“So much of the information out there about using web and social media marketing is geared towards selling products and services,” commented Jake Dell, Episcopal Church senior manager of Digital Marketing and Advertising. “We saw the need to write a guide that Episcopal congregations could use and would speak to them, but at the same time we wanted to ”˜borrow’ as much as we could from the business world. We didn’t see a need to re-invent the wheel.”

Included in free Social Media and The Episcopal Church are: six Best Practices; “How To” tips for each practice; and separate sections on church websites and dealing with negative social media.

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Companies have long used criminal background checks, credit reports and even searches on Google and LinkedIn to probe the previous lives of prospective employees. Now, some companies are requiring job candidates to also pass a social media background check.

A year-old start-up, Social Intelligence, scrapes the Internet for everything prospective employees may have said or done online in the past seven years.

Then it assembles a dossier with examples of professional honors and charitable work, along with negative information that meets specific criteria: online evidence of racist remarks; references to drugs; sexually explicit photos, text messages or videos; flagrant displays of weapons or bombs and clearly identifiable violent activity.

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Psychology experiments showed that people presented with difficult questions began to think of computers.

When participants knew that facts would be available on a computer later, they had poor recall of answers but enhanced recall of where they were stored.

The researchers say the internet acts as a “transactive memory” that we depend upon to remember for us.

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Several states have passed laws requiring affiliates of online retailers like Amazon (AMZN) to collect and remit sales taxes. “Amazon tax” laws have passed in California, New York, Colorado, Rhode Island, North Carolina, Connecticut and Illinois. Lawmakers have tried in at least 14 other states.

But in nearly every case, online retailers have cut ties with their state affiliates. Residents can still buy from the e-tailers, but the affiliates lose business or move.

“The nation’s first few Amazon taxes have not produced any revenue at all, and there is some evidence of lost revenue,” according to a National Tax Foundation study last year.

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Spotify in now playing in the U.S.

The online music service, hugely popular in Europe, is now live in the States. But to start using Spotify, users need to be invited in — a very Google-esque move. Well, that is unless you’re willing to sign up and pay for Spotify.

The music-streaming service has been expected for more than a year now as Spotify had to reach agreements with record labels over licensing rights to songs on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.

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The Internal Revenue Service didn’t always properly notify taxpayers after inadvertently disclosing personal information, according to a Treasury Department audit released Thursday.

Not all citizens were notified that their personal information had been released, in a sample of 98 case files from the 2009 and 2010 fiscal years that the IRS had flagged as inadvertent disclosures of personal taxpayer information, according to a report from the Treasury Inspector General for Taxpayer Administration.

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The military must move from defending against cyberattacks to actively deterring such attacks, a top general said Thursday as the Pentagon unveiled a new strategy for dealing with threats from computer hackers.

Under the strategy, the military will seek to develop new protections for military and defense-contractor computer networks. Officials say they will also develop strategies for employing U.S. cyberweapons to retaliate against major cyberattacks.

The Pentagon has concluded that the laws of armed conflict apply in cyberspace, as was previously reported by The Wall Street Journal.

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(The above title is from the print version–KSH).

My 8-year-old son has used Facebook just once. “Call me, Uncle Marc,” he wrote to my brother from my husband’s account. When he didn’t get an instantaneous response–Uncle Marc was at an Allman Brothers concert–he was not terribly impressed by the site that has nearly 700 million people under its spell.

So I am not among the many parents who freaked out when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced his desire to upend the Children’s Online Privacy and Protection Act, which requires websites that collect user information to get parental permission via credit-card verification, for example, for anyone under the age of 13. “That will be a fight we take on at some point. My philosophy is that for education, you need to start at a really, really young age,” said the baby-faced Facebook founder.

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More than one million websites closed down in China last year, a state-run think tank has said.

The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said there were were 41% fewer websites at the end of 2010 than a year earlier.

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Consumers who illegally download copyrighted films, music or television shows might see their Internet speed slowed or access restricted under an industry anti-piracy effort announced on Thursday.

U.S. Internet service providers, including Verizon Communications Inc, Comcast Corp, Time Warner Cable Inc, Cablevision Systems Corp and AT&T Inc agreed to alert customers, up to six times, when it appears their account is used for illegal downloading. Warnings will come as e-mails or pop-up messages.

