Update 1 on the Google/Italian legal case

Hmm.  Following my post on the Google/Italy legal case last night, the plot this morning, thickens slightly - to an almost minestroni-like consistency in fact.  This is likely to be my first update of a few ....

A twitter search first thing revealed the first pro-ruling post I'd seen, from blogger Malcolm Coles (whose server currently appears to have ground to a halt under the barrage of hits).  He repeated the prosecution's claim that the video had been left up their for two months, "even though some Web users had already posted comments asking for it to be taken down" (quoting Reuters here).

So - the see-saw of judgement now starts to lean rather more towards the Italian side than it did last night, when I was reading that the video had been taken down when complaints were received. It still doesn't seem reasonable to expect a publishing platform to take responsibility for all content that appears on it, and the ruling seems unfairly harsh.  However, a crucial aspect to the case is whether Google were in fact guilty of not taking down the content quickly enough, and thus open to the charge of breach of privacy.

At the time of writing there are some aspects of the case which remain unclear (and please forgive the nitty-gritty dissection of comment vs. flag - but it really DOES make a difference in the moderation world).  The answers to these would make it much easier to come down firmly on one side or the other.

• Whether the video did in fact remain up an unnecessarily long period of time: it seems that Google says it took the content down within hours of it being reported, and helped the Italian police with investigations. The prosecution says the video was up for two months, even though users had posted objections. 
• Whether the objections were in the form of comments only or whether the ‘flag inappropriate content’ button was used.  Google have a large team which proactively scan YouTube for imappropriate content, but even had that been the case on 'Google Videos' back in 2006, of course there is no guarantee that either the video or comments about it would always be found.
• If the video had in fact been flagged, how long it was after receiving a flagged objection that the content was taken down - this surely is the crucial period of time, not how long the video was actually on site.
• Whether the video had indeed been promoted in the "funniest videos" category for two months as some commentary is claiming - and if so, whether this was a manual or an automated process.  If a manual process where Google eyes were on the content, this is of course unacceptable.

According to the ex-UK Information Commissioner's statement, the decision was not based on the Italian equivalent of the Data Protection Act, and so is likely to be based on local Italian laws that are unlikely to be reflected in other European states.  Most reports state that these are criminal proceedings - criminal law is the area where most countries tend to guard their own approach and is not harmonised across Europe.

It's a bold move by an Italian court, and unlikely I would imagine to be followed as a precedent in other Western jurisdictions.  But at the very least it calls into immediate and urgent question the operations of any social network/UGC global site accessible and/or operating in Italy and throws into sharp focus the issues that social networks (and also brands who have a presence on those networks) need to address in terms of protecting users.  Of course, we've got a white paper on that ...

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Google execs found guilty in Italy over video posting - what now for social networks?

I'm still reeling from the shock of hearing the news today that an Italian court has found three Google executives guilty (it acquitted the fourth), convicting them to suspended six-month sentences. We have been awaiting the outcome of this trial for a long time, but I honestly didn't expect it to go this way, especially considering that similar cases in other countries had not resulted in convictions.  Both common sense and legal opinion shared the view that it was not reasonable to expect a publishing platform - in this case Google Videos - to be responsible for every piece of content, provided they responded to complaints immediately by removing any offensive content.

The Google employees were sued over a video posted to Google in 2006, showing four youths bullying a child with learning difficulties.   The Google executives were acquitted of the other charge of defamation, but were found guilty of a privacy violation, of not obtaining the consent for publication of all those appearing in the video.

Here is the statement from Google following the verdict.  An extract:

"It attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built. Common sense dictates that only the person who films and uploads a video to a hosting platform could take the steps necessary to protect the privacy and obtain the consent of the people they are filming. European Union law was drafted specifically to give hosting providers a safe harbor from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence. The belief, rightly in our opinion, was that a notice and take down regime of this kind would help creativity flourish and support free speech while protecting personal privacy. If that principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them — every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video — then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear."

Richard Thomas, the UK's former information commissioner and consultant to privacy law firm Hunton & Williams, said the case was "ridiculous".

