After raising the low end of its stock price in the days before the IPO, "early indications and the investment community's keen interest in the offering had pointed to a successful IPO... the target price exceeded the high end of its pricing range..." Sound familiar? No, it's not a contemporary news report about LinkedIn: that's CNET reporting on the GeoCities IPO back in August 1998.

I'm always curious about the ways different groups use social media, including differing levels of adoption and engagement based on age, gender, ethnicity, and so on -- but I'm also aware that data purporting to show such differences should be taken with a grain of salt. In one recent example, a study says African-Americans are more likely to use Twitter than the population at large. This finding is interesting, but needs to be qualified by the sample population -- i.e., college students.

If all goes according to plan, on Thursday LinkedIn will become the first major social media company to stage an initial public offering. Currently the company is planning to sell 7.84 million shares at a price of $42-$45 per share, which would value the professional social network at about $4.1 billion -- up over 100% from a projected valuation of about $2 billion at the end of January, and 24% from $3.3 billion just a week ago.

Oh, such hilarity. Where to start? The total lack of common sense? The failure to think strategically? The hypocrisy? Facebook's PR debacle of last week -- when it was revealed it hired PR firm Burson-Marsteller to plant negative stories about Google in the press -- was ridiculous, incompetent, malicious, and all-too-plausible. Despite their careful attempts to cultivate laid-back images, both companies have a fiercely competitive streak and rightly view managing public opinion as key to their long-term success. So why wouldn't they talk trash about each other, including furtive campaigns to seed negative publicity in the press?

I'm obsessed with Westerns, and it occurred to me that the progress of social media resembles the settling of the Old West: small pioneer groups blaze trails across the new landscape, sparking the interest of larger groups who arrive later. As the population increases, businesses spring up to serve the growing numbers of settlers and take advantage of new resources. Eventually, the initial lawlessness gives way to increasing demands for law and order, pushed by legitimate businesses and ordinary citizens afraid that outlaws will jeopardize their newfound prosperity (in part by deterring continued immigration). While competition was taken for granted, …

Skype shares many of the basic defining elements of social media: namely, it is an online platform that allows people to communicate in a new way that costs less than previous communication channels. It is also a useful illustration of the business dynamics behind social media, especially following Microsoft's acquisition of the video and voice chat service for $8.5 billion, announced on Tuesday.

In yesterday's post I mentioned a survey from the U.K. suggesting that many parents see social networks having a negative impact on their children's education, as the distractions of online socializing inevitably prove more engaging than homework. But there are two sides to every story, and I maintain there are plenty of ways social networks can be learning aids rather than hindrances.

While parents have been leery of the safety risks posed by social media, they also face the age-old argument posed by children in the face of an allegedly unjust prohibition: "if you can do it, why can't we?" Lacking a convincing rationale, many parents are throwing in the towel and letting pre-teens use social media -- and in fact are often helping them, in a strategic move that allows them exert some kind of oversight and supervision.

While the U.S. military has embraced social media, albeit hesitantly, it's fair to say that social media -- an undisciplined, egalitarian free-for-all -- is a bit unnerving to the military mindset, with its respect for order, authority, and accountability. As a result some other professional militaries are thinking twice about whether to let service members use social media, and under what circumstances.

Any time there's a big news event nowadays, it seems like we media types go looking for evidence of shifts in the way people get their news, for example away from TV and radio to social media. The death of Osama bin Laden on May 1, 2011 was certainly one such occasion: it seems like there were almost as many surveys asking how people heard the news as there were articles about the news itself (I contributed one earlier this week). But too often we try to impose a simplistic, zero-sum perspective -- that is, that gains on one side …