The amount of U.S. cellphone users that have apps on their devices rose from 43% in May 2010. Pew points out that the demographic has not really changed, there are just more people from those demographics downloading apps. For smartphones, they tend to be young, have higher incomes and college degrees and live in urban and suburban areas. How do you fit in these demographics?

In terms of paid apps, games are the leader. That comes as no surprise as game developers are the ones that are pushing the bounds of what these devices can do. People will pay for a good game. Weather, social networking, maps/search, music and news were the next highest on the list of apps usage. Of app users, 46% have paid for an app at some point, which is no different from the 47% that said the same thing in May 2010. About 52% said they paid $5 or less for apps with 17% have paid more than $20 for an app. Those that pay for apps tend to be aged 30 or above with college degrees in urban areas.

Let us know in the comments how much you are willing to pay for an app.

Check out the chart below breaking down what apps that users are downloading by age demographic. The results are pretty interesting. African-Americans are more likely to download apps that help them communicate with family and friends. About 46% of people use mobile apps to help them make decisions about purchases and 48% of users use apps to help them with work-related tasks.

Check out the full report here.

A note from Pew on the survey results:

The Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project has begun to explore the contours of this relatively new digital phenomenon. In August of 2011, the Project conducted its most recent national survey of the state of apps culture. The survey was conducted from July 25-August 26 among 2,260 adults ages 18 and older in both English and Spanish, 916 of whom were interviewed on their cell phones.

That is right, IDC is making a bet on Redmond over Cupertino in the worldwide smartphone wars. Again. The rationale is Nokia and its penetration into emerging markets. Does this make sense though? Nokia is in turmoil, partly because of its partnership with Microsoft. Symbian was the back that Nokia rode to its former place as the top mobile vendor. Its market share is eroding and Nokia will stop development of the platform within the next few years. Can it really be that simple for Microsoft to unseat the iPhone?

How IDC Could Be Full Of It

For starters, Android as it is now known might not exist in 2015. Oracle wants a big bite out of Android ad revenues in its Java-related patent suit against Google that stems from its purchase of Sun Microsystems in January. Microsoft also has a robust legal arm going after Android original equipment manufacturers and takes a slice from every HTC Android device sold. So, Google is getting squeezed on Android from two sides on Android. Could the cost of defending the platform become more burdensome than continuing to develop it?

As for Nokia and Microsoft. At this juncture, the market shows no signs whatsoever of a bump for either company. What makes the iPhone and Android so successful right now in market share is that they are the leaders in "mind share." See PCMag on what carrier vendors think of Windows Phone 7 to get an idea of the platforms current mindshare. Apple creates its "magical" buzz and consumers fawn over it. Android has been pushed into popular culture because very large companies have a significant stake in it doing well (Verizon foremost, but also Sprint, T-Mobile HTC, Motorola and Samsung as the primary Android pushers). Nokia has manufacturing might and reach, but is losing brand power by the day and there is no guarantee (or market signals) that Windows Phone can change that.

IDC is in a tough spot if it wants to keep making predictions. The smartphone market moves so fast that it is hard to keep make one prediction at the beginning of the year and stand by it. Yet, quarterly forecasts lose their meaning because it becomes an empty exercise in market trends. We will see in time how the smartphone market plays out. Who knows, perhaps there will be some unforeseen player like MeeGo or webOS (both listed in the "other" category by IDC) that comes in grows like crazy, pushing the existing actors to the side of the stage.

The study aimed to uncover how the world's online behavior may be shifting, in terms of both consumption and communication. And among the findings were that online consumers in emerging, rapid growth markets are more engaged than those in mature markets, with Egypt and China, for example, having much higher levels of digital engagement than Japan, Denmark or Finland.

In these rapid growth markets, blogging and social networking are becoming increasingly popular: 88% of online users in China and 51% of those in Brazil have their own blog, as compared to only 32% in the U.S. And 92% of those in Thailand, 88% of those in Malaysia and 87% of those online users in Vietnam have uploaded photos to social networks, as compared to only 28% of those in Japan.

The report points to the adoption of mobile technologies as fueling these trends. Mobile users spend more time on social networks, and respondents indicated that they anticipate spending even more time on them in the future.

And on average, across the globe, we are spending more time on social networking sites. The heaviest users of social networking are in Malaysia where people spend nine hours per week. In Russia, online users spend 8.1 per week on social networking sites, and in Turkey, they spend 7.7 hours a week.

Malaysians Spend the Most Time, Have the Most Friends on Social Networks

Malaysians also have the highest number of friends on these sites - an average of 233. In Brazil, the average is 231. This is compared to countries like Japan, where the average is 29, and South Korea, where the average is 50.

According to TNS Chief Development Officer Matthew Froggatt, "We've seen that in mature markets where people have been online for years and where access is ubiquitous, the Internet has already become a commoditised item that consumers take for granted. However, in rapid growth markets that have seen recent, sustained investment in infrastructure, users are embracing these new channels in much more active ways."

