Finally some good news for Facebook: a favorable third quarter earnings report, including promising growth in mobile advertising revenues, has buoyed the stock price for the world's dominant social network by $4.05, or over 20%, to $23.55 at the time of writing. But there's still plenty of skepticism out there regarding the company's valuation.

One quarter (24.1%) of doctors said they use social media in a professional capacity every day, including searching for medical information, according to a new survey of social media use by medical professionals funded by Pfizer and published last month in the Journal of Medical Internet Research.

While most churchgoers are probably used to rules demanding cessation of all electronic activity during services, a church in Arizona is taking the opposite stance: the congregation at Fellowship Church in Anthem, AZ is encouraged to tweet, update their Facebook profiles, and post to Instagram from the pews, according to CBS5, a local station which first reported the news.

Social media has huge potential for doing good -- or rather, for enabling people to do good. But it also enables plenty of, um, not-so-good. Just consider a recent study from the Philippines' Department of Health, which linked social networks to a rise in cases of HIV in that country.

Brands generated a mind-blowing 38 billion social media impressions worldwide in the third quarter of 2012, according to a quarterly survey from research outfit PQ Media and uberVU, which measures social audiences; in addition to a demographic and regional breakdown of these impressions, the partners also produced a list of the brands with the most impressions.

Although sites like Facebook supposedly prohibit individuals under the age of 13 from joining, this rule has failed to prevent millions of children from becoming members, according to a new survey of over 25,000 European kids by the London School of Economics' EU Kids Online project.

A Canadian legislator is proposing a national anti-bullying campaign amid mounting anecdotal (and some statistical) evidence that bullying is on the rise thanks to social media. Dany Morin, a member of Canada's lower house of parliament, made his proposal following the much-publicized suicide of Amanda Todd, a 15-year old in Vancouver, who killed herself several weeks after posting a heartfelt account of her experience being bullied both online and offline. As if to indicate the extent of the problem, online memorials to Todd have attracted hateful posts, which are eliciting a new wave of anger over bullies and anonymous online …

A number of studies have shown that social media can help promote healthy lifestyle habits, with potential applications including weight loss, smoking cessation, and now STD prevention. That's according to a new article published in the November issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, which suggests that social media can increase condom use by young adults -- at least for a while.

Some of social media's most positive features, including the ease of and ubiquity of online commenting, may make it an obstacle to the judicial process, according to the Australian judge in charge of a high-profile murder trial.

There's more than one way to skin a cat (or so I've been told) and there's more than one social network you can use to find a new job. Indeed, while you might think LinkedIn is the logical first choice, Facebook is actually used by more Americans looking for new jobs, according to the 2012 Social Job Seeker Survey, a poll of 2,108 U.S. adults performed for Jobvite by The Polling Company.