The epic battle between drug cartels and the Mexican government has assumed the proportions of a civil war, leaving more than 40,000 dead in the last five years. And like many other armed conflicts, journalism is one of the casualties, as reporters have been cowed into submission by the very real threat of reprisals by drug gangs for unfavorable reporting, which have left 66 journalists dead since 2006. But there is still one source of information available to regular Mexicans, provided they have an Internet connection: social media, which offers the key advantage of anonymity.

New York State's Representatives seem unable to stop sending nudie pics of themselves to women they've never met on the Internet. Back in February I wrote about the antics of Rep. Christopher Lee, the Republican Representative from the 26th District in upstate New York, who went looking for love online with such stupidity that he deserved his own column. Now, in the interests of bipartisan fairness I must heap scorn and mockery on Anthony Weiner, the Democratic Representative from New York's 9th District, who accidentally broadcast a photo of his "junk" to the entire world through Twitter.

Now that he has been put out to pasture as executive chairman, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has plenty of time to mull over his tenure in the top spot and -- rather remarkably -- pontificate in public about his successes and failures. While this may not be what Larry Page and Sergey Brin had in mind for his post-CEO career, it sure makes for interesting reading; indeed, I think Schmidt's most recent statements illuminate some of the reasons that Google has failed (so far) to plug into the social media phenomenon.

Significant proportions of African-American (30%) and Hispanic (39%) adults say they are more likely to support a cause or social issue online than offline, according to the results of a new study by Georgetown University's Center for Social Impact Communication and Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide. That compares to 24% of white American adults agreeing with the same statement.

I have no idea whether I'm at all representative of Gmail's user base, but if I am Google would be well-advised to just can the whole social media push it's been planning for over a year now. Because, as far as I'm concerned, all the new bells, whistles and widgets Google has added to the email service to make it more "social" are just annoying distractions, which I avoid as scrupulously as Google's targeted ads. The latest social spaghetti flung against the Gmail wall is a "people widget."

While big brands and national advertisers are embracing social media in highly visible (and not always competent) ways, the real evidence of its long-term utility is the high rate of adoption by small business owners, who are ramping up spending to reach potential customers in local markets, according to Webs, which offers a do-it-yourself service for Web site creation.

LinkedIn ventured forth into the public markets with great success earlier this month and now comes word that Zynga, the casual game juggernaut, is preparing to go public sometime in June. Going beyond the simple spectacle of tech geeks frolicking in frothy billions, it's worth noting one element that's mostly absent in the first round of IPOs: advertising.

The first rule of the social media business is to choose a weird, opaque name for your company, and Cambridge-based Crimson Hexagon -- which specializes in semantic analysis to help companies track online sentiment -- has certainly succeeded there. If I had to guess, the "crimson" is for Harvard (it was spun off by Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science in 2007) and the "hexagon" is a reference to "The Library of Babel" by Jorge Luis Borges... or a beehive. Or something else entirely.

The world is looking a little less crazy today with the news that Blippy, a social network which allowed you to share your credit card purchases with your friends and made no sense, has closed. Social media is full of all kinds of weird startups, but Blippy, which launched in December 2009, always struck me as a particular affront to reason. True, it wasn't supposed to share your credit card numbers, and you could choose which purchases to publicize, but why in God's name would you want to broadcast this information anyway?

Well, that's comforting. A month after Sony's PlayStation Network was brought low by a coordinated wave of hack attacks which compromised users' personal information, friendly hackers and security pros are warning that the network remains vulnerable to online malefactors. The response from Sony's boss (I'm paraphrasing): "Basically, yes."