Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr are all hugely popular social companies that aren’t making much money right now (with the exception of Tumblr, and that might be debatable.) They’ve raised huge amounts of venture capital or have been acquired by companies for such large price tags that they’ll have to make money soon. But the core value proposition for these three services, one that’s certainly reflected in the attitudes of the founders, is that that they are beautiful, creative online spaces. So how do you put ads there without ruining the atmosphere you’ve created and that users have come to expect?

Mad Men advertising executives explore the brand new world of video ads in the 1960′s.

Obviously, many forms of advertising have been around for hundreds of years, but only in the past 15 or so have we seen a change in how search and contexual ads have had an impact on the business. This search-driven model existed before Google, but from the time the company launched AdWords in 2000, the concept of text-driven and contextualized ads based on search really began to take off. This data-driven approach has affected much of online advertising since then, and Google has developed a billion dollar business around the practice.

And along with search, display ads have also been a signficant part of the puzzle. In the early years of online advertising, it seemed that banner ads and other forms of display would be able to mimic more old-school advertising methods, since they weren’t all that different from the then-profitable ads in print. But the format is no longer dominant — in fiscal year 2012, search ads brought in 46 percent of revenue from advertising, compared to the 21 percent of revenue coming from display ads, according to an IAB report.

Why advertising should get to know us

Most recently, the rise of social media and smartphones that track everything in our daily lives from location to spending habits to real-world friends have made keyword search or banner ads start to feel fairly impersonal. Now Facebook can serve you ads for cars if they think you’re likely to buy a car soon, or Twitter can show you promoted tweets based on the messages you post. These companies haven’t totally cracked personalized ad-targeting yet, but they’re working on it. As those companies know, advertising needs to feel useful and relevant if it’s going to work — all without seeming creepy or invading of a person’s privacy, and useful to a person on both desktop and mobile.

That’s a tough balance to hit, and it certainly doesn’t seem that those companies have totally succeeded yet. If the Mad Men era Madison Avenue experts figured out how to tap into a person’s core desires to re-create advertising in the 1950s and 1960s, we’re still waiting for someone to do the same with in the current digital era, by adding a layer of emotion and desire to the social media and consumer data that’s out there.

The idea of the moment, which we’ve written about extensively here at paidContent, is native advertising: creating “sponsored content” from brands that fits in with the look and feel of the site but is labeled as an ad and supports that particular brand. Tons of sites, from Buzzfeed to The Atlantic to the New York Times (to GigaOM itself) do sponsored stories. It’s how Tumblr’s ads are rolling out for companies like Denny’s. And in particular, for sites like Instagram, it seems like potentially the only way to preserve the aesthetics of the site while letting brands in the door.

Young founders look to their history books

When the Yahoo/Tumblr deal closed, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer talked about her intentions for ads on Tumblr and how CEO David Karp (who had previously decried advertising of any kind) imagined them on his site:

“David talks wistfully about the ads that he saw as a child, that would make him want to go see a movie or own a particular type of car,” Mayer said. “He says the current state of internet advertising doesn’t aspire to be as good as the content itself. We think that should change … we’re aligned in those ideals. When you hear us talk about native ads, where the ads are every bit as good as the content, and maybe even make the content better — that’s what we are aiming for. We want the ads themselves to create that aspirational feel that, for example, television ads or movie ads do.”

And speaking at the Commonwealth Club on Thursday in San Francisco, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom was equally nostalgic about old-school advertising and how it might work for his own company:

“We made a promise that Instagram would be a self-sustaining business, and that promise still holds true today. The deal makes no sense if you think this thing will never make money. We’ve always had plans, and it’s just about when, and it’s just about how,” he said. “Think about the magazine Vogue, for instance, and how half that magazine is advertising, but that advertising is really compelling.”

Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger talk with Google Ventures’s Kevin Rose at the Castro Theater in San Francisco on May 30, 2013.

