Part of my online life includes editorial duties at ResearchBlogging.org, where I serve as the Social Sciences Editor. Each Thursday, I pick notable posts on research in anthropology, philosophy, social science, and research to share on the ResearchBlogging.org News site. To help highlight this writing, I also share my selections here on AiP. The range for selections [...]

This post is a bit different from what Bonnie and I usually post in this blog – an interview with Dr. Richard Price, founder and CEO of Academia.edu, a social network for researchers.  Academia.edu is a San Francisco-based start-up, which currently has 1.8 million registered users and 4.5 million unique visitors a month, with about [...]

Newts aren’t doing a lot of Facebook friending, and last time I checked, the cormorant had not updated its relationship status. But a new neural analysis suggests that our social networking tendencies most likely have their neural roots in some of our early vertebrate ancestors. The findings were published online May 31 in Science. “There [...]

The launch of the Google+ social network casts a shadow over Google’s previous efforts in this arena, including Orkut, Wave and Buzz, all of which still have active Web sites. For the most part Google+’s predecessors will coexist alongside the new social network as Google determines what works and what doesn’t. Google launched Orkut in [...]

LOUISVILLE, Ky.—In any given second, an average of 600 Twitter messages ("tweets") are sent. The secret to its success: it’s fun, simple and social—a set of criteria that all entrepreneurs should keep in mind when pursuing their ideas, Dom Sagolla said here Friday at Idea Festival. Twitter‘s 140-character constraint has been crucial to the service’s [...]

If the adage "if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all" were applied to the Web, most comment threads would be empty. Some comments posted in response to a news article, blog, video or other online content successfully advance a debate and/or challenge assertions made by reporters, bloggers and editors. [...]

Guest Blog by Leonard Mlodinow* One advantage of belonging to a cohesive society in which people help each other is that the group is often better equipped than a set of individuals to deal with threats from the outside. People intuitively realize there is strength in numbers, and take comfort in the company of others, [...]