs, wrote on the public OpenID Board mailing list this morning, "Google Apps can now become an identity and data hub for multiple SaaS providers." Sachs appeared to believe his email was not being posted to a public board; he asked that it not be circulated so that some unusual technical work could be completed and political support shored up in the face of likely community and press cynicism. There's good reason for that - it may not be the good news it seems to be.

Tim Ferriss believes you can learn (but not master) a language in 2-12 months. But what if you don't have that much time? Whether you've managed to find a last minute travel deal or you just want to welcome your new neighbors down the hall, below are a few translation tools to aid you in your quest to communicate.

1. Forvo: Forvo is a fantastic crowdsourced language site where users submit, rate and share audio clips in order to practice proper language pronunciation. One great feature is that audio files are mapped according to the speaker's region. This means you won't make the mistake of speaking le français du Québec to Parisians.

"Dear Grandma, would you like to come out to the bar with my friends and I for a drink tonight?"

Your grandmother is on Facebook now and Facebook introduced today a new way to invite all your "friends" on the site to an event. The way the tool works is the best example yet of how Facebook is moving in exactly the wrong direction with its new privacy settings. Facebook continues to implement features in a way that presumes all our contacts are in one big bucket, instead of recognizing that we want to communicate different things to different groups of people.

Last October, Yahoo announced the Yahoo Query Language, a language similar to the popular database language SQL. Then, this February, Yahoo also announced its first major product that made use of YQL, the Open Data Tables, which allowed developers to create their own table definitions besides the ones already provided by Yahoo. As we reported in March, Yahoo then went ahead and extended YQL with YQL Execute, which gives developers even more flexibility and basically turns the web into a giant database that can be processed and mashed up with YQL. Today, Yahoo announced that it has completed its set of YQL verbs with three more functions (INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE) that now also allow developers to not just read and manipulate data, but also write data back to other services.

There's a fascinating new Twitter app in development called TwittARound, an augmented reality Twitter viewer for the iPhone 3GS. With the app, you can see live tweets around your location and you can even see how far away they are. To accomplish this, TwittARound uses a combination of the iPhone's compass and its accelerator-enabled GPS to determine the location of tweets and then layers those on top of a live video feed. The end result is a Twitter AU experience that looks incredible...at least in the YouTube video. Unfortunately, there's a big problem with this amazing new creation: Apple won't allow it in the App Store.

Nick Givotovsky, a Connecticut based internet consultant and long time contributor to the digital identity community, died in an accident at his home on Friday at the age of 44. Givotovsky was an active member of the Data Portability Working Group, was a regular attendee of the Internet Identity Workshops and was Steward for the Identity Futures group in Identity Commons. He is recognized by both communities as a valued, respected and well liked contributor to many important efforts.

Author and consultant Doc Searls writes in a post memorializing Givotovsky that "Every encounter with Nick was engaging and mind-sharpening." London entrepreneur, Ian Henderson, offers the following quote from Givotovsky, exemplifying his contribution to the digital rights conversation.

This morning the blogosphere is abuzz with the late-breaking news about Google's new Chrome OS, a combination of the Chrome browser and windowing system running on top of a Linux kernel. But more important than what's being announced is what hasn't been said. People already have a lot of questions about the Chrome OS and the answers may ultimately determine how well it succeeds as a true competitor to both Microsoft and Apple, as is being widely speculated. We'll explore some of those questions in this post.