Finding the Don Draper approach to social

Systrom and Karp might be inspired by old Vogue ads, but it doesn’t seem that Tumblr users are as enamored by Denny’s gifs, and it’s fair to say that I’d be far less offended by a slightly off-target ad on a news website than one posted in my Instagram feed. The founders have accomplished a remarkable feat of creating companies where users feel personally and emotionally attached to the experiences they have there — just ask someone like Om who’s made a digital friend with someone he’s only “met” through Instagram.

But by raising the bar for what we expect on their services, the founders might have made navigating advertising that much harder for themselves. We’re in a whole new world of digital media, just as Don Draper and his executives faced with the rise of the television. But just as those executives saw the change as a new opportunity to reach consumers in their living rooms, so too could Pinterest and Instagram see this as an opportunity: to make digital advertising personal.

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Before Google’s senior vice president, Vic Gundotra announced the new Google+ Wednesday at Google’s annual developer conference, Google I/O, I sat down with Fred Gilbert who heads up design for Google+, who explained how the company arrived at this new, improved look; I see it as a hybrid of a stream and Pinterest-style cards that doesn’t look awkward and ungainly.

It is a responsive design and with a click you switch how you want to see your content — as a stream or as these tiles, Gilbert pointed out. A lot of the new design actually takes a lot of cues from the current mobile versions of Google+, which are actually more advanced compared to the desktop version. At first blush this looks like a unification of mobile and desktop, but there are changes that are visible only on Google’s Chrome browser.

Fred Gilbert, lead designer for the new Google+

Gilbert, who has worked for Google for over five years, explained that a lot of the new design has been shaped by how the web has changed. He pointed out that we are sharing more things more often and as a result the social web is getting busier. You can say that again!

“What I saw was a chance to make people and the content they share the star,” Gilbert said. “Everything else just fades into the background.”

Flat design for a busy world

The design of the new Google+ is muted and flat. The colors are actually quite neutral, allowing mostly the content to shine brighter. “Flatter design keeps the distraction away,” Gilbert said. This new philosophy is reflected in this new version of Google+, which is marked by simplicity and fewer distractions. For instance, unless you are ready to engage with a piece of content, the links appear as regular text, without the distraction of the blue link. Both the left and right sidebar and menus disappear, sliding in and out as needed.

Google has come up with a unique twist on the #hashtag concept and is using it as a way to surface contextual information on the new Google+ service. The new design also liberally uses the concept of cards (that first showed up on Google Now). Hover over an item, and on the back side of the card you get more information and related links and action items.

Gilbert explained that when Google started working on the new look, the idea was to take a lot of information and show it in as simple a manner, giving the eye the visual cues to understand the importance of content. Bigger photos, for instance are indicative of their importance. Photos become bigger based on analysis of past relationships to the people and the content and their ensuing interactions, Gilbert explained.

Data, Design, Experience

Underlying these visual cues are a lot of data analytics. This data-informed design is actually a clever approach and the wave of the data-informed design. Gilbert said that usually when companies undertake a redesign of their website, it is based on some kind of data they have collected over a period of time. For Google+, data is informing the design, except at a much faster speed and is hyper-personalized based on who you really are. “Data and design have to be used together to tailor experiences,” said Gilbert.

We’ll take a close look at how data is informing design at our RoadMap event in November in San Francisco. If you sign up here you can get first access to tickets that will go on sale this Summer.

While Google still is a few years away from developing the human quotient of Apple, the new Google+ shows that the company is thinking correctly about its design identity, not forgetting that its core competency is its infrastructure: its ability to crunch large sets of data cheaply and quickly and then deliver them at blazing speed to our browsers.

The biggest challenge for Google is that Google+ doesn’t really feel like a social network like Facebook or Twitter. Instead it is something that was launched because of a degree of fear and a dash of hubris. It was a social network that Larry wanted, not you and I.

However, it has slowly evolved and has found some fanatical users such as photographer Trey Ratcliff, blogger Robert Scoble and our very own Janko Roettgers, who has turned to Google+ to build a community for his Cord Cutters show and podcasts. Google needs accidental visitors such as me to become active participants. I think the new design will help.

