Tatyana Ray has more than 1,200 Facebook friends, sends 600 texts a month and participated in four student clubs during the year and a half she attended high school online, through a program affiliated with Stanford University.

Although top public and private high schools abound in her affluent area of Palo Alto, the 17-year-old originally applied to the online school because she and her parents thought it looked both interesting and challenging. She enjoyed the academics but eventually found she was lonely. She missed the human connection of proms, football games and in-person, rather than online, gossip. The digital clubs for fashion, books and cooking involved Web cams and blogs and felt more like work than fun. Last winter, Ms. Ray left the online school and enrolled at a local community college for a semester.

Tatyana Ray has spent most of her high school career in online school.

“Socially, it wasn’t working,” she says. “I felt I was missing out.”

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Until last week, Justin Halpern’s 73-year-old father didn’t know that he was a Twitter sensation.

His dad’s quips have resulted in more than 231,000 followers under the account name @–mydadsays. But after it attracted wide attention in recent weeks as followers retweeted postings, and blogs and mainstream media covered it, Mr. Halpern finally broke the news.

But his dad didn’t really get it. “He asked if I had to start up the Internet to get on Twitter, and then I felt better because I knew he wouldn’t understand the grand scope of what was going on,” said Mr. Halpern in an interview.

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The country’s technology chief said that he would push the government to embrace blogs, wikis and social networking sites to achieve both greater efficiency and transparency.

“It’s a safe assumption that the federal government will be more likely to adopt Web 2.0 technologies in the months ahead,” said Aneesh Chopra, the White House chief technology officer, in an interview. Projects he wants to implement include using the Web to solicit public feedback on improving Veterans Benefits Administration disbursements and overhauling the immigration services Web site. One plan includes sending visa applicants text-message notifications.

Chopra’s comments underscore the Obama administration’s hope to marshal the power of swiftly changing technologies.

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A report from security firm Proofpoint shows that email isn’t the only inside threat companies face–confidential information is leaking out via blogs, mobile devices and social-media sites.

In a survey of some 220 companies, Proofpoint found that email is still the No. 1 offender when it comes to data leaks. About 43% of respondents had investigated an email-based security breach during the past year. Nearly one-third of the companies surveyed had fired an employee for violating email confidentiality policies, a 26 percent increase from 2008.

Blogs and videos are increasingly channels for leaks as well, with 18 percent of respondents saying that they looked at those media when investigating an information leak.

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Dave Winer’s ability to peer into the future is uncanny. He was talking about a river of news long before the current activity streams became popular. He was evangelizing RSS long before there were blogs. I could go on and on about his prescient observations, but it’s his warnings that are especially prophetic.

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SpinVox, a British company that converts voicemails into text with speech recognition technology, has been accused by the BBC of using humans at call centers to manually conduct the majority of the translations.

The U.K.-based company, which boasts 30 million users across five continents, says that voicemails are translated into text via conversion technology known as “D2,” or “the Brain.” Customers can read the messages and post them on blogs, social networking sites, or send them to their email inboxes.

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For the most part, the traditional news outlets lead and the blogs follow, typically by 2.5 hours, according to a new computer analysis of news articles and commentary on the Web during the last three months of the 2008 presidential campaign.

The finding was one of several in a study that Internet experts say is the first time the Web has been used to track–and try to measure–the news cycle, the process by which information becomes news, competes for attention and fades.

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We all know that The New York Times (NYT) and other papers have been thinking hard about finding ways to charge readers for the news on their web sites, and there’s evidence that the decision-making process is moving along. Bloomberg has reported that a survey of print subscribers included this sentence:

The New York Times website, nytimes.com, is considering charging a monthly fee of $5.00 to access its content, including all its articles, blogs and multimedia.

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Mothers have dramatically increased their use of social networking tools in the past three years, according to a new survey of 25,000 women conducted by parenting site BabyCenter.

About 63 percent of moms used Facebook, Twitter and blogs this year, a whopping increase from 11 percent in 2006. The survey also found that the kinds of media moms spent time using changed after giving birth. Post-birth, nearly a third (32 percent) of respondents said they used the Internet more, while their use of other media formats decreased. For example, 44 percent said they regularly gave TV the sole focus of their attention prior to giving birth, which plummeted to 7 percent after giving birth.

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Nick Denton is sitting amid the rows of screen-staring digital workers in the fourth-floor walkup that serves as Gawker headquarters, having neglected to build himself a private office.

“I would do it, but I don’t want to be mocked by the blogs,” says the company’s founder, retreating to the loft’s only semiprivate space — a pair of old couches next to a table with boxes of canned soda piled underneath.

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They did say it was too close to call.

Last night’s “American Idol” win by Kris Allen–despite some social-media analyses pointing to an Adam Lambert victory–highlights how close the two contestants were, and how changes in sentiment late Wednesday may have turned the tide.

Data-analytics firm Biz360 issued a statement Wednesday afternoon predicting that Mr. Lambert would be the winner. It, however, qualified that “an accurate statistical prediction is impossible due to the limitations of margins of error,” with a less than 1 percent difference between the two singers.

At the time, Mr. Allen was generating a slightly lower amount of coverage and positive commentary on blogs, Twitter, MySpace and other data sources, it said.

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A mood of tension has gripped the White House in recent days as President Obama prepares himself for a new round of criticism from one of the nation’s most powerful and influential constituencies: pajama-wearing Internet users who post anonymous comments on liberal blogs.

In the West Wing, Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel has set up a high-tech “war room” to monitor the blog comments from the President’s basement-dwelling critics, postings which one White House source said could be “really mean” in the days ahead.

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Amazon.com’s (AMZN) Kindle e-book reader has already inspired hope for new digital business models for book and newspaper publishers. Now the Kindle wants to do business with bloggers too.

On Wednesday, Amazon unveiled a beta program that pays bloggers for Kindle subscriptions to their posts.

The Kindle comes with an experimental Web browser that allows users to surf ordinary Web sites. But for the sake of convenience, Amazon also sells Kindle subscriptions to a select list of blogs that are automatically updated and made available on the device’s home screen. Those subscriptions can cost as much as $2 per month.

Under the new program, Amazon will pay registered bloggers 30 percent of its subscription fee–pretty low, considering that Apple (AAPL) gives iPhone developers a 70 percent cut on sales of software applications for the device. So that’s about 60 cents per reader, per month, for the most expensive blogs.

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In theory, the RSS reader is a great idea. Many years ago, as blogs became an ever-larger part of my news diet, I got addicted to Bloglines, one of the first popular RSS programs. I used to read a dozen different news sites every day, going to each site every so often to check whether something fresh had been posted.

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Back in the day, if your favorite TV show was on the network chopping block, your only real option for hoping to get it saved was organizing a massive letter writing campaign.

But in the era of blogs, social networks, and microblogging, fans of endangered shows can quickly organize and protest, and in some cases, even guilt network execs into giving them at least a bit more of their favorite programs.

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