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Italian PR professional and former Microsoft Italy marketer Vincenzo Cosenza sent us an interesting visualization today. Below is a map of the world, showing the most popular social networks by country. The map was built using Alexa and Google Trends for Website traffic data in June 2009 and we think it shows some interesting trends. After all, our world is becoming smaller and it's good to know what services our friends on the other side of the globe are using to connect with each other.

Social networks are becoming a default way for many employees to stay in touch with friends, colleagues, and business associates, but according to a new poll by the anti-virus firm Sophos, 63% of system administrators worry that employees who share too much personal information on social networking sites will put their company's IT infrastructure at risk. A quarter of these businesses also report that they have been the victim of spam, phishing, and malware attacks via sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace.

In a new report, Nielsen Online takes a closer look at how social media and video sites have reshaped the web and the online advertising market over the last few years, especially in the context of the current economic crisis. According to Nielsen, since 2003, the time spent on video sites has increased by over 2,000%, and the number of Americans who visit online video sites like YouTube and Hulu has climbed 339% over the same time period.

With regards to the economy, a number of sectors, including retail, and the auto and financial services industries, have obviously made dramatic cuts to their online spending. On the other hand, the pharmaceutical industry is actually spending more on online ads today.

Today, the white label application builder called LOLapps emerged from stealth mode to announce that they now have 44 million unique visitors using their tools. The company has been operating since early 2008, allowing users to create both quizzes and gifts on social networking platforms like Bebo, Facebook, and others. A user-generated content builder like this may seem like no big deal, but for LOLapps, it's big business.

According to data compiled by O'Reilly's Ben Lorica, Facebook is currently seeing some very impressive growth outside of the United States. In Africa and Asia, for example, Facebook's active user base grew over 70% in the last 12 weeks, and in Indonesia, Facebook has finally displaced Friendster as the most popular social network.

With regards to the basic demographics on Facebook, women still represent the majority of users (51% vs. 45%), and while younger users still represent the majority of active users on the service, users over 55 are driving most of Facebook's current growth.

In the coming years, we will see a revolution in the ability of machines to access, process, and apply information. This revolution will emerge from three distinct areas of activity connected to the Semantic Web: the Web of Data, the Web of Services, and the Web of Identity providers. These webs aim to make semantic knowledge of data accessible, semantic services available and connectable, and semantic knowledge of individuals processable, respectively. In this post, we will look at the first of these Webs (of Data) and see how making information accessible to machines will transform how we find information.

A new online community site called Lunch.com has just launched into private beta here at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. The site, essentially a recommendation network, aims to bring the sort of casual conversations you would have with friends over lunch to the online arena. Using a proprietary "Similarity Network Engine," Lunch calculates what you have in common with other site members so you can share recommendations with those who have your same interests and perspectives.

Streamy, which calls itself a "real-time news reading and sharing site," opened its doors today after an 18-month long private beta. Streamy is a mix between an RSS reader, a social media aggregator, and a real-time search engine. You can connect your Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Friendfeed, and Flickr accounts to Streamy, and post status updates from Streamy directly to these services. Streamy will also recommend interesting stories to you, and, thanks to its innovative user interface, sharing stories with your friends on the supported social media services is extremely easy.

The Internet economy has been built on the network effect (i.e. the effect that one user of a good or service has on the value of that product for other people). Investors and entrepreneurs have treated this like Moore's Law. But just as Moore's Law hits physical constraints, network effects have a limit in many types of online communities. Indeed, in some cases, a reverse network effect may exist: as new people join, others are motivated to leave. This dramatically affects the length of the competitive advantage enjoyed by these ventures. In this post, we'll look at which ventures suffer from reverse network effects, which don't, and which may suffer depending on the strategy they choose to adopt.

A new social networking site for music called WorldSings wants to "unite artists and music fans from around the world." If that concept sounds a lot like what MySpace is doing with their music offering, that's because it is - but there's a twist. Like MySpace, WorldSings lets artists create profiles where they can upload music, videos, and concert lists as well as feature live events. Meanwhile, music fans can friend the artists and each other as they engage in music discovery on the network.