Interesting study about the usage and the behaviour of social media platform users from over 29 countries from webguild.org:
A new study by Universal McCann called When did we start trusting strangers? found that rather than being passive, consumers have taken not only active, but also creative roles in consumerism. In fact, consumers have become true “consum’actors.” The study was [...]

News aggregators:
friendfeed.com
Friendfeed works as a feed of your social community activities, one adds services like flickr, picasa, twitter, google reader, digg, stumbleupon, del.icio.us, youtube, fast.fm and of course own blogs sharing the own post/messages/links with other people and commenting the interesting stuff from others. Seriously good source of hot news right from the streets!

toluu.com
A service [...]

There is someone new in the search engine shark pool: cuil.com.
They do not start silently, they know who is the enemy and the attack is declared:
cuil.com [Cuil means knowledge in Irish] claims to search 121,617,892,992 web pages, which is “three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft”.

The discussion whether the one is killing the other is getting hotter and the opinions are raging high.
First of all these two “opponents” are hard to compare as friendfeed being a information aggregation tool and twitter a hybrid between instant messenger and micro blogging device.

Both serve certainly completely different needs, twitter mainly focuses on spreading rather personal opinons/feelings/emotional states/gossip, only randomly establishing a real conversation.
Friendfeed resembles a honey pot of information gathered by its user acting as honey bees collected from various flowers, like Digg, GoogleReader, del.icio.us, stumbleupon and many more.

The guys at hongkiat.com offer a really neat list of diverse plugins, widgets and tricks helping you letting your blog to stand out of the crowd with stunning features one won’t find on the average blog.
Even advanced wordpress users might find a new feature, so check it out:
http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/40-most-wanted-wordpress-tricks-and-hacks