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Is blogging for old people? Apparently so. Well, at least according to a new study from Pew Internet Project, that is. Today's youngest generation of online users are no longer interested in consuming long-form content like blogs, says the research. Instead, communication among teens tends to involve brief bursts of information, like a Facebook status update or a text message. Pew's findings state that only 14% of tweens and teens ages 12 to 17 now report that they blog, down from 25% only four years ago. They're also less interested in commenting on their friends' blogs, too, with only 52% reporting doing so, down from over three-quarters back in 2006.

Buying and selling tickets is another business that's slowly being migrated over to our mobile devices. Whether it's a movie ticket, concert ticket, plane ticket, or something else, there are a number of companies now offering digital alternatives to the tree-killing paper printouts of days past. In a new study by Juniper Research, analysts predict that the market for mobile ticketing will reach 15 billion delivered tickets by the year 2014.

Are you goofing off on Facebook at work? As it turns out, this sort of "time theft" may be no longer be your company's top concern when it comes to social networking in the workplace. According to a new study from security firm Sophos, the real problem with social networks - and most of all Facebook - is the security risk they pose to organizations.

After Facebook's recent privacy settings "adjustment," the social network is now reporting that 35% users who had never before engaged with their privacy settings took the initiative to do so instead of accepting the updated suggestions put before them by the social network. To Facebook, this number is a very, very good thing. Although nowhere near a majority of users, this engagement rate is much higher than industry averages. Plus, as Facebook's director of public policy Tim Sparapani points out, "35% of 350 million users is an extraordinary number."

But should Facebook really be proud here? What about the other 65% of users who blindly accepted the defaults?

"This status is being tracked. The owners of Facebook have confirmed they will send $1 to the rescue fund for Haiti every time this is cut and paste as a status." Sound familiar? This recent status message hoax has been making its way around the popular social network, duping members into posting the status as their own in the hopes that, by doing so, they've somehow contributed to the Haitian earthquake disaster relief fund without having to actually open their own pocketbook to do so. While that would be nice if it was true, this hoax is just one of many found on Facebook today.

According to the analysts at research firm Gartner, mobile application stores are expected to generate revenues of nearly $7 billion over the course of this year. That figure is a combination of the $6.2 billion spent purchasing the mobile applications themselves combined with an additional $.6 billion generated through advertising revenues from in-app ads. Not surprisingly, Apple dominates this market, accounting for 99.4% of the market as of last year, states the report.

According to new data from ChangeWave Research, both usage and consumer sentiment towards Google's mobile operating system Android has increased over the past several months. As of December 2009, the research firm's survey shows that 4% of all smartphone owners now use a phone running some version of the Android OS. That's an increase of 200% since the previous survey released in September.

Dan Zarrella has long impressed us with his discourses on the science of retweets, as well as his psychoanalytic apps that scan and parse Twitter streams - one for general analysis and one for dreams.

His latest project, TweetPsych for lists, is an enlightening and often amusing look at what your lists are talking about, how they view the world, what turns them on (or off), and more. Depending on how you group your Twitter friends, you can make interesting generalizations or conjectures about society as a whole. What do the denizens of L.A. or San Francisco tweet about most? What about women - what's got them buzzing? Read on for more on precisely that cross-section of the Twittersphere.

These days, everyone is talking about social media and discussing what services and tools to use, how to use them, why you should use them, etc. In fact, if you listened to all the advice out there, you would probably think that no matter who you are, whether an individual wanting to build a personal brand, or a large multinational corporation intent on communicating with customers, you should be using social media. But is social media for everyone? Are there times when you shouldn't be using it at all?

A study released earlier this year by Anderson Analytics looked 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.

Although the daily trends on Twitter over the past year have often been silly or even obscene, hindsight has proven to be much more interesting.

WhatTheTrend has compiled a great overview of Twitter hashtags and trending topics. Their Twitter Zeitgeist 2009 gives us food for thought as we move into a new, hopefully less gaming-prone era of examining and measuring what real users are really talking about on the social web. Now, let's talk about Twilight and Michael Jackson. Or, in the choose-your-own-adventure model of blog posts, you can skip to the part where we talk about tech-related trending topics instead.

At the beginning of this year, analyst firm Gartner released a report that highlights eight up-and-coming mobile technologies which they predict will impact the mobile industry over the course of the next two years. According to Nick Jones, vice president and analyst at the firm, the technologies they've identified will evolve quickly and will likely pose issues that will have to be addressed by short term strategies.

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.

The Twitterati have spoken!

Throughout 2009, a few tech topics got so much attention that they managed to make Twitter's trends. Google Wave was one of the most notable of these, obviously, but what were the other subjects of such interest to Twitter-using geeks? Twitter has just released a list of the top 10 technology-related trending topics of the year; here's what tweeps have been talking about.

According to recent predictions from analyst firm IDC, mobile web usage is set to explode over the course of next year due to market forces like the tripling of iPhone applications, the quintupling of Android applications and the introduction of Apple's long-rumored tablet computer. This forecast was among the firm's many year-end predictions released in a report that offered a broad overview of what's to come in 2010 in the IT industry, cloud computing, the mobile web and the overall technology marketplace.

The social media data company Rapleaf has just released the final parts of their 3-part study involving the demographics and online behavior of webmail users. In the first part of the study, gender and age data was examined and revealed some interesting findings...like the fact that Gmail has more female users than male, for example. In the final sections of the study, the company has turned its attention to social networking data to discover more details about webmail users' social media profiles, memberships and network preferences.

A backlash against anonymous commenters and trolls seems to be underway. Only last month, a court case was settled where anonymous commenters ended up having to pay big fines to the women who they defiled using vulgar, derogatory remarks on an internet forum. And previously, an anonymous blogger in the modeling industry was forced to reveal her identity after numerous malicious posts about a colleague showed up on her blog. Now the latest scandal in this new trend of "giving the trolls what they deserve" is causing a controversy all of its own. And this time, the nasty comment didn't just lead to an embarrassing reveal or a heavy fine, it cost someone their job.

Research firm Gartner has just put out a list of the top ten mobile applications of the future. Well, not the distant future, but the far off year of 2012. Nothing on the list is all that surprising or, in many cases, even all that new. Instead, the list includes the sorts of technologies that are just now coming into their own and haven't yet seen widespread adoption as well as the already common technologies that are still experiencing growth.

Facebook is getting old. No, people aren't getting tired of it, it's actually getting old, as in its population is aging. In May of 2008, the median age for Facebook was 26. Today, it's 33, a good seven years older. That's an interesting turn of events for a site once built for the exclusive use of college students. So where are today's college students hanging out now? Well, to some extent, they're still on Facebook, despite having to share the space with moms, dads, grandparents, and bosses. Surprisingly though, they're also headed to another network you may have heard of: Twitter.

In our society, there's an image of a computer nerd as this sad, pale, and lonely guy sitting in the dark gazing at a glowing screen. As it turns out, that's just an image and it's far from the truth. The reality is that most technology users are perfectly well-adjusted and social creatures. In fact, those who surf the web and use their mobile phones may actually be more social and better connected to the world at large than those who don't.