Turns out the Japanese are blog-addicted, with the average blog visitor there spending more than one hour a month perusing others’ posts. It got us thinking about other interesting national social media consumption habits that just might tell us a bit more about these cultures.

Volkswagen gave the driving public the first glimpse at the 2012 VW Beetle last week in a launch spearheaded through social media, most notably, through a prominently placed promoted tweet campaign. But despite the hype around the new design and the well-intended social strategy for the launch, the initial results have sputtered out of the gate.

How much is a single, glowing Facebook recommendation worth to a marketer? Just how valuable is a strong endorsement from a blogger in determining future sales? And just how engaged is the average TV viewer with a popular show with all these distracting networked gadgets, tablets and laptops in the room? Syncapse answers some of these questions in a new piece of research out this week.

Last month we looked at growth trends for each of the big social media publishing channels, namely, Facebook, Twitter and blogs. Not all of you agreed with our conclusion: that blogging is an activity that, at best, is leveling off. At worst, it’s an activity in decline. The New York Times is now jumping on this discussion meme, declaring that today’s twentysomethings no longer blog, a further sign that fewer people can find the time.

Procter & Gamble next week will launch a social media campaign. This one, it hopes, will make a big difference. The effort aims to martial the power of bloggers and social network users everywhere to raise awareness for the need to bring clean water to children in need. The do-gooder campaign hopes to distribute roughly 200,000 liters of water with the help of your clicks.

Reuters’ latest vision of the transformative impact of social media holds lessons for not just big media, but big brands as well. Take a look.

Since 2004, Technorati has been publishing its annual State of the Blogosphere survey, an insightful look at how blogging habits of individuals and companies continue to evolve. The details for the 2010 survey will be released in November, but Technorati is asking for your input now.

Social searching is getting smarter all the time (or so we hope), and Microsoft announced some further interesting developments on Bing Social this week. But how do the two heavyweights of social search, Google and Bing Social, match up? We measure them up here.

Two new reports out this week detail Internet usage in the UK and China, two countries with vastly different cultures but an uncannily similar enthusiasm for social media.

Hours after news broke of the April 20 Deepwater Horizon explosion, the first of the “boycott BP!” pleas could be found on Twitter, on random weekend eco-warrior blogs and here and there on Facebook. Now, the movement has snowballed into a social media cause célèbre, replete with Twitter flash protests, celebrity backing, damning homemade documentaries and satirical updates from an official-seeming company mouthpiece, the fastest growing account on Twitter. Where have we seen this all before? Yep, BP is facing its “Tehran moment,” with the anger of millions threatening to do irreparable damage. Can BP clean up the mess before it’s too late?