Travel industry, here’s a little tidbit to brighten your Q4 earnings estimates: new research out of the University of Vermont reveals that the farther we are from home, the happier our tweets reflect us to be.

The study, released last week, titled “Happiness and the Patterns of Life: A Study of Geolocated Tweets,” reports that “expressed happiness increases logarithmically with distance from an individual’s average location.”

Let’s look at this a little more closely.

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Good news travels fast.

Especially on social networks. So says Jonah Berger, a social psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania and author of new book (and recent SXSW talk), Contagious: Why Things Catch On.

Berger and his Penn colleague Katherine Milkman dove into people’s social networking habits, analyzing the types of content people share most, with whom, when, and why. The results are pretty fascinating.

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Do you consider your audience before tweeting? More importantly, do you consider your audience overall?

Just because someone isn’t your “friend” on Facebook or following you on Twitter, do you think about what they’ll see if they scan through your tweets? You probably should.

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A professor from the University of South Carolina who encouraged her students to use Twitter in their French class will be receiving an honorary knighthood from the French government.

Dr. Lara Lomicka Anderson, associate professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at USC, will be awarded the Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Academiques (Order of Academic Palms) for advancing the French language. It’s quite a big deal – the original deceleration was established by Napolean Bonaparte.

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Research scientist Duncan Watts and his team at Yahoo! Research have published an interesting study that looks at the effect of elite users – celebrities, media outlets, organisations and power bloggers – and ‘ordinary’ users (everybody else) on the network.

Taking their information from Twitter lists, the research hoped to prove a difficult field of communication theory known as Lasswell’s Maxim, which ponders “who says what to whom in which channel with what effect”.

In other words: at the thick end, who influences who? And what does this mean for brands looking to utilise Twitter for marketing? Read more