For the complete results, including some very nice infographics, visit the TNS Digital Life site.

If you're wondering how the engineers are claiming "first" when video conferencing solutions, most notably Apple's FaceTime and mobile video applications like Fring, already provide face-to-face communications ideal for signing, the difference is in the technology behind mobileASL itself.

The UW team, led by Eve Riskin, a professor of electrical engineering, claim that Apple's FaceTime uses 10 times the bandwidth of MobileASL. FaceTime is also currently limited to Wi-Fi, although Apple may eventually open it up to run over 3G, assuming network operators could manage the overhead. Fring works over both Wi-Fi and 3G, but is limited to various smartphones like the iPhone, phones built with Google's Android mobile OS and certain Nokia devices.

MobileASL, on the other hand, could be integrated into any device that has a video camera on the same side of the phone as the screen.

It also increases the video quality around the face and hands while optimizing the compressed video signals specifically for sign language. The software even detects whether a person is signing or not in order to extend the phone's battery life during use.

Jessica Tran, a doctoral student in electrical engineering who is running the field study, is experimenting with different compression systems to further extend the battery life of phones under heavy video use. Another researcher, engineering doctoral student Jaehong Chon, made MobileASL compatible with H.264, an industry standard for video compression.

The field test underway now, with students in the UW Summer Academy for Advancing Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Computing, is the first of its kind. "This is the first study of how deaf people in the United States use mobile video phones," Riskin said.

Most of the study participants say that email or texting are currently their preferred methods of communication. This MobileASL technology may eventually change that.

FaceTime Still a Good Alternative for Now

However, it's not alone in its goal of making smartphones more useful to people with disabilities. Video Relay Services company ZVRS recently announced its launch of a mobile video relay service that works with Apple's FaceTime to enable single-tap, face-to-face video interpreting. The service was released to the public on July 26, the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The iPhone-only FaceTime-enabled service works by connecting those in need to a video interpreter by way of a special phone number.

But while ZVRS's service only works on the iPhone 4, mobileASL technology could potentially work on any phone. And that, in many ways, makes it a first.

That may not be true, as it turns out. A new study coming out of Northwestern University, discovered that college students have a decided lack of Web savvy, especially when it comes to search engines and the ability to determine the credibility of search results. Apparently, the students favor search engine rankings above all other factors. The only thing that matters is that something is the top search result, not that it's legit.

During the study, one of the researchers asked a study participant, "What is this website?" The student answered, "Oh, I don't know. The first thing that came up."

That exchange sums up the overall results from this study: many students trusted in rankings above all else. In fact, a quarter of the students, when assigned information-seeking tasks, said they chose a website because - and only because - it was the first search result.

Only 10% of the students made mention of the site's author or that author's credentials while completing tasks. However, in reviewing the screen-capture footage of those respondents, the researchers found that even in this supposedly savvy minority, none actually followed through to verify the identification or qualifications of the site's authors.

Google was not the only search engine used in the study, but it was one in which the students put a lot of trust. The students felt emotionally tied to the service in some cases, noting how much they loved it and depended on it. (Those who used Yahoo! said they merely "liked" it.)

Regardless the choice of search engine, though, the first step in information-seeking was always the use of such a service, which was typically referred to as a verb. And yes, in addition to "google it," some even said they would "yahoo it."

Wikipedia Not Trusted as Much

Another interesting finding from the study involved the use of Wikipedia. Perhaps because of teachers' insistence over the years that the user-generated encyclopedia is not a credible source of information, only a third of the students used Wikipedia to search for answers when given particular tasks. This is a drop from earlier studies (like Raine & Tancer, 2007) which showed Wikipedia use at 46% among students.

Other popular trusted sources included SparkNotes (a study guide site), WedMD, Planned Parenthood, CNN, BBC, Microsoft (specifically Encarta and Office-related resources) and those sites with a .gov or .edu extension. Some students even thought that .org domain name meant a site was inherently trustworthy - they weren't aware that the .org extension can be freely registered just like .com and is not for nonprofit use only, as may have originally been intended.

Students Need Media Literacy Education

Over 1,000 students were surveyed and then the researchers randomly sampled 102 students from 1,060 students who had participated in the survey. The demographics of the group were both ethnically and racially diverse, reaching a representative sample of first-year college students at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

In summary, the findings showed that students are not always turning to the most relevant clues to determine the credibility of online content, said the researchers Eszter Hargittai, Lindsay Fullerton, Ericka Menchen-Trevino and Kristen Yates Thomas. Further initiatives that help educate people in this domain are needed, they claim.

Image credit in original article: flickr user Paulo Fehlauer

The U.S. House of Representatives has announced a public hearing to explore making publicly-funded research open to the public. Legislators in both the House and the Senate have already introduced bills calling for this. If they pass, the implications could be significant and might result in an economic jump.

Rep. Mike Doyle (R-PA) introduced the Federal Research Public Access Act into the House on April 15. An identical Senate version of the bill was introduced by Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Senator John Cornyn (R-TX). Bi-partisan support for public access to federal research has been growing.

