For the last six or so months I’ve been running on the assumption that social networks were replacing email.

Like most every opinion I have, this belief turned out to be completely unfounded and untrue.

Researchers at Nielsen believed the same thing and created a study to test this hypothesis. And their early findings show that the opposite is true:the more people use social media, the more time they spend on email, too.

The email use of high and medium social media consumers has jumped between April 2008 and 2009. In fact, the email use of high social media consumers has more than doubled in that time, increasing more than 100 minutes a month to just under 190 minutes in April 2009.

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The amount of times spent of social networks has tripled in the last year, according to Nielsen (PDF).

A year ago, users spent 6 percent of their online time on social networks, but as of August 2009, time spent on social networks now represents 17 percent of total internet use.

“This growth suggests a wholesale change in the way the Internet is used,” said Nielsen’s Jon Gibs.

“While video and text content remain central to the Web experience – the desire of online consumers to connect, communicate and share is increasingly driving the medium’s growth,” Gibs said.

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Added functionality is coming to the Google Toolbar in the form of Google Sidewiki . It lives in the browser sidebar, and hopes to group user-created entries by relevancy. Different individual reactions, insights or other information appear alongside the Web page, grouped by an algorithm that aims to promote useful entries, rather than just the most recent ones.

Sidewiki was announced on the Official Google Blog Wednesday, and the product is available now for Firefox or Internet Explorer, and soon for Chrome and other browsers.

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The newest installments of digital book readers keep widening the definition of what these devices do - will it have a button interface or tablet style, will it also be useful for holding images or music? Further muddying up the eReader image are newly leaked images from Microsoft, and another from Netherlands-based IREX Technologies.

The Microsoft reader’s called a Courier for now, says Business Week, and has an open-book look with dual-screen configuration. Controlled by stylus or finger gestures, the touchscreens may have multitouch capabilities equivalent to a color Touch edition Sony e-reader. However, PC World suggests that this device may not even make it to production, but may only be an imaginative competitive exercise.

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A few years back, at an old job in a state far, far away, one of my fellow co-workers was fired because of a post she made on MySpace.

Wherein she threatened to put laxative in our coffee.

A long HR battle ensued, the main point of contention being whether what she had MySpaced (didn’t it look like I just wrote in Sanskrit there?) was technically in the public or private realm.

A few years later, we all know the answer to that question. Every week there’s a new Facebook/Twitter firing or faux pas, the latest that I know of being when a California Pizza Kitchen employee criticized his company’s uniform switch.

With human resources departments increasingly having to deal with social-network-related problems, there still isn’t any consensus on how to treat social-networking job infractions.

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On September 22nd, celebrate OneWebDay, a day inspired by Earth Day and intended to help shrink the digital divide.

OneWebDay is both a celebration of our digital lives and an attempt to make those lives available to all.

“The Web is a vital shared resource, but most people are not empowered to take part in defining the direction of this now indispensable resource,” according to the event’s website.

“Some take it for granted, some cannot breach the barriers to access, and some relinquish control to authoritative institutions that are all too happy to fill the void of public leadership,” according to the site.

OneWebDay was founded in 2006 by Susan Crawford, professor of law at the University of Michigan and President Barack Obama’s Special Assistant for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy.

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Google Books has experienced much backlash from publishers with its plans to offer digital copies of public domain and other types of books. During the congressional hearing Thursday, the company discussed with opponents the settlement that could give it rights to digitally distribute some works. But part of the agreement is that rivals would also be able to sell access to these digital copies.

According to the Wall Street Journal , Paul Misener, Amazon.com Inc’s vice president for global public policy, wants to work directly with rights holders, not through Google. But Authors Guild executive director Paul Aiken approved Google’s decision. “Having books available through multiple outlets directly addresses the antitrust issues,” he said, and would generate additional book sales.

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Multimedia multitaskers are mentally less fit than those who undertake one task at a time, a Stanford study finds.

According to the researchers conducting the study of about 100 Stanford students, multitaskers are deficient in memory and attention.

“They’re suckers for irrelevancy,” says communication professor Clifford Nass. “Everything distracts them.”

In a series of tasks designed to measure how well test subjects ignore distractions, store and organize information and switch between tasks, the test-group of students who self-identified as multimedia multitaskers performed worse than those who didn’t.

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Much has been written lately about the problem of BlackBerrys and employee overtime. A host of lawsuits have arisen in the past year as the legal system attempts to close the technological gap the device has created.

How much do BlackBerrys intrude into employees’ non-work lives? An average of 15 hours a week in the UK, according to employment law firm Peninsula.

According to the firm’s survey of over 600 employees, the additional internet time is boosting the work week to almost 60 hours.

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The thing that stops many new Twitter users in their tracks is the visual chaos. Twitter is a messy place, with short verbal blasts and bit.ly links flying in all directions, a far cry from the minimalist restraint of Facebook profiles.

Pear Analytics studied Twitter’s noise-to-message ratio, analyzing 2,000 public tweets generated between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. CST over a two-week period.

They placed tweet content into five categories: News (minus tech news, which Pear took out of the category), Spam, Self Promotion (corporate self promotion, not the kind you see on Facebook), Pointless Babble (the kind you see on Facebook), Conversational (tweets that turn into conversation) and those with Pass Along Value (anything retweeted).

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