"It is like prosecuting the post office for hate mail that is sent in the post," he told BBC News. "I can't imagine anything similar happening in this country. The case wasn't brought by the Italian equivalent of the information commissioner but by criminal prosecutors and we don't know their motives. "I find it worrying that the chief privacy officer who had nothing to do with the video has been found guilty. It is unrealistic to expect firms to monitor everything that goes online." 

Peter Fleischer, privacy counsel at Google, questioned how many internet platforms would be able to continue if the decision held - it is being appealed by Google.

There are two interpretations of this ruling that I can think of right now.  One is that the Italian political and judicial systems are completely out of touch with Web 2.0 and really have no concept of the internet and what havoc this case law may wreak upon it.  This may indeed be the case.

The other (not mutually exclusive) is that Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has an enormous axe to grind in the form of his his Mediaset network, the only major private TV network in Italy.  Berlusconi's government is currently pushing through new measures that would give the state control over online video content and force anyone who regularly uploads videos to obtain a license from the Ministry of Communications.

The new Internet restrictions, opponents say, are yet another attempt by Berlusconi's party to protect Mediaset's bottom line in the age of online video sharing. "This decree is an enormous gift to Mediaset," says Paolo Gentiloni, a former Communications Minister who is now the opposition's point man on media policy. "We suspect that this maneuver is aimed at slowing the growth of the web's video offerings by a government that has a personal interest in supporting private TV."

The new rules would require Internet service providers to remove content the state deems is in violation of copyright law, or face a fine of up to $210,000. "We are concerned over the fact that Internet service providers, like YouTube, that simply make content available to the general public, are being bundled together with traditional television networks that actually manage content," Marco Pancini, Google's European affairs chief, told the newspaper La Stampa. "It amounts to destroying the entire Internet system."

I haven't been able to find out whether that ruling has gone through, as expected, on Feb 4th this year (can anyone update me?), but regardless, it seems possible that the judgement today may have been influenced by other than altruistic motives.

eModeration has, by coincidence, just published a free white paper on the subject of Moderation in Social Networks, in which we firmly recommend that brands moderate the content uploaded by users on their social network pages/channels precisely because the social network platforms themselves can't.  This ruling would seem to make it all the more imperative that brands enforce moderation - please take a look at the white paper for a guide.

And whilst we await the results of Google's appeal (and potentially the future of Web 2.0), we do of course feel duty-bound to offer our moderation services to any platforms who feel in need of a helping hand :-)

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Social Media Round-up #30

Welcome to eModeration's round-up of all that is intriguing, alarming or odd in the world of social media, compiled by Kate Williams. For more social media snippets, follow her on @emodkate - or for general twittery, @KateVWilliams.

This week: Facebook's humour deficit; apocalypse and anomie with Chatroulette; and 'C' for 'Counter-Intuitive'.

Read on here ... 

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When your teenager says they're being cyberbullied ....

Ann Collier is a writer and journalist and editor of NetFamilyNews.org, whose excellent safety tips for tweens and teens I’ve quoted on this blog before.

Another couple of articles from her this month have caught my eye. Clicks and cliques: *Really* meaty advice for parents on cyberbullying is a lengthy, detailed account of Annie Fox's recent 55-min. interview with fellow educator and author Rosalind Wiseman at FamilyConfidential.com.  It talks about what a parent/carer should do when their teen comes to them with a cyberbullying problem.  How how to give their child the tools to cope with the situation, how to talk to their charge in a candid, respectful way and, in the process, helping him/her to understand the rights and responsibilities of being a human being as well as a technology user.

Ann Collier has turned the podcast into two articles directed at ‘parents’ and ‘schools’.  The schools post was full of some great advice to education professionals about how to handle cyberbullying and sexting as a 'whole-school' response involving teaching staff, pupils and parents (versus delivering a 30 minute assembly as a one-off).

The parenting post has a wider audience and so I’ll attempt to further further distil the wisdom of it here – but do read the originals if you have time because they explain the points in far greater detail than I have space for.

• Whatever teens may think, just because its commonplace, it’s NOT normal or OK to be cyberbullied, and they need to be reassured that it’s the correct reaction to be upset by it
  
• Parents/carers should recognise the child is taking a risk by confessing their fears. Most of the time they think that going to an adult will make it worse, which is why research shows only 10% of teens report cyberbullying to their parents (see this)
  
• Utilise Wiseman’s ‘SEAL Strategy’, designed to help the child, if not completely take back control of the situation, at least mentally work her way out of victimization mode.

S means you "stop and think when and where, now or later, publicly or privately"
E is about how "you explain exactly what you don't like and exactly what you want."
A is really two As – for "affirm" and "acknowledge/admit” their rights and responsibilities.  The first A is their right to live unmolested by bullies.  The second A is acknowledge/admit the role they themselves have had in the situation.
L is "You either lock in or lock out the relationship or friendship with the person you confronted – or you take a vacation from it.”

It’s really important for adults to bear in mind that there is more than one perspective on a situation and to try not to be too partisan when listening to your teen’s account of what has been happening.  Always check with the other parents/teachers involved whether your understanding of the situation is accurate. "You're teaching your child how you handle conflict," Wiseman says in the podcast.

She adds that, no matter how much technology is involved in the issue being worked out, "this is not a technology issue; ultimately, it's a parenting issue."  Which of course means providing a good role model yourself in the social media society: if your own Facebook posts are full of taunts or personal information, then it’s likely your teen’s will be too.

Image by TylerEric via Flickr

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The Foursquare Thing - what's all the fuss about?

I’m not sure what this will do to my standing amongst fellow social media-ites, but I’m not mayor of anywhere at all.  Not the pub.  Not my local cafe.  Not the library, the museum, the tube station, bicycle racks and not even my own home – actually, especially not my own home.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then you’ve not had your Facebook or Twitter accounts fly-papered with friends’ announcements of where they are in Foursquare.   Actually, I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that everyone reading this knows exactly what I’m talking about, and if not, there are lots of good pages explaining the idea behind Foursquare (not least Foursquare’s own)- and there’s also this rather good take on the commercial angle by Matt Rhodes at FreshNetworks.

You may gathered that I’m not a fan, that my iPhone will remain Foursquare app-less.  And although I do slightly resent my precious iPhone screen inches being squatted by the various pizza parlours  my friends are eating in tonight, that’s not the reason why.  In any case, Jay Andrew Allen in The Zero Boss is much, much wittier (and ruder) than I can be about how riveting these locational updates are:

“But really, guys – I don’t care where you are. I mean, I care in a general way. You at home? Work? On a trip to the Bahamas? At a convention listening to a life-altering speaker? That’s great – let us know. That’s newsworthy among friends. But I don’t need latitude and longitude. I don’t give a shit that your hankering for day-old corn dogs has made you Mayor of the 7-11 at 91st and Roosevelt. I’m your friend, man – not your professional stalker”

It’s actually the ‘stalker’ bit which has my professional and personal hackles rising. Although Foursquare – unlike Gowalla – doesn’t yet actually require you to be precisely at the location where you are ‘checking in’, lots of naive people think nothing of posting their location whilst they are actually there (unlike canny celeb users of the service who reputedly only check in they when leaving to avoid being mobbed). And after all, that’s the way Foursquare was intended to be used – you let your network of Foursquare friends know where you are, in case they want to join you, don’t you?

The problem comes when you:
a)    Accept Foursquare friends you don’t know (so telling a bunch of strangers where you are)
b)    Link your Foursquare posts to Twitter and Facebook, and so tell the whole social media world where you are ... and as importantly, where you aren’t.

Where you aren’t of course, is at home.  The ramifications of this have been ably demonstrated by the provocative site pleaserobme.com, a “dressed up twitter search page” of publically-viewable ‘I’ve left home’ Foursquare check-in tweets.

