(Photo: Inquisitr)

Google Ideas, the search giant's “think/do tank," recently funded a study about Internet usage among gang members. Fast Company reports on the results, and surprise, surprise: Rather than committing complicated cyber crimes or crowd-funding gun purchases, their main activities involve "self-promotion and braggadocio." Primarily by posting YouTube videos.

Gang members, they're online narcissts like everybody else!

Fast Company says:

Social networking sites are widely used for self-promotion. The researchers found that 46% of the gang members polled reported posting gang-related videos online, and that 56% reported watching gang-related videos online.

A quarter of respondents also copped to Googling the names of rival gangs to "see what shows up."

In addition, 11 percent said said they used the Internet for "organizing activities," and 19 percent claimed their gang had some sort of website. Most of the respondents, however, said they keep the incriminating stuff offline: “[We] don’t talk about it [gang business] because the police is on there,” one interviewee informed researchers.

Maybe they should have googled whether YouTube videos are admissible in court.

The gloriously candid Mr. Schmidt has taken on more of a policy role since stepping down as CEO in 2011, focusing on the company's external relationships with business partners and governments. He's working on a book called The New Digital Age with Jared Cohen, the fratty-looking former State Department policy and planning adviser, who now heads Google Ideas, a New York-based think tank that "convenes unorthodox stakeholders."

It's unclear how the message of Mr. Schmidt's book--that the Internet and mobile tech can free people from poverty and political oppression--will go over in Pyongyang, or even who they'll visit, considering that North Korea has no diplomatic relations with the U.S. and hosts "almost no business with companies in the U.S."

But if the GOOG is searching for unorthodox stakeholders, they may want to look at the newest iteration of its supreme leader:

North Korea is in the midst of what leader Kim Jong Un called a modern-day “industrial revolution” in a New Year’s Day speech to the nation Monday. He is pushing science and technology as a path to economic development for the impoverished country, aiming for computers in every school and digitized machinery in every factory.

Milder rhetoric aside, the visit to North Korea follows the recent jailing of an American citizen of Korean descent on suspicion of committing “hostile” acts against the state. And Mr. Richardson has previously been on trips to North Korea to negotiate the release of American detainees. But it's worth noting that Google has also been willing to play ball with restrictive governments before, to a point:

After being accused of complying with China’s strict Internet regulations, known as “the Great Firewall of China,” Google pulled its search business from the world’s largest Internet market in 2010 by redirecting traffic from mainland China to Hong Kong. The company maintains other businesses in China, but a recent transparency report shows Google’s services there sporadically are blocked.

Mr. Schmidt was talking about implanting chips in your brain when he said, "Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it," but it seems to work for policy as well.

Seth Weintraub, who covers the Google beat at Fortune, has noticed two new job postings for Google's New York office.

The positions are at Google Ideas, an amorphous initiative at Google under which we assume seemingly random things like self-driving cars might be lumped.

"Google Ideas is a "think/do tank" focused on connecting across different sectors, disciplines and experiences to understand and act upon global challenges in new and innovative ways," the ad says. Nice work if you can get it.

"The establishment of this team is based on the fact that there are many complex global challenges—social, economic, political, security—that remain unresolved despite lots of experts thinking about them and vast resources being allocated to them."

Gomplex global challenges unsolved? Sounds like a job for Google.

Google hired Jared Cohen to start up the New York-based initiative in September.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries