Social media can be a waste of time.

It's easy to find yourself innocently surfing the Web only to find three hours later that you're reading about some celebrity break-up that happened five years ago, which led to an on-set fight on a television program, which caused an executive to be fired, which is why your favorite movie isn't out on DVD yet.

Other times it's not.

The University of California, San Francisco's (UCSF) Memory and Aging Center launched a YouTube video channel that targets researchers, clinicians and patients around the world who have "incurable neurodegenerative brain diseases."

The goal: educate the public, identify patients early along the process, share research and find a cure for these diseases.

No small order. But one social technologies are acutely designed to help.

Along with the channel, the clinic offers access to trial databases and software widgets that can be easily displayed on most websites. The center has also launched a Facebook page and a streaming video page.

Wedding days may be a wonderful celebration of love and commitment, but getting there is rarely a joy.

Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia is hoping to tap into that angst with its newly unveiled wedding plan community, which launched today. The social software targets brides (they are specific about brides, no mention of the other half) who want to centralize all of their information in one place.

The tools, which also integrate Martha Stewarts Wedding magazine, gives planners a space to track budgets and expenses, build invite lists with RSVP tracking, create seating charts using drag-and-drop maps, monitor the timeline, create task checklists and find vendors.

This product release comes less than a month after Omnimedia acquired a 40 percent equity stake in Wedding Wire, a social networking and planning site for -- you guessed it -- women planning their weddings.

Getting past the obvious sexist nature of wedding planning, wedding planning is a $160 billion business -- and a 2006 study found that 97 percent of women use the Web in some manner to plan their business.

For anyone looking to tap into ecommerce, weddings are a good first move.

Technology companies are banking on the fact that your media can make them a lot of money.

Google ponied up quite a bit of cash to create a multiple media "business" (it's not a business proper until it makes money) by using your videos, pictures, websites and any other media you have -- and want to keep.

YouTube, by far the most recognizable of its properties, has been a black hole of cash. However, analysts believe the site -- which allows people to upload their videos and build personal channels -- is poised to make upwards of $500 million next year.

That's still a bit less than the $1.65 billion the company paid for it, but if estimates prove true (and they rarely do), YouTube could end of being one of the billion dollar, undervalued companies.

Apple has virtually cornered the market on personal media, although the consumer electronics company is less interested in your pictures and videos and more interested in selling you hardware to play your favorite music.

iTunes, Apple's eponymous digital entertainment retailer, just crossed the 5 billion song threshold. At roughly 99 cents per song, that's a pretty big threshold. It's also more songs than Wal-mart.

"Why can't I find this?"

That's the nightmare question for anyone who works online. Businesses spend countless millions of dollars architecting information, designing usable websites and anticipating what their customers want. Most of the time, it's all for naught (although it's getting better, thank you Google).

It's even worse when your employees are searching for answers and can't find them on your system.

69 percent of the 500 companies surveyed have less than half of their information on a searchable Intranet, the in-house network that connects employees together without allowing those pesky Internet surfers to join the party.

Chew on that for a moment. We live in the Information Age and nearly seven in 10 businesses make less than half of their data available to the workers.

As you might expect, nearly 50 percent of those workers surveyed said that finding corporate information is both consumes a great deal of time and reduces the effectiveness of their work.

Of course, since companies have identified the problem, surely they are working feverishly to correct the inefficiencies. Right?

49 percent of the companies said they had no plan to address their Intranet search issues and 38 percent said they didn't think search was a key factor for their worker productivity.

Interactivity is the name of the game.

Digital technologies have changed our expectations. Unlike television, radio and books, the Web forces people to actively engage in what they are doing -- reading, linking, thinking and searching pulled together with the social aspect of friends. It's truly transformed the way we "live" our lives.

So it comes as little surprise that a new study predicts that the computer game industry will continue to outpace other traditional forms of entertainment, growing a clip just above 10 percent per year.

And by 2012, computer games will be a $62 billion market.

Not surprisingly, the continued growth has caused a worker problem for the industry. There aren't enough programmers to keep up with the demand. The increasingly advanced hardware and software means the days of hackers slogging the programs is long gone.

Recently Microsoft announced a research and development project that would bring touch screen computing to the PC environment. It's big news -- if you're a bit on the nerdy side.

The keyboard and mouse aren't great interfaces for computing. The Web, by its nature, is a 3D environment, but we treat it like a 2D page.

However, you don't have to wait for the cutting edge Microsoft technology to begin to play around with 3D interfaces. The new Firefox browser, which was released yesterday, comes with a plug-in called PicLens that enables you to leave the traditional Web page behind for a richer, 3D experience.

