With the aim of bettering communication with their employees, two-thirds of companies plan on increasing their use of social media next year, according to employment consultancy Watson Wyatt.

Sixty-five percent of the 328 global companies polled by Watson Wyatt plan on increasing their social media usage in 2010.

The benefits of using social media to improve workplace communications are obvious, especially when one considers the values of real time over email and the potential savings fostered by things like VoIP. There is also a sense of community that can be established with social media, as well as an ability to increase employee engagement.

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Who is the online you?

According to Microsoft researcher and Harvard fellow dana boyd, you are who you follow on Twitter.

“The you that you create on social networks is a you that you create for your community,” boyd said, speaking earlier this week at Wharton’s Supernova 2009 conference in San Francisco.

“The community determines you,” boyd said. “You imitate the people you follow.”

Maybe because we approach things with similar sets of assumptions (academic), I tend to agree with boyd, even if academic discourse is as culturally determined as anything else, if not more so (while it is the language that interrogates privilege, it is also the language of privilege).

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Women’s presence on social networks is far greater than that of men, according to Pingdom’s demographic study of 19 social networking sites.

Eighty-seven percent of social networks have more female users than males. Those with the highest percentage of female users are Bebo, MySpace, Classmates, Xanga, Ning and Twitter.

Two-thirds of Bebo’s users are female, while MySpace and Classmates have close to that (64 percent each).

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In an apparent effort to unfriend the Oxford American Dictionary, the Global Language Monitor has named Twitter its word of the year.

“Twitter represents a new form of social interaction, where all communication is reduced to 140 characters,” said Paul JJ Payack, President of The Global Language Monitor.

“Being limited to strict formats did wonders for the sonnet and haiku,” Payack said “One wonders where this highly impractical word-limit will lead as the future unfolds.”

Apparently, it’s the verb form of Twitter (‘to twitter something’) that was chosen, as opposed to the noun. The Global Language Monitor defines the word as “The ability to encapsulate human thought in 140 characters,” which I suppose means that ‘twittering something’ is beating our ‘tweeting something’ in popular usage.

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Last week, the Webby Awards named the top ten Internet moments of the decade.

Each of the winners represents how the internet has triumphed over old technologies and practices.

“The Internet is the story of the decade because it was the catalyst for change in not just every aspect of our everyday lives, but in everything from commerce and communication to politics and pop culture,” said David-Michel Davies, the executive director of the Webby Awards.

“The recurring theme among all of the milestones on our list is the Internet’s capacity to circumvent old systems and put more power into the hands of ordinary people,” he said.

The Webby Award’s top ten are:

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Despite the recession, most U.S. and U.K companies have continued or increased their spending on innovation, according to Accenture. Two-thirds of the companies polled had either maintained or increased their innovation spend in the last six months.

Nearly half (48 percent) of the U.S. and U.K. executives surveyed by Accenture said that their companies had increased funding for innovation in the last six months. One-third of respondents said the level of spend had remained the same.

In fact, innovation is seen as a top priority for their economic recovery. Eighty-nine percent of the survey’s respondents said that innovation was more important to their company’s future growth than cost reduction was.

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A new survey by Hunch has proven what brand managers have been telling us for years: Microsoft users are sheep. At least compared to Mac users, who, the study finds, are more creative and individualistic than PC users.

Mac people view the world of conformity and want to be different, opting for colors, retro designs, unique clothing and highly stylized art.

PC users, on the other hand think that “the world is different enough” and value conformity.Their aesthetic is “mainstream modern,” (whatever’s popular at the moment) and when buying for lifestyle they prefer practicality over design.

Mac users also tend towards indie films, “specialized comedians,” and magazines that focus on design. PC users, on the other hand, are 50 percent more likely to like paintings of dogs playing poker.

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Jack Thompson cannot be happy about this.

As part of President Obama’s “Educate to Innovate” program to advance U.S. science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education, several contests to advance youth STEM education through video-game design have been launched.

“There is no better way to engage and motivate youth then to reach them with familiar imagery and activities they deeply enjoy,” said Dean Garfield, president and CEO of the Information Technology Industry Council.

A group composed of the MacArthur Foundation, Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA), the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI), Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA), the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation and Microsoft are behind the two competitions.

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{b=”GGHJJHGECCEG”.ascii.stutter;f=Duty.kr(0.15,0,Dseq([b,71!3,69!5,b,69!3,67!5,0].flat.midicps))*[1,2];LFCub.ar(f)/9}.play

That’s Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, written in SuperCollider, the programming language behind sc140, the first album of music composed expressly for tweets.

Up to five minutes of music can be squeezed into 140 SuperCollider characters.

Dan Stowell, a composer and PhD candidate in computer science at the University of London, was composing with SuperCollider and tweeted instructions on how to compose with it. Suddenly, many people were tweeting their songs.

“Some of the tweets made such great music that I couldn’t just let them vanish into the ether,” Stowell said. “So I brought all the best ones together in an online album.”

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Here is a report that just makes me sad.

In-Stat predicts that, by 2013, thirty-one percent of all notebooks will be sold through carriers. Why does that make me sad? Because subsidized computers can end up being a lot more expensive than just paying for them up front.

“In the US, carriers are charging up to $60 per month for a two year contract with the subsidized purchase of a netbook,” said Jim McGregor, In-Stat analyst.

“While the subsidy costs the carrier $50–$100, it generates $1,440 or more in service fees over the life of the contract,” McGregor said.

Consumers should be afraid of this trend, and should fight it. We’ve already seen how much power carriers have when they are the gatekeepers to technology. AT&T’s iPhone exclusivity, and the utter powerlessness of dissatisfied customers, is a good lesson in this.

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