Social media is about community, right? Social media is about relationships, correct? What is required in a genuine relationship? People exchanging ideas and thoughts with each other and getting to know each other is how I look at it in an incredibly basic sense. At least that’s what I think. While social media is considered to be advancing our ability to connect with others it is still important to caution just how much we trust who is saying what.

Update: The poll was found to have been created by a minor, and determined to be a prank. Apparently there will be no charges filed.

Original Article: Someone created a poll on Facebook asking "Should Obama be killed?" using a third-party application. The poll was taken down, but not before 751 people voted on it. The options were:

President Barack Obama addressed the United Nations today in a speech in New York City. The event has of course inspired a lot of buzz and conversation on the web and Twitter.

Videos of the speech have been uploaded to YouTube:

You know how I love a good conspiracy theory, so try this one on for size.

InsideFacebook has an interesting page that showcases the popularity of Facebook pages with Vanity URLs. For those interested in celebrity social media statistics, it may be worth a look.

An entry on the White House blog looks at where President Barack Obama’s YouTube videos are getting viewed the most. This of course varies from video to video, but it’s interesting to look at.

The White House references an article from Micah L. Sifry at techPresident, who looks at YouTube Insight data to see what regions some of the President’s speeches were most popular in.

YouTube said today that it will offer a live stream of President Barack Obama’s press conference discussing his first 100 days in office.

Reports suggest that social networking is now more popular than email. Twitter in particular grew 33% in only a month according to Compete data.

There have been numerous reports claiming that the White House has stopped using YouTube for its video addresses to the nation. According to both the White House and Google, this is not the case.

President Obama’s nomination for Antitrust Chief, Christine A. Varney, has a history of criticizing Google on the topic of antitrust. Current concern appears to be focused on Google’s efforts in the cloud computing world.

“This is what it’s come to,” writes the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Fred von Lohmann. “Teenagers singing ‘Winter Wonderland’ being censored on YouTube.

There are people who think Google is incorporating political bias into search results. As examples they use misspellings of George Bush and Barack Obama. Are the results of misspelled queries really something Google would take the time to specifically alter to inject their political beliefs though?

Search for Barack Aboma in Google and you will get a "Did you mean: barack obama" suggestion, and the top 2 results for Barack Obama:

Add another layer onto the Obama administration’s ties to Google. Obama’s Director of Citizen Participation is reportedly going to be Google Product Manager Katie Jacobs Stanton.

Since President Obama was sworn in and Whitehouse.gov has switched to a new interface, there has been an endless amount of chatter about the state of the White House’s technology. Some discuss the shortcomings, while others defend it as just fine.

Tradition and Transition

Google only needs to run its "Googlebomb" algorithm once in a while. And just recently, one of these times emerged. You may have read about it. Obama was ranking for "failure".

He doesn’t rank for failure anymore, and that’s because Google ran the algorithm. Matt Cutts was kind enough to explain Google’s process for this type of thing:

I’ve seen at least two stories today that remind us why social media can be a legitimate venue for good information. If you haven’t been able to grasp the concept yet, perhaps this will help.

At 12:00 Eastern Time when Barack Obama officially became the President of the United States of America (by rule of the Constitution), Whitehouse.gov transformed into its new version. And it’s got a heavy emphasis on new media.

It’s too early to lock down the potential (or failures) of crowd-sourcing. Where Wikipedia, the 4th most visited resource on the Internet, logs incredible, meteoric success, and where the politicization inherent to mob rule has dragged down the populist ideals of Digg.com and others, the collaborative spirit continues to be tested and modified.

In America, as on the Internet.

Yesterday, we looked at different places around the Internet to get your inauguration coverage. Today Google is sharing a few Google Maps mashups that are out there.

As the wireless networks prepare for inauguration traffic jam, there are plenty of ways that users will be utilizing the Internet to stay up to date on their inauguration coverage, just as they did with the election.

Of course Hulu has it covered, and has even gone so far as to provide an embeddable countdown: