A shocking 21% of young adults said they would turn down a job if it didn't allow them to access social network sites or their personal email during work hours, according to a new global survey of workplace attitudes and behaviors by Clearswift, a software security company. This is part of a larger phenomenon which is blurring the lines between individuals' private and professional lives, Clearswift found in its survey of 1,600 managers and employees in USA, UK, Germany and Australia, performed in January and February.

Oh, Darnell Dockett, we hardly knew ye; but then we knew ye a whole lot better when ye got naked online in front of thousands of viewers. Dockett, a defensive lineman for the Arizona Cardinals, has apologized after being chastised by coach Ken Whisenhunt and general manager Rod Graves for streaming live video of himself taking a shower, according to the Arizona Republic, which first reported the news. It seems Dockett, who tweets regularly, performed his public ablutions on Ustream after a dare and a $1,000 bet, then later bragged about it on Twitter.

Paralleling the United States, the number of adults in the United Kingdom who use social networks has expanded rapidly in the last few years -- but they are also demonstrating more caution in what they choose to share online, according to the new UK Adult Media Literacy report from Ofcom, which conducted 1,824 in-home interviews with U.K. adults. Does this echo or foreshadow similar changes in the U.S.?

I'm not a language snob or a nitpicker, and I have resigned myself to the corporate practice of inventing new words and burying things in opaque doublespeak to make it almost impossible to know what, in fact, you are trying to talk about. But sometimes I can't help but notice when executives seize on a nice-sounding word and employ it in a way that completely contradicts what it actually means; this is especially grating when it appears to be a deliberate, disingenuous PR tactic.

As Facebook continues to struggle with privacy issues in its continuing effort to make the site a profitable advertising medium, it might seem safe to conclude that it has carte blanche: after all, it's the biggest, most popular social network in the world, so it appears to wield an almost monopolistic power in the social space. But this would be an incorrect and dangerous assumption.

Sometimes when you hear about the cutting edge of media technology you say "wow that's awesome!" Other times -- or sometimes at the same time -- you want to say "wow that's creepy!" Today I hosted a panel discussion at the MediaPost Digital Out-of-Home Forum where I found myself saying both. One of the most interesting new areas of development in the DO arena is the ongoing merger with social media, which came up during several panel discussions, including the one I moderated ("Is Digital Out of Home Getting Too Creepy?"). Multiple speakers seemed to agree that mobile devices are …

It still doesn't make the slightest bit of sense to me, but the "social shopping" phenomenon evidently makes a great deal of sense to people with lots of dough to invest in new sites. Tuesday brought news that a new social shopping site, Swipely, has raised $7.5 million in Series A funding and launched its service, which allows users to update their friends on their recent credit card purchases. Investors included Index Ventures and Greylock Partners.

It's amazing how many things can go wrong when you are trying to give people something for free. Free giveaways just seem to keep ending in PR disaster (last year's Oprah KFC coupon debacle, for example) and when social media is involved, it's twice as bad. Just ask Dunkin' Donuts, which is celebrating its 60th anniversary with an iced coffee giveaway in select locations around the U.S.

Even with the best intentions, Facebook is flailing -- and failing -- to defuse the controversy arising from its new Open Graph. Facebook's latest move in its ongoing privacy punch-up is the hiring of Tim Muris, the former chairman of the Federal Trade Commission under George W. Bush from 2001-2004, as a liaison with the current FTC; basically Muris is supposed to help Facebook reach some kind of compromise with the FTC to head off intrusive regulation regarding privacy issues. Predictably, the press and pundits have jumped all over Facebook for hiring an ex-Bush official, noting the previous administration's serial …

I generally stand on the side of commerce, and there's no question Facebook needs to justify its massive valuation by monetizing its massive audience. I also know it's much easier to be an armchair CEO, kibitzing and criticizing from the sidelines, than to actually lead a big company in a dynamic market environment, under pressure from investors and the press and the public and politicians. Still: this was not the right way for Facebook to introduce a new business strategy. Zuckerberg and co. must have known that the new Open Graph program -- which shares information about members with other …