Pleaserobme’s creators Forthehack warn:

“The danger is publicly telling people where you are. This is because it leaves one place you're definitely not... home. So here we are; on one end we're leaving lights on when we're going on a holiday, and on the other we're telling everybody on the internet we're not home. It gets even worse if you have "friends" who want to colonize your house. That means they have to enter your address, to tell everyone where they are. Your address.. on the internet.. Now you know what to do when people reach for their phone as soon as they enter your home. That's right, slap them across the face.”

But in all fairness, as this counter from Foursquare points out  (quoting from a post by Gawker,which has some good Foursquare sensible usage tips also – check it out):

“You might as well argue that you should never tell anyone that you have a job, because then people will know you are at work from 9-5 every day, and can use the white pages to find your home and rob you!”

Added to which, Pleaserobme’s assumption would be that either we all live alone or we only go out accompanied by all household members.

Rather more real is the fear that young people without much street-smart could be using the site and publicising their locations.  Foursquare’s terms state (as do the main social networks) that you should be 13 yrs or over to use the site.  Unlike the main social networks however, they make no attempt at all to enforce this. The Foursquare site doesn’t even ask your age when you register, or warn you that should be over 13 at point of registration.  Instead, it requests to connect immediately to your Twitter and Facebook friends.  And we all know how intimately the average teenager knows and trusts her Facebook friends, right?

Unsurprisingly, Foursquare stalkers are already being reported and causing concern.  As MWD Technology News puts it:

“Imagine you are an average girl but you have that one guy that you just can’t stand and he shows up everywhere because he knows your exact locations from FS or Twitter (Stalker).  In your lifetime you probably had that one jealous person that just couldn’t live without knowing where you are at the moment. Don’t worry FourSquare will feed that jealousy and questions that come after that “Where have you been? Who did you meet on 100th St at Starbucks?….”

Oh, and to add an extra ingredient into the mix, SquarePik has upped the anti on potential UGC mis-use by allowing users to ‘drop an image or video at a venue’.   There are no  flagging buttons on the site alongside the ‘tags’ where users leave suggestions of what to do at a venue, and so as far as I can see there is no easy way to report inappropriate content.

To be honest, I’ve been scratching my head why some otherwise perfectly nice, sane people are playing Foursquare. OK, you get to collect badges (seriously, this really does it for some) and if you’re Mayor one day, you may even get a free ticket from your local cinema.  You can also find out which is the best salad to have and may well use it as a rendezvous aid.  But I’m inclined to think that Ivor Tossell hits the nail on the head in his post for the Globe and Mail:  it’s all about ego.

“Since FourSquare lets you choose when to locate yourself, you can be sure that users will put themselves on the map with an eye toward reinforcing their self-image. Would you rather your contacts perceive you as a club-goer or a homebody? Would you like to come off as a compulsive library-goer or food shopper? McDonald's or Gary's Falafel Palace? Sears or Mark's Work Wearhouse?”

Hmmm. D’you know what?  My friends – my real life, offline friends – know where and when I eat and shop.  The rest?  Well, to be honest, except the burglars, I think they just don’t care ...

Update 08/03/10 A colleague pointed out this post on Techcrunch - it seems that (whilst I was still determinedly not playing it), Foursquare have added badges like 'Douchbag' (you are a frequenter of untrendy locations) and 'Crunked' (you've been to 4 or more bars in one night, so you're probably drunk) to their virtual offerings.  And, unsurprisingly, causing offence to some, especially those who have auto-tweets of their status set up.

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Facebook Login Confusion

This is a spectacular reminder of the wide range of people using the internet and how varied their levels of technical ability and experience are.

ReadWriteWeb is a blog that reports on social networking developments and general internet current affairs.  Last Wednesday they posted an article about a login integration agreement between Facebook and AOL - fairly typical stuff considering the way "Facebook Connect" boxes are popping up all over the web.  Strangely the RWW folks noticed an unusually high amount of traffic to that particular article and an exceptional number of article comments; most of which complained about difficulties logging into Facebook and disappointment with the site's new layout.

The admin poked around in the back end and found that almost all of these new hits were referred from a Google search for "facebook login."

