Why Rochelle’s key takeout from GovCamp Scotland had nothing to do with platforms, technology or geekery.

When they first came to office, the Obama team had a mantra: “Never waste a good crisis”. They then spent the next two years doing exactly the opposite. In the past few months we’ve seen a couple of decent crises – the first involving WikiLeaks, the second involving the political upheavals in Tunisia and Egypt. Both involve the internet in one way or another.

This is a useful graph to add some context if you have not yet tried Facebook advertising for your charity or nonprofit – although most charities I’ve come across have put a toe in the water at least by now, and many have found Facebook ads can work well for them.

Just as it was during the recent uprisings in Tunisia, the role of social media in the recent upheaval in Egypt has been the subject of much debate since the unrest began on Thursday.

The Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2010 report is full of interesting insights if you are blogging and want to promote your blog – or your website, for that matter – to a wider audience.

Intern Paul Butler was interested in the locations of friendships, so he decided to create a visualization of Facebook connections around the globe. How local are our friends? Where are the highest concentration of friendships? How do political and geological boundaries affect them?

Yesterday, @teridoubtfire stumbled across a charity Twitter account, clearly run by an agency (the people that worked at the agency were the only ones retweeting it), that was busily tweeting celebrities, one after the other, with messages that looked like this:

Yesterday’s Chart of the Day was this insight into how Twitter users in the US spend their time on it, taken from a ‘big study’ by The Pew Research Center ‘focused entirely on Twitter’.

If you’re a Facebook user – which, if you’re reading this, in all likelihood you are! – then you probably noticed lots of you friends changing their profile picture to a cartoon character over the weekend and wondered what it was all about.

Will Facebook ever displace Google as a search engine? Probably not. But, it could quickly erode Google’s dominance as the way people find information.