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Social-networking sites grew from 9 percent to 19 percent as a source for news in the last two years, but only 3 percent of respondents say they regularly get news from Twitter.

The Internet is continuing to erode TV, radio, and newspapers as the source of news for Americans. According to thelatest Pew Research Center surveycovering the changing news landscape,the proliferation of mobile devices and social networks is accelerating the shift to online news consumption.In the survey, 39 percent said that they got their news online, up from 33 percent two years ago.

Only TV surpasses online as a news source today. Among 18- to 29-year-olds, one-third watched some TV news, down from 49 percent in 2006.Among those under 30, only 13 percent read a digital or print newspaper, while 33 percent viewed news on a social network and 34 percent saw some news on TV.

A majority of those surveyed (64 percent) said they preferred news sources that didn't espouse a specific point of view, while 26 percent wanted news from sources sharing their political viewpoint.Yahoo, Google, CNN, local news, and MSN were the top five online news sources named among the respondents.

Social-networking sites as a source for news grew from 9 percent to 19 percent in the last two years. Among the social-networking sites, 13 percent of respondents got some news from Twitter, and Twitter users are avid consumers of news.Only 9 percent of the Twitter users said they tweeted or retweeted regularly, which was a similar active user percentage to other social-networking sites.

However, only 3 percent of those surveyed overall said that they regularly get news from Twitter, up from 2 percent in 2010. The percentage of the public that sees news on social-networking sites such as Facebook, Google+, or Twitter increased from 29 percent in 2010 to 47 percent in 2012.

The 18- to 24-year-old demographic consumes the least amount of news, which is not unexpected, with e-mailing, texting, and using social networks ranking as their top activities, according to the survey. Overall, 41 percent of those surveyed use social-networking sites.

News coming out of the nation's capitol was not among the top news subjects among younger people. Just 43 percent said they followed news from Washington, D.C., very or fairly closely, and 57 percent said they don't follow it too closely or not at all.

Pew Research Center's biennial news consumption survey was fielded May 9 through June 3, 2012, among 3,003 adults.

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Pew study: News consumption up via mobile, social media

Frederick A. Murphy / CDC handout via EPA file

A new virus that appears similar to rabies, but has the symptoms and lethality of Ebola, shown here, has been dubbed the Bas-Congo virus. It killed two teenagers in the Congo in 2009.

By Maggie Fox, NBC News

A virus that killed two teenagers in Congo in 2009 is a completely new type, related to rabies but causing the bleeding and rapid death that makes Ebola infection so terrifying, scientists reported on Thursday. Theyre searching for the source of the virus, which may be transmitted by insects or bats.

The new virus is being named Bas-Congo virus, for the area where it was found. Researchers are finding more and more of these new viruses, in part because new tests make it possible, but also in the hope of better understanding them so they can prevent pandemics of deadly disease.

The virus infected a 15-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl in the same village in Congo in 2009. They didnt stand a chance, says Joseph Fair of Metabiota, a company that investigates pathogens. Fair is in the Democratic Republic of Congo now, under contract to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to help battle an ongoing Ebola outbreak.

They expired within three days, Fair said in a telephone interview. It was a very rapid killer.

A few days later a male nurse who cared for the two teenagers developed the same symptoms and survived. Samples from the lucky nurse have been tested and it turned out a completely new virus had infected him, Fair and other researchers report in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS pathogens.

The genetic sequences went to Dr. Charles Chiu, of the University of California, San Francisco.

We were astounded that this patient had sequences in his blood from a completely unknown and unidentified virus, Chiu said. They werent expecting that.

See original here:
New virus in Africa looks like rabies, acts like Ebola

Frederick A. Murphy / CDC handout via EPA file

A new virus that appears similar to rabies, but has the symptoms and lethality of Ebola, shown here, has been dubbed the Bas-Congo virus. It killed two teenagers in the Congo in 2009.

By Maggie Fox, NBC News

A virus that killed two teenagers in Congo in 2009 is a completely new type, related to rabies but causing the bleeding and rapid death that makes Ebola infection so terrifying, scientists reported on Thursday. Theyre searching for the source of the virus, which may be transmitted by insects or bats.

The new virus is being named Bas-Congo virus, for the area where it was found. Researchers are finding more and more of these new viruses, in part because new tests make it possible, but also in the hope of better understanding them so they can prevent pandemics of deadly disease.

The virus infected a 15-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl in the same village in Congo in 2009. They didnt stand a chance, says Joseph Fair of Metabiota, a company that investigates pathogens. Fair is in the Democratic Republic of Congo now, under contract to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to help battle an ongoing Ebola outbreak.

They expired within three days, Fair said in a telephone interview. It was a very rapid killer.

A few days later a male nurse who cared for the two teenagers developed the same symptoms and survived. Samples from the lucky nurse have been tested and it turned out a completely new virus had infected him, Fair and other researchers report in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS pathogens.

The genetic sequences went to Dr. Charles Chiu, of the University of California, San Francisco.

We were astounded that this patient had sequences in his blood from a completely unknown and unidentified virus, Chiu said. They werent expecting that.