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LinkedIn’s “talent solutions” service, which gives recruiters and hiring managers the ability to post job ads and hunt for candidates, is the fastest-growing and most profitable portion of LinkedIn’s business. The talent solutions homepage saw an update last week that involved several design changes, but it was the addition of the “People You Might Want to Hire” tool that’s sheds the most light on how LinkedIn makes money.

At this point, most professional people are at least aware of LinkedIn, and with the company boasting 200 million registered users, a good number of people now have profile pages listing their work experience and other relevant information on the social networking site. But the consumer-facing side of LinkedIn that you might see is not the portion of the company that brings in the most revenue — or, at least not directly.

The talent solutions portion of LinkedIn brought in 53 percent of the company’s revenue last quarter. The basic service allows corporate recruiters and human resources employeees to post job ads for the company, search for relevant candidates, track responses, and monitor people they might like to hire (yes, a recruiter can put an alert on your profile and know when you make updates or switch jobs.) Companies pay for access to those recruiting features, and the more accurate the data LinkedIn can provide, the more value the companies will derive from the service.

The new feature on the Recruiter page is an intelligent recommendation engine that suggests to recruiters people they might want to hire. It sounds simple enough, and with similar features all over sites like Facebook and Twitter, maybe not so novel. But the feature is huge for LinkedIn on the consumer side already, where the company reports that 50 percent of job seeker engagement comes from the recommended jobs tool, with the other 50 percent coming from people typing into the search bar. Users who are actively looking for jobs might be willing to put in search terms. But people who aren’t actively looking to switch jobs — which LinkedIn estimates is about 80 percent of the current workforce —  are far less likely to search.

“Recommendations have fundamentally changed the trajectory of Linkedin.com,” said Parker Barrile, head of product for talent solutions, in an interview this week. “The recommendations technology that suggests things for members totally change the game. Because we’ve realized how important it is not to expect consumers to actively search for things.”

My colleague Derrick Harris recently wrote about the engineering shift at LinkedIn over the past five years that now allows the company to put significant resources behind engineering projects like recommendations, and Barrile said that refining and perfecting the suggestions has become critically important.

“We’ve invested a lot into the technology that works on those recommendations,” he said. “All of these recommendation technologies learn from the way users interact with them. And LinkedIn’s recommendation technologies have become especiallly responsive because they’re so important to the business.”

The “People You Might Want To Hire” tool takes into account past behavior on the part of the recruiter, as well as data signals from within the job ad, to put together a list of candidates who might be a fit based on a variety of signals. For instance, let’s say you’re an tech company looking to hire for a PR position. The tool won’t just surface people working in technology PR. Instead, it might surface people working in technology who list writing and editing as their skills, or have a number of endorsements for communication or working with a team. Or, let’s say you’re hiring for a venture capital position in San Francisco — the system might also suggest relevant candidates from New York, since it knows people in venture capital are likely to move between the two cities.

Potentially creepy if you start getting a lot of messages from recruiters asking you to move to New York? Maybe. But for people who end up with job offers out of the process, there’s a strong upside to that technology.

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Disconnect.me is one example. Launched in 2010 by a former Google engineer, the company provides “Facebook Disconnect” and other tools to stop the “Like” button and other widgets from siphoning data about your web browsing habits. On Monday, Disconnect launched a major update that not only provides a better picture of which companies want to track you, but also improves web speed.

Disconnect 2: what it is, how it works

In 2010, Google engineer Brian Kennish created a popular extension for the Chromse browser that stopped Facebook tracking. Soon after, feeling conflicted about working for a major data collector, he left Google to work on privacy issues full-time. He formed the company Disconnect along with consumer rights’ attorney Casey Oppenheim and another Googler.

The team’s first move was to replicate the features of Facebook Disconnect and use them to shut out other data-collecting platforms like Google, Twitter and Yahoo. Kennish made these companies his target because their widgets appear on many of the most popular websites on the internet: sites that offer information about health or news or weather. These widgets, which invite a reader to “like” or “share,” also act as backdoor portals that disclose what you’re viewing to advertising and analytic companies. For instance, the social media companies help ad firms learn when when you visit sites like “6 Things I wish I knew about Cancer.”

Now, the company has unveiled Disconnect 2, which Kennish describes as the tool he wanted to build all along. In a phone interview, he and Oppenheim explained that the new version is meant to embody three goals: privacy, speed and “don’t break the internet.” The company says this last goal means that Disconnect’s filtering tools won’t interrupt or interfere with a user’s ordinary browsing experience — even as it screens out more than 2,000 of the biggest data-collecting sites.

Disconnect 2, which you can install on your Chrome or Safari browser, also has a new look that provides much more information at a glance than the previous version. The icon sits in the top right of the browser; here’s what you see when you click on it:

The three letters at the top, which represent Facebook, Google and Twitter, are displayed separately because their tracking tools are found on so many websites. The user can also see the number of other tracking sites broken down by category. The drop-down arrows provide specific information about those other tracking sites. Meanwhile, hovering over the bars at the bottom shows how much faster the page loads without all the tracking tools (in this case, 28 percent) as well as how much less data is being consumed:

Finally, users can also pull up an image of just which companies trying to track them on a given webpage. If you click “Visualize page,” this is what you see:

The above image shows that BuzzFeed is one of the dozens of sites, including advertisers, data firms and analytics companies, that request information when I visit the Huffington Post (I don’t mean to single out either BuzzFeed or HuffPo — a similar graphic appears if you visit Reuters, ESPN, Weather.com or nearly any other well-known site — including GigaOM).

What Disconnect 2 means for users, publishers and advertisers

The new version of Disconnect should be a hit with privacy-craving internet users, who will welcome the opportunity to throw up a bigger shield between their social media identities and companies that want their data. The faster, less-cluttered browsing experience is also appealing. Publishers and advertisers, however, will not be giving Kennish and crew a high-five anytime soon.

That’s because, in addition to cutting off tracking sites, Disconnect 2 also strips out many of the ads that appear on a website (I visited Drudge Report, for instance, and the prime top-of-the-page ad had vanished). This is hardly good news for publishers navigating an already challenging ad economy. Advertisers too will be unimpressed since the data Disconnect is unplugging is the lifeblood of popular “retargeting” campaigns.

On the other hand, publishers and advertisers can take comfort in the fact that only a relative handful of users are sophisticated enough to understand the tracking issue in the first place — let alone download a special browser extension to stop it. According to the company, there are one million active users a week for the original Disconnect. While advertisers may fear a future surge in the tool’s popularity, that number alone will not have them quaking in their boots.

Disconnect 2: no match for the movement to mobile

While Disconnect 2 has the potential to throw a wrench into the advertising operations of Facebook and Google, it’s also unlikely to check the larger erosion of privacy taking place all around us. The reason for this is not because Disconnect 2 is an esoteric product. The problem is instead that its arrival coincides with a major shift in how we explore the internet.

Today, the most serious threat to our privacy is not the screen on our desk but the one in our pocket. Our smartphones are not just little computers — they are also GPS tracking devices that record our every movement and many our thoughts. Consumers happily enable this process with toys that blare their location like Foursquare and Facebook. And the trend is only accelerating (see Om’s trenchant thoughts in ”Why Facebook Home bothers me“).

In the face of this voluntary surrender of our location and habits, does Disconnect’s attempt to staunch the tide of desktop data even matter? It can certainly help, of course. At a time when Facebook is collecting not just our online habits but our offline ones too (the company is now partnering with retailers like drug stores), any tool that will deprive them of data will be a comfort to privacy advocates. Overall, though, Disconnect is unlikely to be a game changer.

Kennish appears to recognize this. In our phone interview, he said the company is at work on tools to limit the spread of data from mobile devices. He also stresses that one of Disconnect’s primary goals is education and awareness. By distributing a tool that helps average people understand how their data is collected, the company can help build a critical mass aware of what is happening and what is at stake.

Finally, here’s a video in which the company explains Disconnect 2 in its own words:

Correction: This story was amended at 3pm on Monday to state that the original version of Disconnect has 1 million active users, not 1 million downloads.

(Image by  Sergey Nivens via Shutterstock)

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If nothing else, the incident helps reinforce just how blurry the line is between plagiarism and sloppy attribution — and also how the the web makes it easier to provide attribution via hyperlinks, but at the same time makes it harder to define what is plagiarism or content theft and what isn’t.

