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Previous research from the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project has found that a fifth of US adults have made a charitable contribution online, and that 9% have done so using texting. But a new survey of 863 individuals who contributed money to the Haiti earthquake efforts using texting donations shows that this behaviour can be replicated, but only in other high-profile disasters such as the BP Gulf oil spill or the Japanese tsumani. Think of this as impuse charity, very much in the moment.

In a new study released today, Pew Internet Research found that 66 percent of American adults online use Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn. They cite staying in touch with family and friends as one of the major reasons for using these sites. Seventy-one percent of the younger demographic, ages 18-29, cites staying in touch with current friends as a major reason for using social networks. Fifty-five percent of users ages 30-49 are on social networking sites to connect with old friends they'd lost touch with.

Maybe Microsoft's multi-billion dollar deal for Skype wasn't such an outlandish deal after all. Because according to a recent poll conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, the popularity of Internet phone calls has jumped dramatically, with 5% of Internet users placing a VOIP phone call on any given day.

The survey found that almost a quarter of American adult Internet users (24%) have placed a phone call online. That's 19% of all American adults.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has released a new study, "Politics goes mobile."

Among other findings, mobile phone users voted more often than others, those votes were equally balanced between Republican and Democrat and young users were more often to use their mobile phones for political goals than others. Overall, 82% of American adults own a mobile and a quarter use them to connect politically, according to Pew.

See below for response from Tom Rosenstiel, Director of the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism

"More than 99% of the stories linked to in blogs came from legacy outlets such as newspapers and broadcast networks. And just four - the BBC, CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post accounted for fully 80% of all links."

This is one of the assertions in the latest report from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, "New Media, Old Media."

This month, the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project released a study on the semantic Web. The Web will get smarter. It will become more useful. But will the "semantic Web" become the reality that many envision?

Lee Rainie of Pew and Janna Quitney Anderson of Elon University's Imagining the Internet project asked 895 experts to "predict the likely progress toward achieving the goals of the semantic web by the year 2020."

According to a new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 61% of Americans now get some of their news online, though local TV stations are still the most popular means of finding out about the news. Local print newspapers still reach 50% of Americans and 17% read the print versions of national papers like the New York Times or USA Today.

While 38% of Americans still rely solely on offline sources for their daily news, only 2% of adults in the U.S. get their news exclusively from online sources.

Most experts agree that Google won't make us stupid. Indeed, 76% of technology stakeholders and critics interviewed by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project and the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University believe that the Internet and search engines will enhance human intelligence by 2020.

According to recently released research from the Pew Center, we're just as optimistic about the web as we were ten years ago during the Internet's first boom cycle.

At the end of 2009, most Americans in this Pew survey have a dismal view of the 2000s. Between the Iraq war, the 9/11 attacks, economic and political distress and the curse of reality television, the decade has been voted the worst in our collective memory. But one of few bright spots in a tense ten-year period was and remains technological innovation, including the Internet, cell phones and email. Social sites, however, still have a way to go in the public eye.

Back in the day, it was assumed that heavy Internet geeks were a bunch of basement-dwelling, trenchcoat-wearing, socially maladjusted introverts.

However, a new study from the Pew Internet Project shows that geeks, including IM users and bloggers, are more likely to help neighbors, get out of the house, volunteer, and behave as upstanding members of their IRL communities.