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When Pooja Nath was an undergraduate at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, an elite engineering school in India, she felt isolated. She was one of the few women on campus. While her male classmates collaborated on problem sets, Ms. Nath toiled in the computer lab alone.

“Back then, no one owned a laptop, there was no Internet in the dorm rooms. So everyone in my class would be working in the computer lab together,” she said. “But all the guys would be communicating with each other, getting help so fast, and I would be on the sidelines just watching.”

The experience as a young woman in that culture formed the foundation of her start-up in Silicon Valley, Piazza….

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It is a good day to reflect on America–her history and founding, her calling and responsibility, her past and her future. Therefore I will keep the posts today exclusively on the Independence Day/America theme–KSH.

1. Every big news story has a faith angle….

2. Atheists are the most fervent commenters on matters religious….

3. People are still intensely curious about the Bible, its meaning and its origins….

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Benedict XVI is pushing Vatican communication to take “enormous steps,” according to the president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications.

Archbishop Claudio Celli affirmed this today when he presented News.va, the Vatican’s new Web portal that will bring news from various Church sources to the same site.

Read it all and check the new website.

Google is trying once again to challenge Facebook’s domination of the social networking business. Its main social networking site “Orkut” is very popular in Brazil, but in the rest of the world, Google trails Facebook.

But the company has a new attempt to catch up.

The new social network is called Google Plus, and you’re not allowed to join it. At least, not yet.

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[Rowan] Williams outlined several challenges churches will encounter this century and urged them to use new means of communication and social media to spread the gospel more effectively.

“There is virtually nowhere you can go in the world where you won’t see a mobile telephone. The church needs to learn how use these new means of communications more effectively for the sake of the gospel. If we have social media, they can also be media for communion,” he said.

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There is no independent journalistic entity that covers the Episcopal Church in the fashion that the Church Times covers the Church of England, and thus no one to hold us accountable when we are being unnecessarily secretive, or when people in positions of authority insist on prerogatives that aren’t healthy for the wider church. We have to do that ourselves.

—Jim Naughton of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, D.C.

The government urgently needs to recruit an elite cadre of innovators able to lead a workforce with a different, entrepreneurial ethos ”“ including hackers ”“ as solvers of puzzles. Rather than developing security measures in bunkers or silos, we should be bold and emulate the “small world clusters” that brought together the world’s best health laboratories to defeat the Sars epidemic in weeks, not years. The US now admits to a “human capital crisis in cybersecurity,” with estimates that up to 30,000 cybersecurity professionals are needed against the 1,000 it has. The answer could lie in online self-managing collaborative ventures of the kind that created the free open-source pc operating system, Linux. That is the future of cybersecurity, open networks collaborating against mutual threats.

Critically, innovation must not fall victim to budget constraints in the current climate of austerity. The US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff has described the economic crisis and recession as the greatest challenge to national security. In the US, cybersecurity co-ordinator Howard Schmidt forms strategic links with economic policy through the office of management and budget in the White House. The UK National Security Council appears to distance itself from economic matters, regardless of the security risks in a sluggish recovery. Britain needs to learn from the US and ask whether enough cyberspending is allocated to education, research and development. Strategies have to evolve fast. It is not yet too late.

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Twenty years into the Web, academic publishing has retained pretty much the same structures it had in the 19th century.

That’s the argument made by Dan Cohen, director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Most journals, he notes, will not allow comments on articles. Pieces can’t be revised after publication. They’re locked up behind digital gates, so no one can link to them. And multimedia work? Forget it.

But much scholarship thrives outside that system, Mr. Cohen says, in formats like lengthy blog posts and the “gray literature” of conference papers. On Wednesday, the professor announced a new publishing platform to showcase the best of that online work….

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Coming soon to the Internet: website addresses that end in “.bank,” “.Vegas” and “.Canon.”

The organization that oversees the Internet address system is preparing to open the floodgates to a nearly limitless selection of new website suffixes, including ones in Arabic, Chinese and other scripts. That could usher in the most sweeping transformation of the Domain Name System since its creation in the 1980s.

More than 300 suffixes are available today, the bulk of them country-code domains, such as “.uk” for the United Kingdom and “.de” for Germany.

