eModeration's Social Media Round-Up - The Headlines #6

Welcome to our round-up of all that's new, controversial or just plain weird on the social media scene in the last few days. Such a lot of news this week that we've split it into three - look out for posts #7 (The Fab Four: Twitter, F acebook, YouTube and Google) and #8 (Social Brands and Legal) to follow. And please feed back below on what you find interesting, or how we could best deliver it to you.

THE HEADLINES...

How awkward. The IAB UK (the UK's Internet Advertising Bureau) was left shuffling its feet and perspiring slightly, as they admitted that their recently-announced Internet advertising figures were, um, wrong - by the small matter of £50m. Luckily the overall figure - which revealed, to industry-wide glee, that internet is now a bigger ad medium than TV - was unaffected.

After six long months, YouTube has finally inked a landmark deal to take Channel 4 content shortly after broadcast. Top pop TV, for example Skins and Peep Show, will now be available free of charge - and C4 has managed to cling to ad sales around the content.

More than 10 million UK adults have never used the Internet, according to a new report for Martha Lane Fox, the government’s Digital Inclusion Champion. 17 per cent of the population have never been online – and 4 million of those are already socially excluded.

It’s even worse for rural communities, warned Prince Charles, who are being left in the digital slow lane, unable to access the internet to connect with vital services or promote their struggling economies.

"Internet? What the Divvil’s that?", barked the Duke of Edinburgh, who acknowledged this week that he was baffled by technology in general and remote controls in particular, generally lying on the floor to operate the set instead.

And a rough old week for T–mobile, and anyone else with their their data in the clouds. The company faces sky-high legal bills after two separate class actions were filed in response to the 'catastrophic' loss of data faced by users of their Sidekick smartphones. The outage appears to have been caused by a server malfunction at Danger, a subsidiary of Microsoft, who now claim that 'the majority' of the lost data is recoverable.


THE LOWDOWN...

Gordon Brown faced the Wrath of Mum this week in a live web-chat on parenting site Mumsnet. Mumsnet members, who have a rep for being both straight-talking and politically-savvy, expressed their disappointment rather sharply – but the PM managed to avoid a stinging slap to the back of his knees.

Swing it, Daddio! The Conservatives, meanwhile, are hanging with Der Youth, having commissioned a 40-second ad on music-streaming service Spotify. Don’t tell, but had I been picking the Tory best-placed to connect with the young, I might have pretended not to see doughty Eric Pickles’ hand go up.

In a Backslash Backlash, the Father of the World Wide Web™ Sir Tim Berners-Lee has admitted that, had he his time again, he would go //-free.

Hoorah! those Facebook Fails just keep on coming. Maxi Sopo, a 26-year-old suspected of bank fraud, wanted all his friends to know what a grand old time he was having lying low in sunny Mexico. Unluckily, he’d already made the schoolboy error of adding a law-enforcement official to his list of friends.

Finland has declared fast Internet access a legal right. From July, Finnish telecom companies will be obliged to provide the nation’s 5.3 million citizens with at least 1 Mbps, with even faster speeds in the pipeline. “We think it’s something you cannot live without in modern society. Like banking services or water or electricity, you need Internet connection,” said an official.

All rather galling for Sweden, who actually broke their bit of the Internet last week. The .se domain was out for a whole hour on Monday, before they fixed it up with a rubber-band and some blu-tak, and managed to jump-start the motor.

I Tweet Dead People. Yes, it’s come to this - the first social media séance, or “Twéance” [baboom-tish], will take place on October 30th, when UK psychic Jancye Wallace will attempt to contact Dead Slebs via Twitter.

No need, I feel for ornamentation – this story speaks perfectly well for itself. The Glo Bible has high-resolution photos, virtual tours, interactive timelines and a slick, youthful publicity campaign featuring a soft-rock soundtrack - and is available in the UK for a very reasonable £59.99.

I’mma let you decide whether t’laugh or cry / When Miley Cyrus raps her Twitter goodbye.

And in spookily-related news, Hollywood execs are cracking down on movie-industry celebs who leak info through their Twitter and Facebook accounts. No idea why.


AND THE BEST OF THE REST…

The IAB (no, this time it's the US Interactive Advertising Bureau) got a bit shirty this week in response to Federal Trade Commission’s new guidelines on bloggers and brands. The new rules, it claims, stifle free speech by restricting online communication – “the cheapest, most widely accessible communications medium ever invented” - more harshly than they regulate trad forms of media.

PepsiCo hit a bum note, with an iPhone app which suggested pickup lines for use on a roster of female ‘types’. The lines – some of which were very questionable – prompted a storm of Twitter protests, to which Pepsi responded with a tweet apologizing for causing offence.

If a postal strike lasted 5-10 days, e-commerce companies would lose an estimated £220m. A report from Kelkoo reveals that a whopping 94% of shoppers would be unforgiving of e-tailers, if they failed to deliver.

LinkedIn is upwardly-mobile, recently adding 1m users in just 12 days and pushing total members to 50m. Fastest growth is in India, where they’ve now got nearly 3m users.

A massive click fraud operation, consisting of thousands of publisher sites, was shut down last week. Fake traffic to the sites was allegedly generated by a vast network of Chinese students.

Social news site Digg says their new ad format, which allows users to vote ads up or down just as they would other site content, has surpassed expectations. Those ads with the most Diggs are super-exposed, whilst the least popular eventually drop off the edge of the world.

That's all folks!

You can, if you wish, follow Kate on Twitter, where she is @emodkate.