When you activate the software, the application pulls the images, stories and videos from a website (if it's been site owner has added the feature already) and allows users to browse through a scrolling set of information.

Of course, it's a bit clunky to use if you're stuck with a mouse and keyboard. Which is why it's important to remember that this 3D interface is being developed with the next-generation of computer in mind: the kind you control with your fingers.

The Mozilla Foundation released Firefox 3.0, the latest upgrade to the quickest growing browser on the market.

For most casual Web users -- folks like my mom and dad -- the browser choice is not something they think about too often. After all, Microsoft comes with Internet Explorer and Apple comes with Safari. It's right there on your computer when you fire it up.

But those aren't the only choices. Opera, for instance, is the only browser that is compliant with any operating system, a pretty good choice particularly since so many functions these days are Web-based, which means you can access them no matter what computer you happen to be using.

For my tastes, though, there are several reasons to give Firefox a shot if you haven't already. It gives you the best browsing experience. It's designed with simplicity in mind. Most people -- and you can now include my mom and dad in that category -- are able to figure out what the browser can do because of its sleek interface.

Casual users will find the bookmarking and tabbed browsing features quite helpful, and the history and discovery features are enhanced, according to Webmonkey.

You might want to wait a bit before you download because Mozilla is attempting to break the record for most downloads in one day -- and there are some reports about traffic jams on the old InterWeb Tubes.

The Associated Press, a wire service that provides news to most newspapers, said they were no longer going to allow websites to use material from its pieces.

This is a bad idea for many reasons; however, the worst reason is that AP decided to wage a battle with the entire blogosphere, and this is a battle that other companies have fought -- and lost. Because even if they win, they lose.

Let me explain.

Blogs and other websites will oftentimes pull a sentence or two from a news story -- designate that materials -- and then hyperlink to the original source. That's pretty standard fair.

The AP -- which does own the copyright to even those few snipped words -- said that it would no longer allow that to happen.

It's perfectly within their right; it also ensures that blogs -- which are increasingly important for driving traffic, and thus revenues -- will stop using their content completely. Already some of the most influential blogs -- which have millions of readers -- said they would no longer use any material from AP.

This strategy has been tried before. Years ago, companies attempted to stop the practice of "deep linking", where websites would link directly to a page, even if it was 10 pages deep on a site, instead of to the home page. The reason: If you click on a link, you expect to go directly to the information.

Companies, though, which make their money on banner ads (which is a bad idea) tried to force people to link to only the home page, thus ensuring more page views.

Since the links you've clicked on above don't go to site home pages, you can imagine how well that worked.

Two myths about Americans that I'd like to put to rest here:

1. the notion that Americans aren't reading these days
2. the notion that Americans don't care about politics

Hogwash.

What Americans are turning away from are the polarized, kid-like screaming matches between so-called political pundits who view campaigns more like boxing matches than policy debates.

Instead, they are making an honest attempt to find out what the candidates stand for. How do I know? The American people told me.

46 percent of Americans have used the Web to find information about the candidates, according to the Pew Research Center; and 30 percent of Americans have sought out unfiltered political content -- heading directly for the McCain and Obama sites -- looking for information about their political stances.

Turns out, what Americans really want is to listen to the people who may be our president and read what that person has to say about particular policies.

It's not all that surprising actually; however, we've reached a point in this country -- and with the Web -- where we assume that everyone else is dumber than us, so surely that aren't looking for the same answers. As it turns out, we're all looking for the same substantive information -- and we're not getting it from traditional outlets.

A boyfriend innocently uses his smart phone to record his girlfriend, who is clad in a tiny tee-shirt and underwear, while she is playing a fitness game on the Nintendo Wii that requires her to keep a series of hula hoops by gyrating her hips in a circular motion.

Of course he uploads the video to YouTube, a eponymous video website, and millions of people watch.

The pair, who work in the advertising industry, have said that it wasn't a stunt. Because uploading a secret video of your girlfriend in her underwear would never cause any problem at home.

What's baffling is the debate out the legitimacy of the video.

Nintendo has denied it had anything to do with the video, which is more than believable considering the company's long, family friendly gaming stance. I'm sure there are those in the company thrilled at the exposure, but it wouldn't shock me to find out many of the executives are steamed at the pair of amateur advertisers.

While the pair denied they planned the stunt, it's telling the boyfriend said while his agency doesn't work with Nintendo, he'd certainly like to in the future.

Viral videos are a happenstance oftentimes on the Web; however, as we learned with lonelygirl15, if it seems a little too good to be true, it probably is.