It seems that an awful lot of people don't have Facebook bookmarked and aren't familiar with the process of typing "facebook.com" into their address bar.  Instead they'd googled for "facebook login" and gone to the first search result which, on this day, happened to be ReadWriteWeb's article.

They'd ignored the site's bold red and white colour scheme, very different structure, and even the "ReadWriteWeb" banner and searched for the closest thing to a Facebook login form, which happened to be the article comments section.  Take a look at what they all posted for a real shock to the system about how far we still have to go before the world at large is comfortable in control of a web browser.

Posted by:  Jesse, eModeration Community Manager

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Engage Expo

I'm really excited to be over in New York this week, where, amongst other engagements, I was speaking on a panel at Engage!Expo with Joi Podgorny, (Director of Community Engagement, Smart Bomb Interactive), George Zaloom, (Founder & CEO, FaceChipz) and Pierre Le Lann, (Co-CEO, TribalNova).

The title of the panel was 'User Generated Online Content for Kids: Freedom vs. Safety' and we covered a healthy balance of the positive aspects of UGC and a stark reminder of the more insidious aspects including bullying, sharing of personal information, innappropriate content and general "Lord of the Flies" type gang mentality. The questions from the floor were excellent and despite an earlier morning panel suggesting that ugc for under 14s was just pointless as it was stuck on the too hard to do pile, our audience had a real support for allowing young children to create their own content and engage with others in a safe way.

Pierre's slides of Woozworld were a great reminder of the sheer joy in seeing how tweens and teens have such brilliant imagination and, given the building blocks, they can create amazing content and continually suprise building hospitals, adoption centres, shops and even self policing by creating a prison.

As many of the questions were around that old connundrum of how to help with the registration process to ensure you know the age of the users it was refreshing to see George's new site which aims to blast the registration issue out of the water. George Zaloom proudly demonstrated FaceChipz, a kind of Facebook with stabilisers. This is a social network that is just for friends to share. It centres around users having to physically give their friends or people they want to connect with special poker chip like "FaceChipz". These have a special code that connect the two friends online so you can only connect with people you know and trust. The code even deactivates after use so if it was lost or got into the wrong hands it would be useless. Very cool and a sign of how far the industry has come.

Joi Podgorny was as wonderful as always at keeping the conversation flowing. As all great Community Managers do she invited the attendees (and anyone else) to continue the conversation. To aid this our twitter handles are:

@tlittleton
@joipod
@plelann
@facechipz

Update: the organisers have now very kindly published the MP3 recording of the panel, so if you'd like to have a listen first hand please do so.

As a side note I'm very excited about the new National Geographic VW for kids coming out so good luck with that Joi. Some brands are just ripe for a VW experience.

My after panel buzz was rather squished by the news that my partner had been caught up in a shop being robbed at gunpoint whilst I was talking (ok but in shock) and it reminded me of this very apt quote from Stephen Fry talking about the online world.

“Like a city, there are slums, there are libraries, there are theatres, there are shops, there are places where you would never go and you certainly would not want your children to go,” he said.

Interesting times.

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Social Media Round-up #29

Welcome to eModeration's round-up of all that is intriguing, alarming or odd in the world of social media, compiled by Kate Williams. For more social media snippets, follow her on @emodkate - or for general twittery, @KateVWilliams.

In this update: we're still Buzzing; those Bing Maps chaps; and Facebook's five billion bits.



THE HEADLINES ...

THE LOWDOWN ...

IN OTHER NEWS ...

ON FACEBOOK ...

ON TWITTER ...

ON GOOGLE ...

ON YOUTUBE ...

BRANDS GET SOCIAL ...

ON MOBILE ...

THINKING ...




ON GOOGLE ...

Less than a week since the launch of Google Buzz, and already it feels like forever (but in a good way).

There’ve been tears, and joy, and tears of joy; and massive privacy holes, and the lightening-speed tightening of same: truly, a rollercoaster of emotion for us all this week. But in case you didn’t make the height restriction, here’s a speedy up-sum of the vertiginous highs and lurching lows.