The bills propose specifically that the 11 federal agencies with research budgets of $100 million or greater make the published results of their research free to the public.

Knowledge is (Economic) Power

If these 11 massive agencies suddenly were required to make their research public (with a governmental value of suddenly), it could possibly act as a shot of adrenaline to the private sector. Who knows what products and services might be launched, or improved, on the back of this research? It could result in a significant leap forward for an economy that seems at times terminally stalled.

Presumably, the government already has the research that they've paid for. (Presumably.) But a public in possession of that information might make for a much less patient public. If a government agency, for instance, knows something that could improve its services, but allows bureaucratic foot-dragging or inter-agency squabbling to slow its implementation, that agency would find itself in, let's say, a compromised position politically when an informed public realized what it was doing.

Having been in a position to listen and talk to career bureaucrats facing change, we are not as sanguine as we could be at the news. It would be surprising indeed if half the people responsible for sharing this information with the pubic didn't go limp at the first approach of torch-wielding villagers at their castle door. To work, this bill will require that the chief executive make it known in no uncertain terms that any agency head with a hitch in his gitalong will shortly thereafter find himself on the street in the company of all his closest advisors.

In light of the recent discussions surrounding Facebook and privacy issues, it's important to note that Facebook's new push towards becoming a more open, public network won't just have an effect on an adult population concerned with worries of "friending" bosses and colleagues or adjusting the privacy settings on their children's photos - it will affect the children themselves, as well as teens and young adults, all of which combined make up over a quarter of the social network's user base.

Cyberbullying Stats: Social Networks are Hot Spots

Recent research on the topic of cyberbullying pulls together data from Amanda Lenhart from the Pew Internet Project, UNH's Crimes Against Children Research Center, the work of Internet Solutions for Kids as well as research by professors Sameer Hinduja and Justin Patchin and is summed up in a slideshow presentation available here on SlideShare.

It contains some unsettling facts:

• Girls are harassed more often: 38% reported some form of online harassment.
• Social network users are more likely to report online harassment: 39% experience it
• The majority (59%) of harassment comes from other minors.

While some may argue that dealing with bullies is just part of growing up, there are reasons to worry. Bullying is often associated with school violence, delinquency and even suicide. Bullied teens and sometimes even the bullies themselves have higher levels of depression and other psychological problems, substance abuse, delinquency, weapon-carrying, poor parent/caregiver relationships and offline victimization and abuse.

So What Does This Have to do with Facebook?

In December, Facebook began a major push to open up people's profiles and make the network more public. Although originally pitched to college teens and later to high school students as a private way to connect with friends where mom, dad, teachers and bosses couldn't find you, the social network grew over the years to not only allow those adults in, but it has created a culture where it's now appropriate to friend the boss and the parents, too.

Earlier this year, Facebook's push for openness went even further, allowing for revamped profiles where all your interests are public, everything you "like" is public and certain websites are allowed to immediately tap into your data for "instant personalization."

The problem with all these changes is not only that they've come so quickly people are unable to keep up, but also the way they've been introduced to users. Facebook prompts you to accept a change, a recommendation of new privacy settings for example, and you do so - usually without reading the fine print.

And the fine print reads - to paraphrase - everything you do is now public!

For teens and tweens who clicked through on the network's "recommendations" without understanding what they meant, the impact to their online social lives will be broad. All of a sudden, they can read others' Facebook Wall posts and browse through their photos; they can see who friended who and who said what. They've essentially been given an all-access pass to the fodder needed for rumor-mongering, gossip and slam-book-style attacks re-imagined for an Internet age.

But Teens are More Tech Savvy, Right?

The New York Times claims that today's young generation is becoming more Net-savvy, and is learning how to protect themselves online. Cited in the article was another Pew study that notes that people ages 18-29 are more apt to monitor their online privacy settings, like those on Facebook, than older adults. But measuring a propensity to monitor settings isn't the same as measuring those that actually do.

The figures that may paint a more accurate picture of how teens and young adults behave online come from a different study. Eszter Hargittai, a researcher at Northwestern University, found that the generation we've happily dubbed the "digital natives" isn't necessarily all that digitally savvy. In other words, just because teens are more adapt at using the Web and Facebook, etc., that doesn't make them better at it than the rest of the online population.

This finding was also backed up by a recent article in The Economist, which quotes Sue Bennett of the University of Wollongong, who had set out to debunk the whole idea of the so-called "digital natives." There may be "as much variation within the digital native generation as between the generations," she says, referring to the group's overall digital savvy.

The take-home advice here? When Facebook makes a radical change to online privacy, the youngest users of the network - the ones who haven't even fully developed coping mechanisms for dealing with life's obstacles - are going to be heavily affected. They may, in fact, be even more affected than an adult who can grasp how to deal with the fallout of a privacy breach or embarrassment. Instead of opting for retaliation, delving into depression, turning to drugs, or, in the worst case scenario, choosing suicide, a bullied, harassed or embarrassed adult, will likely find other ways to cope. (Close their account, apologize, set a meeting with the boss to explain, etc.). Teens, tweens and other young adults may not have the wherewithal to make these sort of choices. And Facebook, the network that was once their champion, now seemingly doesn't appear to care.