To Jeremy Duns, who first blew the whistle on what he said was Thayer’s plagiarism, the case seemed open and shut: chunks of the article about North Korea and basketball, including a number of quotes, appeared to have been lifted straight from a piece by San Diego Union-Tribune writer Mark Zeigler on the same topic in 2006. And there was virtually no attribution of any kind in the original version of Thayer’s story, which appeared at the NKNews.com site, apart from one oblique reference to the Union-Tribune — and no links.

Is a small link to the source enough?

Even as Duns was writing his blog post about this incident of plagiarism, however, links began to appear in the Thayer piece, including a link to Zeigler’s original story. To Duns, this was evidence that the author was trying to cover his tracks, but in a comment to Columbia Journalism Review, NKNews editor Tad Farrell said that the lack of links was due to an editing error and that the site added them as soon as it could. Thayer vehemently denied that he was a plagiarist or that he intended to leave out the attribution.

So all’s well that ends well, right? In a follow-up post, the CJR’s Sara Morrison said that Duns clearly jumped to the wrong conclusions (since at least one of those who provided a quote that Duns questioned confirmed that they had in fact talked to Thayer for his piece). Duns wasn’t buying it, however, saying the attribution and links were only added later under protest. As he put it:

“Even hyperlinking to such a huge lift without mentioning the publication or author at all would have been something of a stretch – it’s a hell of a lot of material taken directly to cite with just one bolded word.”

Interestingly enough, Zeigler wasn’t all that satisfied either: although he said he wasn’t prepared to call Thayer a plagiarist, he didn’t think a couple of small links were enough to give him the appropriate attribution for his work. As he put it: “I don’t think just highlighting a few words of type in a different color necessarily qualifies as a proper attribution,” adding that his story “took a lot of work and a lot of man hours” to report and write.

The problem is that while adding hyperlinks is a great way of avoiding a charge of plagiarism — something that might have helped Fox News opinion writer Juan Williams and other alleged plagiarists — there is no accepted protocol for how or where to add those links, or how much content someone can cut and paste into their story or blog post without crossing the line from borrowing into plagiarism or copyright infringement.

How much content is too much to take?

This is also the root of the controversy over what some call the “over-aggregation” by sites like The Huffington Post and Business Insider, where large chunks of stories from other sites — and in some cases, the entire story or post — is published, along with a “via” link somewhere at the bottom of the post. Other blogs, including The Verge and Engadget, have been criticized in the past for burying links to the original source of the content they reproduce, to try and disguise what they have borrowed.

And if you broaden the lens even further, a similar problem is at the root of the fight that Google has been up against in country after country over its use of excerpts from news stories in Google News — stories that come from newspapers and other traditional sources. Germany has passed a law to control the use of such excerpts, even those as short as a single word, and in other countries like France and Belgium, those traditional outlets have sued Google to try and force payment for that content.

Google’s defence is that it links prominently to the original source, and this drives traffic to the publisher’s site, which is fundamentally the same argument that Business Insider and Huffington Post and others use to defend their aggregation of content. But those whose content is used argue, as Brian Morrissey of Digiday did in a back-and-forth with Business Insider founder Henry Blodget, that taking their content produces far more value for the aggregator than it provides in return.

So it seems that when it comes to making use of someone else’s content, linking as a way of providing attribution and credit is enough — except when it isn’t.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock / Zurijeta and Arvind Grover

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I tried to help answer that question in my post from last year: Amplification and the changing role of media. The gist of that post was that “as more sources of news start to go direct by posting their thoughts to their blogs, Twitter and Facebook pages, a journalist’s role becomes more about deciding what to amplify and what to ignore.”

…the rise of the social web, that has changed. Blogs, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other such platforms have made it easy for news makers to go direct to their constituents. So what is the role of today’s media person? In addition to reporting news, I think picking things to amplify is also important. Back in the day, news people made a choice by deciding which stories to write. Today, we have to adopt a similar rigor about what we choose to share and amplify. In sharing (on Twitter or even re-blogging) we are sending the same message as doing an original news report.

The big media outlets still have one thing that they can leverage: attention. By leveraging that attention and highlighting things worth highlighting, they can continue to bring the news to their constituents and at the same time add veracity to it — and thereby add the kind of value that makes them worth keeping around.

“The idea is that people will start to build real-time search into their applications,” said Hilary Mason, Bit.ly’s chief scientist, in an interview explaining the release. The company announced full details of the API in a blog post on its website Tuesday.

The company launched its real-time product to users this summer. It is available to users with Bit.ly accounts at rt.ly, where they can fill out various information fields to see which news stories are getting the most hits across the globe, or see which topics are popular. For instance, this is where you could search for food articles in Brooklyn, New York, United States, and see that something called a “Turkish bagel” is riling people up.

Now, with the release of this API, developers will be able to integrate the real-time search features into their apps, showing what information sent through Bit.ly is being read, where it’s being read, and how often. For instance, a publisher could show which of its articles are the most popular in a particular geographic area, or companies could track where around the globe consumers are reading about its product. Bit.ly’s real-time product also allows for the tracking of particular topics or phrases that are getting a good deal of attention via social media.

Of course, all of the tracked trends on what’s being read right now are necessarily stories tweeted from Bit.ly links, but that’s no insignificant measure. The company, which came from Betaworks, shortened 8.4 billion links in 2012. The company raised $15 million led by Khosla Ventures this summer, bringing its total funding to more than $28 million.

“Bit.ly is in a great position to see this kind of social data. We see a slice of what people are sharing and reading across the social web. So this is a way to start to put that power in the hands of people who can build interesting things with it,” she said.

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But those same kinds of disruptions are moving into new areas, and education is one of them. From university classes via YouTube and startups like Udacity to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, there are more ways than ever for children to educate themselves, even in remote villages in Ethiopia. Despite the inevitable criticisms such efforts get both from within the education system and outside it, it’s part of a powerful and growing phenomenon.

One example: At a recent conference on emerging technology at MIT, Nicholas Negroponte — the former head of the MIT Media Lab and founder of the OLPC project — talked about what his group noticed about the villages in Ethiopia, where some devices were dropped off. The Motorola Xoom tablets, which were distributed along with a solar-charging system, were delivered in boxes to two isolated rural villages about 50 miles from the capital of Addis Ababa, where Negroponte said the children had never before seen printed English words — not even packaging or road signs with printed letters.

Even with no teachers, students taught themselves

Although the OLPC founder says the group expected most of the children to spend their time “playing with the boxes,” in a matter of minutes they had powered up the devices and, within days, they were using a number of apps included with the system. Even more remarkably, within weeks, they had figured out how to “hack” their way around restrictions built into the software to change the laptop’s display background. Thanks to the tablets, they were singing ABC songs and even spelling words in English. Said Negroponte:

“Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera.”

Negroponte later admitted that this small test in two villages wasn’t enough to reach any hard conclusions about the success of such an effort, but, as several commenters at MIT’s Technology Review — and in a discussion at Hacker News — noted, this is not the first attempt to do such a thing: Dr. Sugata Mitra, a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University, launched a project called the “Hole In The Wall” in 1999 in the slums of New Delhi that provided a single computer to children nearby. With little instruction and no formal background in computers, they were able to learn a surprising amount.

In fact, Mitra’s experiences were one of the inspirations for the OLPC approach in Ethiopia, according to OLPC’s chief technology officer Ed McNierney. And, while the experiment has drawn a fair degree of criticism on a number of fronts — from those who believe the money for such projects should go towards teachers and schools instead of laptops, or from those who question whether OLPC can scale large enough to make a difference — Pando Daily founder Sarah Lacy says that she has seen laptops in use in places like Colombia and Rwanda, and they have changed lives for the better.

“I’ve actually seen OLPC laptops being used on the ground in countries like Colombia and Rwanda — and when you see lives so dramatically changed by something, it’s pretty hard to dismiss it as not world-changing enough.”

