M.C. Hammer has had an interesting life, to say the least, from his stint in the U.S. Navy, to glory days when he was arguably the most famous musician in the world, to bankruptcy, to his reinvention as a social media superstar. He is also an acute and rousing public speaker, as the audience at the Gravity Summit at UCLA learned on Tuesday, when Hammer turned an awards acceptance speech (naming him social media marketer of the year for 2010) into a brief but sweeping review of the progress of social media over the last decade.

Discussion about the role of social media in the Egyptian Revolution has been by turns insightful and inane, swinging back and forth between profound principles and trite truisms. One of the least interesting (and yet most oft-remarked) truths to emerge from all this sound and fury is that social media didn't "do" the revolution all by itself; it's interesting to see how many people left furiously mistyped indignant comments to that effect in response to articles which never made any such claim, including my own.

Social media has not only played a key role in the popular revolts sweeping the Middle East from an organizational perspective; it has also been used as a tool by U.S. intelligence for monitoring the progress of the uprisings, and will doubtless be an important source of information for historians and diplomats studying the motivations and dynamics (including immediate flashpoints and long-term trends in sentiment) which produced these remarkable and very complicated events.

The news media drives more Twitter trends than do bloggers, according to a new study from HP Labs social computing division, titled "Trends in Social Media: Persistence and Decay." While perhaps unsurprising, the study -- based on an analysis of 16.32 million tweets on 3,361 topics sent over a 40-day period -- is testimony to the continued reach and influence of established media companies, confirming an earlier trend which saw most blogs drawing primary content from news outlets (rather than each other).

After social media helped Barack Obama win the White House in 2008 and carried Republicans to victory in the 2010 midterm elections, it's clear politicians can no more afford to ignore its transformative potential than marketers, advertisers, and other professionals.

"Where the Ladies At" is a clever app for iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad, aggregating location-based data from female Foursquare users to tell users (who I will stereotype as amorous, single males on the prowl) the thing they most want to know, namely, where the ladies at. This information is presented in an easily-understood graphic format, with a compass needle pointing users to where the ladies at. Currently limited to San Francisco, the app ranks venues by the number of ladies at them, limiting the count to ladies who checked in during the last half hour.

After disappearing for two weeks into the bowels of Egypt's prisons, Google executive Wael Ghonim emerged as one of the central figures in the Egyptian Revolution which removed longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak from power in February 2011. Now Ghonim's employer -- a company with unprecedented power and influence in the world economy -- has an equally unprecedented chance to side with good, in keeping with its motto, "Don't be evil," (which I choose to interpret as an injunction to be good). True, this might require cooperating with archrivals like Facebook and Twitter, which Ghonim singled out for praise last week. …

While no one can question Facebook's massive success, its rapid expansion in the general population has also taken it pretty far from its roots as a social site for college students -- but now a new service, Inigral, is helping reconnect it with college life. Inigral uses a Schools App on Facebook to enable college and university administrators to create official, exclusive sub-networks within Facebook for their students and alumni -- a sort of Facebook within Facebook. These school networks can invite incoming freshman to join via email as soon as they're accepted, helping foster a sense of community, and …

I'm not going to issue moral judgments about Rep. Christopher Lee, who resigned yesterday after Gawker.com published a shirtless photo he sent to a woman (not his wife) he met through Craigslist personals. Nor am I holding my breath for rich and powerful men to change their behavior: politicians are apparently compelled to engage in hanky panky, even though being in the public eye and having numerous opponents means there's a good chance they'll get caught. Like bugs around a bug zapper -- particularly stupid, narcissistic bugs -- they flirt with destruction, circling and circling until POOF they hit the …

Email usage rates are declining sharply among teens and young adults as email is increasingly supplanted by text messaging, including social media messaging, according to comScore's Digital Year in Review. The data suggests this is part of a broader downward trend cutting across most ages.