Breaking News: Some Facebook Users May Be Narcissists!

(...and in other news: The Sky is Blue!)

A new study from the University of Georgia suggests that you can detect whether someone is a narcissist based on that individual's Facebook profile.

(I know, I had no idea either!)

"We found that people who are narcissistic use Facebook in a self-promoting way that can be identified by others," said lead author Laura Buffardi, a doctoral student in psychology who co-authored the study with associate professor W. Keith Campbell.

"Self-promoting? Moi?"

The researchers, whose results appear in the October issue of the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, gave personality questionnaires to nearly 130 Facebook users, analyzed the content of the pages and had untrained strangers view the pages and rate their impression of the owner's narcissism.

The researchers found that the number of Facebook "friends" and wallposts that individuals have on their profile pages correlates with narcissism. Buffardi said this is consistent with how narcissists behave in the real-world, with numerous yet shallow relationships.

Yes, this should be obvious to anyone but aren't you now curious to log in and check out the profiles of your Facebook "friends" to see just how closely they fit the profile of a narcissist? Or maybe you already knew it and are just using them to get on a guest list.

I for one wouldn't dream of using social networks or blog sites for shameless self-promotion.

What I would like to know is: what does having a photo of my cat for a Facebook profile pic say about my personality?

[Via Physorg]

U.S. Patent Office experiments with crowdsourcing to streamline patent review process

Inventors have a lot of issues with the inner workings of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. There's no question that the application and approval process is overly long, and overworked and uninformed patent examiners often grant patents to dubious or "obvious" innovations. The current system is particularly burdensome for the small technology startups for whom time to market is critical to their success.

Seeking to remedy these problems, in 2007 the Patent Office began an experiment in crowdsourcing with the objective of speeding up the patent assessment and approval process and improving the quality of the applications submitted. Under the program called Peer-to-Patent the patent applications are posted to the web for all to see and those with relevant expertise can pass along their input to the Office and the applicants. This collective wisdom of the crowd helps the patent examiners to identify applications for something that's already been invented or questionable merit.

Not surprisingly technology companies are the biggest supporters of this experiment and include IBM, HP, and Microsoft but clearly the smaller inventors with limited financial and legal resources would stand to benefit from this the most.

The Peer-to-Patent web site is being managed by the New York Law School's Institute for Information Law and Policy.

[CNN via Slashdot]