Ed Chi, area manager and principal scientist for the Augmented Social Cognition Research Group at PARC, told MIT's Technology Review that the way people use Twitter is that they "dip in" to the Twitter stream from time to time, but don't want to consume it all at once. The Eddi Project was created so that those brief dips into Twitter are more valuable to the end users.

The tool, Eddi, a Twitter client application named after the idea of eddies in a stream, has the barebones look of something built by data researchers as opposed to web designers. But its user interface isn't the most important aspect - it's the algorithms behind the facade that are its standout feature.

In order to filter Twitter's content, Eddi provides two tools: a topic browser that shows tweets broken down into categories and a recommendation engine.

Twitter Topics - And Not Just the Popular Ones

The idea of browsing Twitter by topic is not unique - plenty of Twitter apps do the same, as does Twitter's own search interface at search.twitter.com. But the problem with most of these systems is that they rely on keywords or hashtags - the latter being the annotations preceded by the pound sign (#) which users add to their tweets to make them searchable.

When there is a major event, such as the Icelandic volcano eruption, Michael Bernstein, a researcher at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT who is involved with the project, explained, the sheer volume of tweets provides a lot of information for an algorithm to use. What's harder is to figure out are the topics attached to tweets that are more unique.

"The essence of the approach is to coerce a tweet to look more like a search query and then get a search engine to tell us more," says Bernstein. After cleaning up the tweet, the tool feeds them into Yahoo's Build your Own Search Service interface in an effort to surface web pages related to the tweet in question. This helps the system to appropriately categorize the tweets into topics.

Recommendation Engine

The second aspect to the system is a recommendation engine that ranks tweets by how interesting they are to you. To determine this, Eddi's algorithms look at your own tweets and interactions with other Twitter users.

The new system will go live on the web for public testing sometime this summer. In the meantime, you can sign up for another of PARC's experimental Twitter recommendation engines, this one called ZeroZero88. Information on sign up is here.

According to the latest study, this one from BlogHer and iVillage (red flag?) and co-sponsored by Ketchum and The Nielsen Company, young adults known as "Millenials" are the top demographic group in both reading and writing blogs, with nearly one third reporting they read blogs and just over 40% saying they blog themselves.

So was the earlier study - the one claiming "kids don't blog" anymore - wrong?

In the new study, the focus was on four age groups: Millenials (ages 18-25), Gen X/Y (26-42), Boomers (43-61) and Seniors (62-76).

This is a confusing segmentation of demographic groups because they've lumped in some of the millenials with the "Gen X" group to create a hybrid group called "Gen X/Y." The term Millenials, however, is often used interchangeably with Gen Y, so it's unclear why they've decided to break up that demographic group in this way. To boost Gen X's numbers, perhaps? We can't be sure.

Ignoring Those Under 18

More importantly, the study simply ignores the youngest generation, the one we like to call "Generation I" or the "iGeneration" (you can guess why), which was a major focus of Pew's study. In fact, Pew's study showed that only 14% of tweens and teens ages 12 to 17 report that they blog, down from 25% only four years ago. And only 52% report reading and commenting on their friends' blogs, down from over three-quarters back in 2006.

In other words, the Internet's newest users aren't blogging or all that interested in reading blogs. Instead, they prefer Facebook, said the study. It's their method of communication between friends and for getting the latest news.

Yes, sigh, Facebook is the new Internet. And the social network's latest moves will only further solidify that position with the launch of the universal like button for the entire Web, the "instant personalization" provided by websites like Pandora and Yelp (to start), the "sign in with Facebook" boxes that appear on seemingly every site now, and so on.

How this youngest online generation uses the Internet is an important trend to watch. Although their habits may change over time, it's worth considering that their general disinterest in sharing their thoughts, feelings, news and ideas via blogging is a trend that will continue as they age. After all, who needs to blog when you have Facebook?

BlogHer/iVillage's Findings

For what it's worth, the BlogHer/iVillage study found that those 18-25 were most likely to write or read blogs, with 40.4% reporting they write blogs and 30.3% reporting they read them. The mysterious Gen X/Y group was a close second, with 28.1% of the group saying they were blog authors and 29.3% saying they were blog readers.

Some of the other numbers are questionable, although we have no way of proving their legitimacy or lack thereof. But really: 12.8% of bloggers are seniors? This is perhaps the most shocking number of them all. Nothing against seniors, of course, but I live in a state filled with them, and I have yet to meet a single senior who even knows what a blog is, much less authors one.

At the end of the day, the study's numbers just feel a little too bullish on this whole blogging thing for my tastes. Plus, there's little info about the methodology included in the report [PDF] - and then there's the fact that BlogHer, a blogging community for women, is, in part, behind the research.

