Mediaboss Marketing

By Callum Borchers, Globe Correspondent

President Obama expanded his social networking repertoire Tuesday by joining Pinterest, the scrapbook-style website where users can pin messages, photographs and videos to virtual boards.

So far, the president has eight boards, or categories of pins. One, called Just the facts, includes three pins promoting Obamas signature health care law, whose constitutionality was debated in oral arguments before the Supreme Court this week.

But most of Obamas new Pinterest boards, managed by his campaign staff, are devoted to lighter fare: Obama-inspired recipes and Pet Lovers for Obama.

A majority of Pinterest users are young and female, a demographic the Obama campaign began targeting more heavily this month. Four years ago, Obama earned 56 percent of the female vote.

During the 2008 election and since, Obama has embraced social media as a way to connect with voters. He has more than 13 million Twitter followers and almost 26 million Facebook likes. The Obama campaign used Twitter to announce that the president had joined Pinterest.

By 4 p.m. Wednesday, he had more than 7,000 followers.

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President Obama joins Pinterest, the social networking website popular among young women

London, May 6 : A leading public school headmistress has warned that social networking sites and celebrities are creating a generation of 'mean girls'.

In a fierce attack, Helen Wright said sites such as Facebook encouraged teenagers to believe 'bitching is good'.

'They're far more used to defriending friends online rather than befriending them in reality. If it's possible in just a moment to defriend someone or unfriend them on Facebook, then people say, 'Why can't I do that in real life'' the Daily Mail quoted her as saying.

'We are in real danger of cultivating a generation of 'mean girls'',' she said.

The headmistress of St Mary's Calne in Wiltshire also criticised a lack of positive role models for young women, saying high-profile female friendships seem to be based on 'bitchiness, meanness, cruelty and criticising what someone's wearing and how they look'.

'Many young women mistakenly se women like Paris Hilton and her latest BFF [best friend forever] and the cast of The Only Way Is Essex as relevant role models and seek to emulate their behaviour,' she said.

Party-loving Paris Hilton and TV personality Nicole Richie had a public falling-out in 2005, after which the two refused to speak to each other for more than a year.

It was rumoured Richie had caused the rift by showing friends a sex tape featuring the heiress, but she denied this.

In other rows, Gwyneth Paltrow aimed barbed comments at Madonna as they competed for the services of a female personal trainer, while Geri Halliwell was the one 'Spice Girl' not invited to the Beckhams' wedding after her clash with Victoria.

Former pupils of 29,694-pound-a-year St Mary's include David Cameron's sister Clare and Jade Jagger, who was expelled for sneaking out to meet a boyfriend.

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Social networking creating generation of 'mean girls'

NEW YORK - Okay, admit it. We're all crazy about our dogs.

We watch them on YouTube and post their pictures on Facebook.

But now it's time for dogs to have a social network of their own. At least that's what the brains behind a New York startup think.

Take, for example, a dog named Bandit.

"He had plenty of friends back in San Francisco," his owner Anthony McGee says. "But now it's time for him to meet new friends in New York."

So McGee used the startup site MatchPuppy.com to find puppy playdates, a clear indication that social networking has indeed gone to the dogs.

Site founder Michael Chiang says the original business plan was to help with 'puppy love,' connecting owners looking to breed their pets. But eventually the team decided "just friends" was okay too.

"We realized there was a bigger need in the market, to help dog owners kind of facilitate playdates online," Chiang says.

Matches are made by neighborhood, breed, and age. But some pet owners have the same kinds of concerns with it as with 'human' online matchmaking.

"I would be a little concerned, because I don't know the dog," said prospective puppy-dater Shameika Bloice.

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'Match Puppy': Social Networking Has Gone to the Dogs

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Tech and You: Social networking app - PlayUp - NewsX - Video

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science have developed a program they're calling Livehoods, which organizes "check-ins" from the popular social networking site Foursquare into a cultural database of local habits and trends.

Livehoods' organizers say the program provides an opportunity for city planners and others to track and aggregate the real-time cultural habits and diverse makeup of certain neighborhoods, from block to block, and to see how they change over time.

"A lot of people might look at this project and say at first, it's obvious," says Justin Cranshaw, a Ph.D. student at CMU and one of the project's leading researchers. "Maybe it's obvious to locals, but to people unfamiliar with that part of the city, this [provides] an accurate snapshot of what's really going on."

The program's algorithm examines the check-ins and identifies unique trends pertaining to that particular neighborhood. This information is then mapped to reveal an area's "Livehood," unique to each section of a city, displaying the most popular things to do and places to go. A user can browse the most frequented locations in a certain area, see what kinds of places they are -- restaurants, movie theaters, bars, etc. -- and learn where people with similar habits are hanging out across the city.

One wonders whether enough types of city-dwellers are logged onto Foursquare these days, but Cranshaw insists that the social-networking site has become more diverse. When Foursquare first started in 2009, it seemed primarily geared toward technologically savvy people in big cities who wanted to score the most check-ins at their local dive bar.

Though it still only reflects the cultural habits of those who own a smartphone and choose to use its service, the site has clearly expanded significantly. Today Foursquare boasts over 20 million users around the world, and it has racked up around 2 billion "check-ins" at various locations. Driving across the country last fall, it was even possible to check in at "the middle of nowhere" somewhere in North Carolina. There was a mayor and a badge and everything.

Cranshaw notes that over the years, computers have become more adept at map-making and providing detailed directions and reviews, but they're still "not that great at determining real cultural knowledge." Livehoods, he says, sorts the local "knowledge" of each community into browsable regions.

"In urban studies, researchers have always had to interview lots of people to get a sense of a community's character and, even then, they must extrapolate from only a small sample of the community," Raz Schwartz, a visiting scholar at the CMU School of Computer Science's Human-Computer Interaction Institute and another researcher on the project, said in a statement. "Now, by using Foursquare data, we're able to tap a large database that can be continually updated."

So far, Livehoods has maps for San Francisco, New York and Pittsburgh, and has analyzed millions of unique check-ins at various locations.

Cranshaw said that the project will not only help city developers and planners, but also business-owners looking to determine the best location to open a new store or restaurant.Certainly advertisers and other marketing agencies will be happy to gain access to the information as well.

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Livehoods Maps Neighborhoods For The Social-Networking Age