Communications Major

The one-time teen heartthrob is grateful for two things: Martin Luther King. Jr. and 10 million followers. Online backlash ensues.

We are not always happy and on vacation all the time. It just looks that way....

These days, if we want to stay in touch with someone, a phone number isn’t the only option. Social media allow us to connect to people without the more awkward ask for someone's phone number. 

No place is safe from the selfie, not even your grandmother's funeral. Yep, we remember being a kid (before Instagram) and can relate. Funerals can be boring affairs. But taking a selfie during one? And then posting it? Hoping this is a trend that's going nowhere.

Ahoy, Instagram mateys — shake the paw of Yogurt the Pirate Dog.

The rest of your filtered feed can walk the plank because this 5-year-old chihuahua doesn't need two eyes to recognize her cuteness.

Each time you swipe through more images of people’s meals and soirees and renovation projects and holiday sunsets, you are potentially blurring the boundary between stranger-you-haven’t-met and sleazy voyeur skulking around the cabana with an iPhone.

A couple of months ago there seemed to be a mini-backlash against us amateur mobile food photo junkies taking pics of our meals. This wasn't just at your classy carpaccio-serving joints (pictured at the left), it even happened at a McDonalds!

But it was a backlash against providing a hungry audience with a steady stream of "food porn" that never really went anywhere.

From Justin Bieber to the Obamas and Madonna, the self-taken cameraphone photo – now a staple of Instagram and Twitter – has become one of the cultural markers of our time.

We like a good publicity stunt almost as much as we like a hot Instagram to slap up on our blog. A breaking story on Yahoo!7 Music reports that teen heartthrob Justin Bieber collapsed at the end of his show in London tonight and had to be rushed to a hospital. But fans and social media mavens can get the inside scoop by checking Twitter and Instagram feeds.

A powerful new short film captures the remarkable wisdom of fashion photographer Jonathan Waiter as he underwent treatment for terminal cancer – watch it here.

The aging of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and even Pinterest is more apparent than ever. More than 30% of teens have cited Instagram (owned by Facebook, btw) as their most important social network. Meanwhile, less than two-fifths of Facebook's adult users in the U.S. are in that ever-desirable 18- to 34-year-old demographic.

The past year saw a lot of changes in social media. Google's social site, Google+, saw huge growth and more activity, LinkedIn really got in the game, and Pinterest continued to pull in more traffic and more sales. Visuals also really became front and center and led the way for infographics, Vine video, and Instagram. To some degree, however, we're still finding our way in social. So many sites, so little time...

Instagram has blocked a large number of hashtags — the keywords people use with "#" as a prefix to make their images more searchable — and unsurprisingly most of them are obscenities. The Data Pack has a large list of hashtags that Instagram has rendered unsearchable. You can tag your photos with them, but doing so is meaningless because no one will be able to search for them.

Gone are the days of "playing nice". HootSuite CEO describes social media's ongoing civil war.

Can't get enough of those crazy, fun-loving Romneys and still smarting that they're not in the White House? Well, you could always follow son Tagg (@Tromney) on Instagram and wish Mitt a Happy 66th Birthday!