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You probably missed the recent special issue of China Newsweek, so let me bring you up to date. Who do you think was on the cover ”” named the “most influential foreign figure” of the year in China? Barack Obama? No. Bill Gates? No. Warren Buffett? No. O.K., I’ll give you a hint: He’s a rock star in Asia, and people in China, Japan and South Korea scalp tickets to hear him. Give up?

It was Michael J. Sandel, the Harvard University political philosopher.

This news will not come as a surprise to Harvard students, some 15,000 of whom have taken Sandel’s legendary “Justice” class….

(It also will not come as a surprise to close readers of this blog, since we featured this amazing resource last September–KSH).

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Oh, Facebook, here we go again.

The social media giant is facing a new wave of concerns over privacy protection after launching its latest feature, which allows users to identify their friends automatically in photos without their permission.

The photo tagging tool, called Tag Suggestions, was put into place in December, but it was listed as unavailable until recently.

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See what you think.

Most of [University of Oxford Professor Robin] Dunbar’s research has focused on why the GORE-TEX model was a success. That model is based on the idea that human beings can hold only about 150 meaningful relationships in their heads. Dunbar has researched the idea so deeply, the number 150 has been dubbed “Dunbar’s Number.”

Ironically, the term was coined on Facebook, where 150 friends may seem like precious few.

“There was a discussion by people saying ‘I’ve got too many friends ”” I don’t know who half these people are,'” Dunbar says. “Somebody apparently said, ‘Look, there’s this guy in England who says you can’t have more than 150.'”

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Dating online the second time around ”“ after divorce or the death of a spouse ”“ isn’t always second nature among boomers, let alone people who are 65 and older, but neither is it all that scary.

Yet they often have unrealistic notions of how to hunt for love and companionship, said Pepper Schwartz, a sociology professor at the University of Washington in Seattle who is also a sex and relationship expert for the AARP and developer of an algorithm to make matches more meaningful on the dating site PerfectMatch.com.

“People 65 or older, they’re picky in a different way,” she said. “Young people tend to go for looks, period. Older people often have a little bit more leeway on what somebody looks like, but then they have all these other kinds of requirements that may or may not be realistic.”

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Google Inc. is blaming computer hackers in China for a high-tech ruse that broke into the personal Gmail accounts of several hundred people, including senior U.S. government officials, military personnel and political activists.

The breach announced Wednesday marks the second time in 17 months that Google has publicly identified China as the home base for a scheme aimed at hijacking information stored on Google’s vast network of computers.

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The Pentagon has concluded that computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war, a finding that for the first time opens the door for the U.S. to respond using traditional military force.

The Pentagon’s first formal cyber strategy, unclassified portions of which are expected to become public next month, represents an early attempt to grapple with a changing world in which a hacker could pose as significant a threat to U.S. nuclear reactors, subways or pipelines as a hostile country’s military.

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Check it out, especially fitting the week of Memorial Day.

Research shows that around 2.6 million children in the UK are living with parents who are drinking hazardously and 705,000 are living with dependent drinkers. (1)

The Children’s Commissioner for England and The Children’s Society have today published the first booklet of its kind for use by children affected by a parent or carer drinking too much alcohol. It will help them to have frank discussions with teachers, professionals or an adult who they trust when they are worried about a parent or carer and the problems caused by their alcohol consumption.

Read it all and follow the links from The Children’s Society.

The Toronto Star reports that, following their home waterbirth, Witterick, 38, and her husband, David Stocker, 39, sent a simple email to everyone in their social network, explaining that they planned to keep their child’s biological sex a secret. Only six people — apart from Storm — know the child’s biological sex: the parents, his or her two brothers Jazz, 5, and Kio, 2, and the two midwives present at the baby’s birth.

“We’ve decided not to share Storm’s sex for now — a tribute to freedom and choice in place of limitation, a stand up to what the world could become in Storm’s lifetime (a more progressive place? …),” the Toronto-based couple wrote.

At only 4 months old, Storm has already lived up to his or her name, birthing a tempest of controversy. The story has made international headlines, was featured on “Today” and “The View” … [recently] and has spurred ethical debates throughout the parenting blogosphere.

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