Internet monitoring companies have been hired by Australian schools to spy on students’ activities on social networking sites.

“We go where the conversations are, where young people or communities of interest are coalescing online,” the Sydney Morning Herald quoted an internet monitoring firm, SR7 partner, James Griffin, as saying.

From in.news.yahoo.com:

Northern Beaches Christian School Principal Stephen Harris said he calls parents even late at night if their children post inappropriate content on the web.

“Our school policy now extends the concept of the school playground to any environment in the social media platform where a student of the school or a teacher is identified by either name, image or inference,” he said.

Public schools are also stepping into what had earlier been considered either private or the domain of parents.

New South Wales Council for Civil Liberties President Cameron Murphy described the monitoring as an “outrageous invasion” of students’ privacy.

“We know it’s become pretty much the essential way of communicating for this generation of students and we understand it’s a big part of their lives. But we’re also aware of the dangers that can come from unrestrained use,” School Director Frances Booth said.

A new study has been able to shed light on the manner in which information and infectious diseases proliferate across complex networks.

It is expected that the findings will help marketers and public relations officers conduct more effective social media and social marketing campaigns.

From Timesofindia.indiatimes.com:

“The important thing is where someone is located in a network,” Nature quoted Makse as saying.

“If someone is in the core, they can spread information more efficiently. The challenge is finding the core,” he said.

That kind of information could help marketers and public relations practitioners conduct more effective social media and social marketing campaigns.

It could also help epidemiologists target resources to reduce the spread of infectious diseases.

In the study, the researchers examined four networks representing archetypical examples of social structures: members of LiveJournal.com; email contacts in the computer science department at University College London; inpatients of Swedish hospitals, and adult film actors.

The latter group was studied because it is a distinct subgroup of the acting profession whose members rarely appear in other genres, Makse explained.

The team of researchers was led by Dr. Hernan Makse of the City College of New York (CCNY) and the findings appeared in Nature Physics.