Education even finds a way around governments

A second example of how a seemingly innocuous technology like YouTube — especially when combined with a social network — can change lives comes from Time magazine, which wrote recently about an 11-year-old girl in Pakistan who was taking an introductory university-level physics class through an educational startup called Udacity. Unfortunately, just as Khadijah Niazi was about to complete the final exam for the course (along with 23,000 other people), her country’s government cut off access to YouTube, which Udacity uses to distribute short instructional clips.

In less than an hour, according to Time, a young man who was taking the same class in Malaysia started posting descriptions of each video and the test questions involved. Meanwhile, a physics professor taking the same class in Portugal tried to find a way around the YouTube blockage — and when that failed, she downloaded all of the videos and then uploaded them to a non-censored site that Niazi could access, a process that took four hours. The next day, the young girl passed the exam with flying colors and became the youngest ever to complete the Udacity course. As Time describes it:

“None of these students had met one another in person. The class directory included people from 125 countries. But, after weeks in the class, helping one another with Newton’s laws, friction and simple harmonic motion, they’d started to feel as if they shared the same carrel in the library. Together, they’d found a passageway into a rigorous, free, college-level class, and they weren’t about to let anyone lock it up.”

Udacity and the OLPC project are only two of the many startups and other ventures that are trying to change the way education occurs — not just in North America, but everywhere. There is also the Khan Academy, which started with Salman Khan using YouTube videos as a way of teaching his young niece about mathematics and now has delivered more than 200 million individual lessons. And there is Coursera, which is designed to allow any educational institution to offer online instruction. Although the latter ran into a brief regulatory roadblock in Minnesota, there are signs that these kinds of innovative efforts are being accepted: Udacity courses are now being approved for credit by some universities, including one in Colorado.

Whether it’s moribund educational institutions or governments or just bureaucratic red tape, what examples like these show is that the disruption of education continues whether such entities like it or not. Students will find a way to learn if they are given the opportunity, and technology and the social web are providing some powerful ways of doing that.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Vince Alongi and One Laptop Per Child

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A new study on social media and civic engagement from the Pew Internet & American Life Project released Friday compares social media behavior between Democrats, Republicans and independents. Among its findings it said that while 52 percent of liberal Democrats who use social media have used the “like” button, 42 percent of conservative Republicans have done so. Overall, Pew said that 38 percent of people who use social media “like” content related to political or social issues.

In general, the study, which included more than 2,200 adults of voting age or older, found that 66 percent of American adults who use social media –- or 39 percent of all American adults –- have done at least one of eight civic or political activities on social media. Not so surprisingly, the more partisan social media users are more likely than their moderate peers to use social networks for political purposes. Also (not so surprisingly), the study found that younger users are more vocal about their political leanings online than older social media users over 50.

Even though liberal Democrats tend to “like” more online, Pew reports that conservative Republicans are also quite active in social media and aren’t bested by Democrats on every social media action. For example, while 39 percent of Republicans have reposted content in social media, 34 percent of Democrats and 31 percent of independents have done the same.  In general, 33 percent of social media have used tools for this purpose, the report said. Conservative Republicans (32 percent) also use social media to follow elected representatives in greater numbers than liberal Democrats (27 percent).

You can check out the full report here and see a few more findings from Pew below:

• 35 percent of social media users have used social media to encourage people to vote. Democrats who use social media are more likely to have used social media to encourage voting — 42 percent have done that compared with 36 percent of Republican social media users and 31 percent of independents.

• 34 percent of social media users have used the tools to post their own political or social thoughts and comments. Liberal Democrats who use social media (42 percent) and conservative Republicans (41 percent) are especially likely to use social media for this purpose.

• 31 percent of social media users have used social media to encourage other people to take action on a political or social issue that is important to them. Democrats lead on this action with 36 percent, followed by Republicans with 34 percent and independents with 29 percent.

• 28 percent of social media users have posted links to political stories or articles for others to read. 39 percent of liberal Democrats have done this, as have 34 percent of conservative Republicans.

• 21 percent of those who use social networks or Twitter belong to a social networking group involved in political or social issues.

Image by SFerdon via Shutterstock.

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