The truth of the matter is that neither this latest study nor Pew's research is likely painting an entirely accurate picture of the blogging landscape. We've questioned Pew's methodology many times in the past and we're skeptical of positive studies put out by those who would benefit from the news.

Our advice? Take both reports with a grain of salt.

Meeyoung Cha, Hamed Haddadi, Fabricio Benevenuto, Krishna P. Gummadi.

How the Data Was Analyzed

The data the researchers had access to is astounding: 54,981,152 user accounts, 1,963,263,821 social (follow) links and 1,755,925,520 tweets. In order to collect this massive store of data, the researchers contacted Twitter and asked permission to crawl Twitter's service. Twitter granted them access and white-listed the IP address range for the 58 servers that were used in the data collection. In total, the crawler was able to scan 80 million Twitter accounts during the month of August 2009. Only 54+ million of those accounts were actually in-use at the time, which, in and of itself, is an interesting finding about how many people create a Twitter account and then abandon it. Only 8% of the active accounts were set to private, so they were ignored during the data analysis. The researchers also used the Twitter API to gather additional information about a user's social links and tweets.

The study focused on the largest part of the Twitter network - the "single disproportionately large connected component," notes the paper, that contained 94.8% of users and 99% of all links and tweets. Within that large network of "in-use" accounts, the researchers further narrowed down the data to focus on the "active users." These users where those who had more than 10 tweets and had a valid screen name that could be retweeted by others. (Interesting - it's possible to have an account and not a screen name?) That left "only" 6,189,636 active users out of the initial 80 million to examine.

To measure the influence of these 6+ million users, the researchers looked at how the entire set of the 52 million users interacted with these active users.

The Three Measures of Influence

After examining the data, the researchers found that the most followed individuals spanned a wide variety of public figures and news sources and included accounts like CNN, New York Times, Barack Obama, Shaquille O'Neal, Ashton Kutcher, Britney Spears and others. However, the most retweeted users tended to be content aggregation services like TwitterTips, TweetMeme, and, interestingly enough, they counted the tech blog Mashable as an aggregation service, too. Other heavily retweeted users included Guy Kawasaki, the humor site The Onion and again, The New York Times. Meanwhile, those users with the most "mentions" - not a direct retweet including the original content of someone else's tweet, but just a casual mention of their name - were celebs.

These three measures of influence - followers, retweets and mentions - has surprisingly little overlap when looking at the top influentials. The top 20 lists from these three categories only had two users in common: Ashton Kutcher and Puff Daddy.

The researchers also examined the ability of Twitter users to influence others. They determined that the most influential users hold significant influence over a variety of topics, as opposed to being experts in just one area.

Examining the 233 "All-Time Influentials"

Out of the 6 million active Twitter users, the researchers picked the top 100 users in each of the three categories. Due to the overlap, there were only 233 distinct users on these lists. These were dubbed the "all-time influentials." Some of these accounts belonged to news organizations or celebs, but others were just regular users. Regarding that last group - it appears that those users who limit their tweets to a single topic are the most likely to increase their influence scores.

In the end, what the researchers found was that follower count alone is not necessarily a worthy measure of determining influence. Other factors come into play as well. Although some heavily-followed accounts are also mentioned and retweeted a lot, just looking at audience size doesn't reveal an account's ability to influence and impact the Twitter universe.

According to the project's homepage, the researchers are hoping to make the data they collected available to the community at large. Before doing so, they will discuss it with Twitter in order to determine that their data sharing plan agrees with the company's policy. They plan to have an update on this situation - possibly the data itself - by May 2010.

Although still a ways off from commercial viability (and availability), the lithium-sulfur batteries promise advances like 80% more capacity, 10 times the power density and, theoretically, the ability to last four times as long as modern batteries.

An Always-On Mobile Web

With these sorts of improvements, lithium-sulfur batteries could lead the way in the next phase of the mobile revolution. They could allow us to fully enjoy the web from anywhere in the world, without having to worry about dying batteries, access to power outlets or having to carry around battery replacements when planning long-lasting mobile computing sessions.

Far more than just a convenience, better battery technology would impact how our mobile devices are designed and how they behave. For example, Apple currently imposes numerous restrictions on members of their mobile device lineup for the sake of battery performance. On Apple iPhones, iPod Touches and the forthcoming iPad, applications aren't permitted to run in the background and Adobe Flash technology has been banned altogether, supposedly for its CPU usage which rapidly drains battery juice. Other mobile smartphone makers, while not necessarily as restrictive as Apple, still have to weigh the benefits of providing these same types of features with the performance hit their gadgets will take if they do so. And as anyone who regularly fires up their smartphone web browser knows, too much Internet surfing during the day means a phone that dies out before nightfall.

