It's a sign of the times that some of first panels and presentations at MediaPost's Search Insider Summit in Park City, UT were about social media. Social media and search marketing are converging, one way or another, and understandably everyone (including me) wants to know how they can make each other more effective and efficient. But in the end it's all about the bottom line -- so I'm also curious whether combining social media and search can really help boost total revenues for search marketing.

This is almost guaranteed to elicit howls of derision from some readers, especially Web-savvy older adults: a new blog, WebOver50 has launched with the mission of helping adults over the age of 50 navigate the rapidly-changing social media environment. Now, I can already hear the criticisms: plenty of people over 50 know all about social media, from Facebook to Twitter and beyond, and they don't need any help figuring out where, what, when, or how to share their personal lives online. But I would beg these readers for patience and tolerance -- after all, not everyone can be as …

The online media world likes to get itself all wound up over big ideas, even when they are so vague it's kind of hard to imagine actual applications. "Social search" is one such nebulous concept: according to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook could supplant or at least complement Google's Web-based searches with its own search results drawing on the social networks surrounding each member. At a certain level, this sounds logical enough: if you are searching for, say, music or TV shows, it seems reasonable to assume you may share preferences with your immediate social circle. But this is only an assumption, …

"If in other sciences we should arrive at certainty without doubt and truth without error, it behooves us to place the foundations of knowledge in mathematics," said Roger Bacon, and there is no question that measuring things is important -- not least because it allows us to rank them, which in turn enables us to judge their relative merits. On that note, Billboard is launching a "Social 50" for contemporary music, based on stats like unique page views, number of fans, and streams of songs and videos via social network sites including the inevitable Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, and Twitter. However, …

The Internet has only been around, in a form accessible to the general population, about 30 years. In that time, the number of American Internet users increased from a mere two million in 1994 to an estimated 240 million in 2010, according to ComScore and Nielsen. Over the same period, over 35 million Americans died. Unsurprisingly, there has been growing overlap between the two groups (Internet users and the deceased) and it can be stated with utmost confidence that everyone in the first group will eventually end up in the second, at some point.

Tech reporting seems to involve a fair amount of speculation, conjecture, and flat-out rumor-mongering nowadays. This is the result of a few converging factors. First, there's the speed and ease with which information can be published and disseminated on the Web, which lowers the bar for what passes editorial muster. Second, there's the general ravenous hunger for scraps of information, however insubstantial, about new products and business models which could impact readers' professional lives. Third, there's the super-tightlipped approach of large, established players like Apple and Google, which obsessively control information about their super-secret products by plugging leaks faster than …

Another week, another new social network, promising a new way of facilitating life, the universe, and everything. This week's entry is Jumo, a social network created by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, who tells The New York Times the site is intended to help people stay in touch with charitable causes close to their hearts. The site included 3,000 organizations and issues at launch, and any non-profit organization can create a profile page, provided it can provide proof of official tax exemption to certify its authenticity.

If anyone still doubts the power of social media to affect the real world in a very substantial way, the intersection of social networks and real estate development should put these lingering doubts to rest. As always, stories with big dollar signs attached are more impressive, and this seems pretty big to me: according to The Wall Street Journal, a group of homeowners in the Long Island town of Huntington successfully used social networks to organize local opposition to a 490-unit, $100 million housing development proposed by AvalonBay Communities Inc. for a site not far from a Long Island Rail …

Here's another one for the "social media surveillance" file, and we can probably file it under "that was stupid" as well. It seems the Israeli Defense Force, always at the cutting edge of technology, is using Facebook to catch female draft-dodgers who avoid military duty by pleading religious exemption. Of course, the subjects of this surveillance make things easier by posting evidence of their draft-dodging for all to see in a public forum.

What would you do if you were an educator and you were presented with a revolutionary new medium, with the potential to totally change the way you teach, manage classes, and communicate with students? I can tell you what I'd do: I'd ban it! Who needs that whole mess? I'm just kidding. But the same can't be said for school boards around the country.