Read more:
Dangerous new virus in Africa

Joomla, the open-source-based content management system that competes against WordPress, Drupal and others in the world of blog, website and intranet creation, has today taken a step up in the world of converged media. The opensource community, which says its platform powers 3% of all the websites in the world, has released version 3.0 of its CMS, which automatically optimizes content created on the platform for the mobile web. Joomla says that its mobile implementation is the first to be built on Twitter Bootstrap, the mobile-friendly toolkit developed by Twitter and released on Github in August 2011 that is a collection ofbase CSS styles for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation, alerts and more that are already widely used in the development of websites and apps.

Also among the 15 or so new features in version 3.0 are aPostgreSQL driver, a new user interface for administrators and a new front-end template. Other features have been introduced incrementally since the sitess last version (2.5, out in January) and include the ability tocopy a template, the option to disable the ability to change the Username in Profile and the installation of language packages directly from the extension manager.

The decision to go with Twitter Bootstrap for Joomlas responsive-design mobile implementation, the company says, was made in part because the framework is already popular with developers. Its one example where Twitter has for now continued to work harmoniously with the developer community, at a time when relationships have become somewhat more strained when it comes to third parties working with its own APIs to create Twitter clients.

Meanwhile, the inclusion of the PostgreSQL driver, Joomla notes, will mean it it supports the main repositories for databases (the other two already supported are MySQL and SQL Server).

While sites like WordPress are widely cited as the worlds biggest website-creation platforms, Joomla has also been a significant, if slightly less consumer-focused player in this space. Sites forCitibank, eBay, General Electric, Harvard University, Ikea, McDonalds and Sony have been built on the platform, along with those of smaller blogs and intranets.

Joomla says thatthere are more than half a million active contributors to its open source CMS, and that its software has been downloaded more than 30 million times to date. WordPress, Drupal and Joomla have come to dominate the market for CMS-based websites (as opposed to those that are built from the ground up in custom designs): together, they account for some 75% of the top-1 million CMS-based sites worldwide, according to an estimate from BuiltWith.

Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 (launched publicly in July 2006), is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post updates 140 characters long. Twitter is a real-time information network that connects [users] to the latest stories, ideas, opinions, and news. The service can be accessed through a variety of methods, including Twitters website; text messaging; instant messaging; and third-party desktop, mobile, and web applications. Twitter is currently available in...

Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS) + Application Framework, which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.

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Website Creation Platform Joomla Debuts Version 3.0, Mobile And Tablet Optimized Thanks To Twitter Bootstrap

NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwire - Sep 27, 2012) - Joomla, one of the world's most popular open source content management systems (CMS) used for everything from websites to blogs to Intranets, today announced the immediate availability of Joomla 3.0. Along with new features such as a PostgreSQL driver, a new user interface for administratorsand a new front-end template, the Joomla CMS can now display content on mobile devices as clearly and distinctly as it does on a personal computer or Mac.This innovation makes Joomla the first major CMS that includes the Twitter Bootstrap framework that enables it to be 100 percent mobile-friendly by default. Over time, a native mobile optimization option becomes increasingly important for a Web presence as global information technology consulting firm IDC predicts that by 2015 mobile Internet will overtake desktop usage.

"As accessing the Internet via a mobile device is becoming more common than accessing it via a desktop computer, the mobile version of a company's website will soon be more important than the desktop version," said Paul Orwig, president of Open Source Matters, a non-profit created to provide organization, legal and financial support to the Joomla project. "With every version of Joomla, we use feedback from our community of more than a half a million contributors to add new features that will keep those who use our CMS ahead of what trends will impact the way their content is experienced.By optimizing Joomla 3.0 for mobile devices, there is absolutely no doubt as to whether what was designed for the desktop will transfer seamlessly to a phone or tablet."

In this release, the goal was to make Joomla 3.0 completely mobile-friendly while still remaining recognizably Joomla. To accomplish this, Twitter Bootstrap was utilized. Bootstrap is an extensive front-end toolkit for developing websites and applications. Using Bootstrap allows Joomla to create a mobile-ready experience based on a popular framework that many other developers and designers already know and work with on a regular basis.

In total, there are more than 15 new features to Joomla 3.0. Other key features include the ability to copy a template, the option to disable the ability to change the Username in Profile and the installation of language packages directly from the extension manager, which makes it easier to manage other languages.Many of these new features have been introduced incrementally since the launch of Joomla 2.5 in January.

One of the brand new features with Joomla 3.0 is the addition of the PostgreSQL driver. This addition means that the CMS is truly database independent, as it already is integrated with MySQL and SQL Server.

Joomla 3.0 is truly a collaborative community-driven software project developed with the feedback gathered from more than 2.6 million Joomla forum posts, nearly 580,000 Joomla forum members and data from more than 9,900 Joomla extensions.To download Joomla 3.0, go to http://www.joomla.org/download.html.

About Joomla! Joomla is one of the world's most popular software packages used to build, organize, manage and publish content for websites, blogs, Intranets, and mobile applications. With about 3 percent of the web running on Joomla, the free open source Content Management System (CMS) powers the web presence of hundreds of thousands of small businesses, governments, non-profits and large organizations worldwide like Citibank, eBay, General Electric, Harvard University, Ikea, McDonald's and Sony. The award-winning CMS is led by an international community of more than a half million active contributors, helping the most inexperienced user to seasoned web developer make their digital visions a reality. Joomla's power and extensibility has resulted in its software being downloaded more than 30 million times.

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Joomla! 3.0 Released; Open Source Content Management System (CMS) Newly Optimized for Mobile Devices