Sarah Lacy guestblogging at TechCrunch posts a thoughtful response, concluding:

“I’m hopeful that the direction social networking is headed in is the answer to this, not the problem. As more of our social graphs move online, via Twitter or Facebook, the more the same social pressures of the real world come to bear. Compare anonymous YouTube comments with Twitter comments. Generally, Twitter is more kind and substantive, especially among users who Twitter under their real names. Now compare that to comments on Facebook. Almost all of the comments on someone’s photo, video, status are supportive and empathetic, because the site has mimicked real world relationships and with that real world pressures.”

Stephen Waddington at Rainier PR is less understanding of Lady Greenfield’s hypothesis, as reported by the Daily Mail:

“This is not neuroscience as we know it as Chris Edwards said. Students wouldn’t be allowed to get away with this level of conjecture in a school essay. It’s lazy journalism. And even lazier science. Will Sturgeon has dissected the story paragraph-by-paragraph and gives further insight into how these types of stories reach the front page of a tabloid newspaper.“

Elsewhere on the web:

YouTube has opened its social API – which allows users to import their YouTube activities into social networks like Friendfeed and Facebook – to developers. Adam Ostrow at Mashable discusses the implications.

Nick Booth highlights the Social Action WordPress plugin, which makes it easier for readers to actively participate in social change through social media, drawing comparisons with Paul Bradshaw’s model for 21st century journalism, leveraging the same concept in context of newspapers.

Frederic Lardinois at ReadWriteWeb reviews MicroPlaza, a personalised memetracker for Twitter which, assuming you follow a lot of people, looks like it will be a killer tool for picking out coherent conversations from the babble.