@pg4sqday Thanks for your comments. I'm curious about number 3-- if I'm not mistaken, the only cost to them would be building a custom badge with a pre-existing logo that's unlocked after a set amount of visits. I don't really know how much time/labour this takes, but I would have thought it would be fairly low-cost. Do you know? As it stands, they already allow any business owner to set up promotions where users get messaged when they've unlocked a discount, special, etc. Would adding a badge to that be that much more costly to them?

I enjoyed the "Grammie's cell phone" piece very much. I, too, find it interesting how many of my older relatives keep in touch with email, where the younger generation (35 and under) are on Facebook.

I've found that an interesting way to let those who aren't motivated to use Facebook/Flickr/Twitter keep in touch is using a customized iGoogle homepage that takes an RSS feed from these places and puts right on their start page. I made one for my parents, for example, that has an RSS of my Flickr and Twitter, as well as the Twitter account my sister used while travelling Kenya. They didn't want to be bothered to get a Twitter account, but with this they could get all our latest updates in one place in an interface they understand-- plus the weather forecast. They enjoy quite a bit, and are able to keep up with us, even when we aren't in contact via phone.

I'm interested in Macleans.ca. Compared to other news sites (CBC, the Globe, etc) they have a much more enjoyable comments section. It's probably partially due to their use of IntenseDebate, but I would also attribute it to the fact that the writers actually join in on the comments section, encouraging non -trolls to engage in the conversation. Not unlike Spark!

What about the whole vampire thing? Is that movies cashing in on books cashing in on TV or TV cashing in on movies cashing in on books? Or just a giant coincidence?

That may be true, but in that situation wouldn't a good corporate citizen have a vested interest in making it so that individuals searching for government services and information are able to find it? And I mean find it without their tax dollars going towards buying AdWords in order to compete with lobbyists. Not saying that Google is obligated to do this, but similar to Nick the hopes I have for Google is that they WOULD do this, because it's the right thing to do, even if it just in the form of a "search your government" button.