Another example of the technology's potential impact: e-Readers. Today, if you want to pack your Kindle or Nook device to take with you on vacation, you still have to go through the thought process: how long will I be gone? Will my battery last? Should I pack the cord? Now imagine that you could just throw your e-Reader into your bag without a second thought, just as if you were packing the paperback novel or newspaper these sorts of gadgets aim to replace. Would that encourage more people to make the switch from the analog formats to digital?

The Impacts of Better Batteries

What if, in the future, concerns like these were no longer a worry? What if phones, netbooks, e-Readers and other mobile devices could be used for days on end without the need for a charge? That would radically impact the way we think about and use our mobile devices.

There are a million other use cases that could benefit from this technology change, too, including sensor networks, computing from remote areas, faster news dissemination from areas impacted by disasters (either natural or man-made) where power outages have occurred, gadgets for hikers, campers and other explorers who spend weeks away from civilization and, therefore, away from electricity, mobile location-based services that run in the background on smartphones and other personal mobile gadgets and - OK, we'll admit it - the ability to Twitter all day long without a recharge.

For the nitty gritty technical details about this new battery technology, MIT's Technology Review explains everything from the cathodes to the conductivity as well as the challenges still ahead for this breakthrough technology. Most notably, the scientists still need to figure out how to maintain capacity. After five discharge/recharge cycles, the batteries lost one-third of their initial storage capacity and after 40 to 50 cycles, they ceased to function altogether. However, if the researchers can overcome that final hurdle and a few others, the new technology could one day become commercially viable. It's too soon to know if that will actually occur, but as gadget lovers ourselves, we're hopeful.

The company analyzed more than 19 million Twitter users and found that a surprisingly small number were actually brave enough to ask the girl to dance, so to say.

Out of the more than 19 million users analyzed, only 21 percent, or just under 4 million, are considered to be "True Twitter Users", a term applied using some extremely lenient criteria. To be considered a "True" Twitter user, a user needs to have 10 followers, follow 10 others and have tweeted 10 times.

For the most part, Twitter's explosive growth really seems to be a party that millions of people came, saw, and quickly decided to leave. But despite the sticker shock of these initial numbers, the report shows that those who decided to stay are becoming increasingly active. Last June, 30 percent of users had no followers, whereas only 17 percent are follower-less now. The same goes for people following other users - the number following zero, less than five and less than 10 have all decreased since last June.

So, maybe Twitter isn't quite exploding and it isn't quite stalling out. Instead, it's still indeed growing at a very regular, unimpressive rate and most people decide they don't want to use it after all. Quick, somebody do another study, before we think Twitter is just doing something average for too long.

Mobile cloud computing is a term that refers to an infrastructure where both the data storage and the data processing happen outside of the mobile device from which an application is launched. To the typical consumer, a cloud-based mobile application looks and feels just like any app purchased or downloaded from a mobile application store like iTunes. However, the app is driven from the "cloud," not from the handheld device itself. There are already a few well-known mobile cloud apps out there including Google's Gmail and Google Voice for iPhone. When launched via iPhone homescreen shortcuts, these apps perform just like any other app on the iPhone, but all of their processing power comes from the cloud.

In the future, there will be even more applications like these available, but they won't necessarily be mobilized web sites like those in Google's line-up. Cloud-based mobile apps are perfectly capable of being packaged in a way that allows them to be sold alongside traditional mobile apps in mobile application stores, with no one but the developers any wiser.

HTML5 Paves the Way for Mobile Web's Future

Earlier this year, ABI Research released a future-watching report called Mobile Cloud Computing which comes to many of the same conclusions as the new Juniper Research report. Where they both agree is on how HTML5 technology and the mobilized enterprise will help drive this trend forward. Specifically, HTML5, the proposed standard for the next version web markup language (the core language used to create the web), offers offline data caching. That means cloud-based mobile apps can behave just like their device-based cousins: when the Internet connection goes down, the app still works. In addition, HTML5-enabled apps resuming from cached mode only pull down the data from the server that changed during the time they were offline. That reduces server load which is a critical need in delivering mobile apps to developing nations and other regions where network coverage and connectivity is poor.

Enterprise Drives Mobile Growth

Like the earlier report from ABI, Juniper also sees the enterprise as a major force behind the move to the cloud. 75% of the mobile cloud-based application market is enterprise, notes the report. Mobile apps allow corporate users to access company data, share files, collaborate on projects and more via their smartphones. This business need will help fund the growth and development of the mobile cloud-based app market.

However, although enterprise will drive this growth, consumer-oriented apps will benefit, too. Over the next four years, these apps will comprise an increasing proportion of the total revenues with business plans that involve subscription-based content and mobile advertising.

The Power of the Cloud: Scale

Finally, the Juniper Report notes that the processing power of the cloud itself is also key to the future of mobile. Cloud-based mobile apps can scale far beyond the capabilities of any smartphone. Instead of being limited to the data storage and processing power contained in a mobile device, cloud apps have all the power of a server-based computing infrastructure accessible through an app's mobile interface. This not only allows owners of low-cost "feature phones" (non-smartphones) the ability to access the same mobile applications used on more advanced platforms, it also allows the apps themselves to become more powerful and capable of more.

Cloud Apps in Relation to the Mobile Marketplace

What's interesting about the dollar amount assigned to this trend - $9.5 billion by 2014 - is how that number compares to other analyst estimates for the mobile application store business as a whole. At the beginning of this year, Gartner researchers estimated that the app store businesses would generate nearly $7 billion this year and would reach $29.5 billion by 2013. Assumingly, it will grow even more by 2014 when the mobile cloud-based application market is expected to near $9.5 billion. In light of that comparison, the mobile cloud-based application trend seems impactful but perhaps less disruptive to the market as whole as is being purported. It appears there will still be plenty of room for both traditional, device-based apps and mobile cloud-based apps in the near future. 

According to a recent research study, maybe not. Psychologists found that "faking it" online is tougher than previously imagined. In fact, the results of the study show that people are much more likely to reveal their true personalities online and not the idealized image of who they want to be.

To conduct the research, the psychologists examined the social networking profiles of 236 U.S. and German students ages 17-22, both on Facebook and MySpace. They also had the same students take multiple personality tests in order to determine both their actual personality and their idealized personality.

Prior to this study, if you had to guess, you may have suspected that the online versions of the participants matched up more closely with the idealized personalities, not the real ones. In fact, that assumption is shared by modern-day psychologists - it even made its way into psychology journals where it was dubbed as the "idealized virtual-identity hypothesis." However, the researchers conducting this new study thought that this was a hypothesis that needed testing. "There has been no research on the most fundamental question about OSN (online social networking sites) profiles," notes the report. "Do they convey accurate impressions of profile owners?"

As it turns out, yes. The surprising conclusion uproots the previously held assumption that we are our idealized selves online. Instead, we are displaying our real personalities. "There was no evidence of self-idealization," concludes the report. "These results suggest that people are not using their OSN profiles to promote an idealized virtual identity. Instead, OSNs might be an efficient medium for expressing and communicating real personality, which may help explain their popularity."

On Facebook, We're All Real People

Although the researchers in this study looked at both MySpace and Facebook profiles to come to this conclusion, we suspect that Facebook is home to even more genuine personalities than MySpace. Instead of allowing its users to set up accounts using fake names or internet handles, Facebook only allows the use of your legal name, a policy that has led to some occasional mistakes when oddly-named real people were caught up in a Facebook purge. This up-front requirement that you "be yourself" on Facebook has had a trickle-down effect on how people use the network. Active users typically only connect with friends, family and other real-world acquaintances as opposed to strangers and other pseduo-friends as was done back in the MySpace days of "he whoever collects the most friends wins."

In addition, the privacy controls Facebook had in place at its beginning (now completely eviscerated, but that's another story...), provided its users with a sense of safety, security and comfort - they could be themselves - their real selves, flaws and all - without the world watching. The end result was the web-based equivalent of the user's offline social network where no one is all that different than they are in real life.

But What About the Older Social Networkers?

The one complaint with have with this latest research study is that it focused only on the youngest demographic of social networking users - those aged 17-22. While this digital generation may have grown up accustomed to openly sharing online, those belonging to the prior generations - especially the baby boomers and older - may be a bit more guarded when it comes to posting to Facebook (and assuming they use it, MySpace). Although the study does reveal some interesting findings about Gen Y/Gen Z and their use of the Internet, more research is necessary to determine if the conclusions span all age groups. 

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

Works With Just About Anything

Find The Most Popular Blogs in Your Field

There are many different ways to identify the top blogs in a given field, systematically, but some methods work better than others depending on the niche you're looking at. We compared six of our favorite methods in this post. Here, we found that visiting http://delicious.com/tag/blog+teaching gave us good results. By default the URLs are listed in reverse chronological order - the most recent items that anyone has bookmarked and have ever been called both "blog" and "teaching" will appear first. In the image above you can see that we're running two Greasemonkey scripts called Autopagerize and Sort By Popularity. Greasemonkey is really easy to use, see our post How to Learn to Use Greasemonkey in 5 Minutes.. These scripts let us open multiple pages of bookmarks all at once and then sort them in order of popularity.

So we did that, then scanned down the top several pages of most popular items tagged both "blog" and "teaching." We tried words other words like "education" as well. Each time we found a good site, we copied the link to it and went to step two.

Add The Feeds to a Reader

We like to use Netvibes to build collections of feeds because it's easy. Click on "add items" then "add feed" and paste in the link to the top blog you found. Netvibes will auto-discover the RSS feed for the site, often multiple variations but it shouldn't matter which one you choose. We pick "RSS 2.0" just because it's the most standard. Add it to your page and then go back to Delicious to find more sources.

We repeated the discovery step until we found about 10 good blogs to subscribe to. Then we visited those blogs and looked at their "blogrolls" or sidebar links to their favorite blogs. We found a number of good sources to include in our list that we had never heard of before. One was a good looking blog about education and technology that was written in Spanish, so we grabbed its feed and ran it through Mloovi.com to have it automatically translated into English, then put that translated feed into Netvibes.

