Every time you turn around, people are talking about how they reconnected with a high school classmate on Facebook or caught up with an old colleague on LinkedIn. 

I’ve often wondered if users are positively or negatively impacted by what they post on social networking sites, especially when they go to interview for a new job.

A recent study completed by CareerBuilder.com found that employers have started searching these sites before interviewing candidates. In fact, a recent study found that 20 percent of companies admitted to checking out candidate’s profiles on social-networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, and that 24 percent of employers had hired an employee based on their social-networking profile. The most shocking finding, however, is that 33 percent of employers decided not to make a job offer after reviewing a profile, primarily due to  drug or alcohol use and photographs deemed “inappropriate” or “provocative.”

So now I’m left to ponder:  How else are social networks being used and by whom?

I recently had my first child enter kindergarten, which was a tear-jerker. Before signing him up for school, I struggled with where to send him. Public, private, charter — so many great options.

In my search, I found schooldigger.com, a great website that ranks over 120,000 U.S. elementary, middle, and high schools based on test scores, district boundaries, ethnic makeup and student/teacher ratios.

Check it out!

1. Thou shalt not abuse Flash.
2. Thou shalt not hide content.
3. Thou shalt not clutter.
4. Thou shalt not overuse glassy reflections.
5. Thou shalt not name your Web 2.0 company with an unnecessary surplus or dearth of vowels.
And 5 More >>

If you’ve ever dealt with lawyers you know how important it is to have all-encompassing disclaimers on everything. Make the world safer for everyone by using these disclaimers liberally in any project. Here is just a sample:

“Important Notice to Purchasers: The entire physical universe, including this product, may one day collapse back into an infinitesimally small space. Should another universe subsequently re-emerge, the existence of this product in that universe cannot be guaranteed.”

I love simple elegant web pages. This site is a one-trick pony: Do you need an umbrella today? Enter your zip code for a Yes or No answer. Of course, one could always look out the window, but where’s the fun in that?

I never thought I would be a Twitter advocate, but in recent weeks I have become a true fan. The bare bones essence of tweets keeps me tapped in just enough to know when and where Gustav was hitting land or which vice presidential candidates was just announced, without having to slog through my normal channels of info. Since I was especially interested in the protests that happened in Saint Paul during the RNC, I followed most of the action in realtime on Twitter. It was the perfect feed of updates and links to make me feel like I was actually in the middle of the action. The raw energy was exciting. And when it was over, so were the tweets. 

Interestingly enough, it seems that big biz feels the same way. Business Week’s recent article, “How Companies Use Twitter” shows how effective a 140-character press release can be.

It seems that Amazon.com’s Kindle is not the flop that many predicted when the e-book reader debuted last year. Citibank’s Mark Mahaney has just doubled his forecast of Kindle sales for the year to 380,000. He figures that Amazon’s sales of Kindle hardware and software will hit $1 billion by 2010. Read more about this!

To make your iPhone life a bit easier, Telegraph.co.uk has published their top five keyboard shortcuts and iPhone tips and tricks, including how to type alternative characters with the keypad, type in multiple languages, and take a screen grab on your iPhone. Cool.