Once you've got a good collection of top blogs in that Netvibes "tab" it's time to get it out of there. You can read the blogs in Netvibes, but there's more that we're going to do with these blogs. When you're in the "add feed" screen, you'll see an "OPML Export" link. OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) is the format that reading lists are imported and exported from feed readers in. It's really simple. Export it to your dekstop and then move onto the next step below. We're now going to edit an OPML file - but don't be scared! It's easy, we promise. Anyone can do it.

Pull Out Your New Tab's Feeds

This step assumes you've using Netvibes, or some other start page, for other things in addition to this project. If that's not the case, skip to the next step. We use Netvibes for a number of different things, so when we put together a new collection of feeds in it and want to export them, we have to deal with the fact that our whole collection of feeds in all our tabs gets exported. Simply search for the title of your tab in the file, then delete everything outside of that section! Everything except the very beginning and end of the file, that is. You can see what it should look like below, in the next step.

The Top of the OPML File.

Don't delete the document type declaration of the body tags. Rename the title of the file and resave your document. Now don't you feel smart? That was really easy though!

Now to Find the Hottest Posts from Those Top Blogs

Now that you've got an OPML file of the most popular blogs in your field, you can take that file over to Postrank.com and import it. You'll need to create an account, and the service doesn't allow you to manage multiple OPML files, so you may need to create a new account for every time you do something like this. I just create a new account with a GMail alias. Did you know that as while other apps, like Postrank, think that emailmarshall@gmail.com, emailmarshall+1@gmail.com and emailmarshall+2@gmail.com are all different emails - Gmail considers them the same thing? It's true, that's an alias and all emails sent to any of those will end up in the same inbox. So I create a new account for each OPML file (silly, but that's how you've got to do some of these things) and then import my new OPML file.

Rank the Blog Posts With Robots!

Once you import that OPML file from your desktop, you'll probably notice that Postrank has seen some of the feeds and not seen others. You should probably come back in an hour once they've processed the remaining feeds. What are they doing? They are checking every item in every feed to see how many comments it has, how many inbound links, how man times it's been bookmarked in Delicious or Digg, how many times people Tweeted about it, etc. It's then ranking each item in each feed on a scale of 1 to 10, relative only to the other items in that same feed.

What does this mean? It means you can have Postrank show you only the most popular posts in each of these top blogs, as determined by the blogs' own communities of readers. That's valuable information! It's a very fast way to get up to speed on the latest hot topics in your field and by subscribing to the feeds filtered for popular items, you can pay peripheral attention to this field but know that you'll never miss a really big story. Thanks Postrank!

Banish Content Overload

By selecting all the feeds in your collection, then setting their filter to "great" - you'll be shown just the hottest posts from each blog. Selecting "best" will show you almost nothing at all, though. Once you've set the filter to Great, export this filtered version of your OPML file and move on to the next step!

Pretty Up Your Collection

We would recommend opening this new OPML file in your text editor and renaming it something more useful.

Check Out the Hotness

By clicking on any of the feeds you imported into Postrank, you can check out the hottest posts in that blog's recent history. Hello time saver! Some of you might be temped to call it a day at this point, and we have captured a lot of good intelligence with relatively little work - but don't stop now, there's more we can do! You'll want to take these next steps, too.

Import Into a Feed Reader

Go back to your Netvibes or other reader's "add a feed" page and you'll see the option to import an OPML file. Import your new Postrank.com filtered OPML file and you'll be subscribed to just the hottest posts from the best blogs in your field of interest. Oh but there's still more we can do!

Make a List of the Links You Found

There's a number of different ways you can do this, you could have made a separate list of your links before you subscribed to their feeds, but I didn't in this example. Instead I went into Netvibes, clicked on the title of each blog and copied its home page URL over to a list in a text editor. Why do you want this list of links? Check out the next step.

Make a Reference Search Engine!

Google Custom Search Engine is really easy to use and is an incredibly powerful tool. Just paste the list of all your top sources in your field into the box on the page, save it, then bookmark the URL of the resulting search engine. Now any time you want to look real smart on a topic in education, you can just search for keywords in your Top Education Blogs Custom Search Engine. We have a lot of different Custom Search Engines that we use here at ReadWriteWeb.

Finally, Discover Community Leaders Elsewhere, Too

Blogs are great, but they aren't the only place where important discussion is going on online - not in almost any field anymore. Thought leaders in the education blogosphere are also having a lot of conversation on Twitter and FriendFeed, they are uploading presentations to SlideShare and participating in other online communities. You can connect with them quickly and easily by using the Google Social Graph API. Martin Atkins has built a very handy little interface that anyone can use to discover social media accounts registered to a person's name. We use that daily.

In the example above, Dave Perry of Academhack mentioned his Twitter account, so we searched for his Twitter name in the Google People Search site and found his Slideshare account too. This will work better for some people than for others, but sometimes it's a really big help.