Tuesday: Buzz appears, causing mild bafflement in both analysts and public. Wednesday: Competitors get snarky. Thursday: Huge privacy issues are revealed. Friday: Huge privacy issues are fixed. Saturday: Stats show Buzz is a Facebook-and-Twitter-rivalling game-changer with over 160,000 Buzz posts and comments per hour.

If you require a little more detail, Mashable’s analysis of Google’s ‘nuclear bomb’ is well worth a look – they also usefully reprise Ari Milner’s tips on how to turn Buzz into your ‘social command centre’.

While the social media world was all a-Buzz this week, the launch was by no means Google’s only news:

Ay Caramba! At least six music blogs were deleted from Google’s Blogger and Blogspot services - entirely without warning - for copyright-releated TOS violations. Their owners received notification after Google had already removed the blogs – in some cases destroying ‘years’ of archives in the process – but many insist they operate with the permission of record labels and artists, reports the Guardian.

In a somewhat inscrutable update on Google’s ongoing Chinese conundrum, co-founder Sergey Brin said that the company wants uncensored search results "within the Chinese system”. Though he postulated that such a thing might come to pass “maybe in a year or two”, Brin acknowledged that “a lot of people might think I am naive - and that might be true.”

Sparking futurist visions of a technology which truly melts geo-cultural borders, the Times reports that Google is developing mobile software which would allow two people to converse in real-time, though neither spoke the other’s language. The software would combine Google Translate, and its voice-recognition system – but won’t be available for several years.

Meanwhile, Google announced the launch of Google Maps Lab, which will allow users to test new features as they’re developed. Commentators speculate that Google is feeling some Microsoft heat, following the recent stream of new features rolled out for the Silverlight-powered version of Bing Maps: this week saw the launch of their Streetside Photos app, which matches geo-tagged Flickr images with their real-world locations.


ON FACEBOOK ...

Though Buzz is doubtless giving Facebook HQ a tension headache, they needn’t panic quite yet: last week The ‘Book announced they’d zipped past the 400 million user post without a backwards glance, and this week new stats reveal that over 100 million of us are using the site via our mobile phones – a near 100% rise over six months, and a vindication of the simplified design of their mobile site.

Elsewhere in the Facebook compound, the chaps in the Dept for the Immediate and Continuing Expansion of Social Games must be jolly pleased: according to TBI Research, the head of an (un-named) social gaming companies says that Facebook’s new payment platform has seen sales of virtual goods jump by 25%. This is enough to absorb the considerably higher commissions which Facebook charges (30%, versus 10% by competing payment services).

And last month, five billion pieces of content were whistling through the cybersphere courtesy of Facebook users – a 500% leap on mid-2009. After launching its ‘Share’ buttons and – of course – Facebook Connect, the social giant is shapeshifting before our very eyes, and looks set to become as much of a content portal as a social networking space.

Unsurprisingly, brands are increasingly focusing on social networks as a means of ‘fishing where the fishes are’ (as Coca-Cola’s social-media team neatly puts it.) eModeration’s most recent white paper covers the notoriously tricksy topic of how to deal with user-generated content on these rapidly-evolving and markedly varied platforms – if your brand is keen to dive in, but perplexed by what’s required, it’s well worth a look.


ON TWITTER ...

There’s been a bit of a hoo-ha recently about whether or not Twitter stats have truly stalled. This, from Royal Pingdom, seems to come down firmly in the No camp: new figures reveal that a mind-boggling 1.2 billion tweets were sent last month.

What’s more, January 12th was Twitter’s biggest day yet “across all metrics that matter” according to an understandably smug-sounding CEO Evan Williams. The figures neatly coincide with the news that Twitter is hiring Ali Rowghani – till now, Pixar’s financial capitane – as chief financial officer: a wake-up call to those who think that Twitter has anything but profitability in its sights.


ON YOUTUBE ...

Crikey, those birthdays just keep on coming, don’t they? No sooner have we surreptitiously pricked the balloons left over from Facebook’s sixth, than YouTube announces its fifth birthday. To celebrate, new Nielsen research reveals that, while overall US online video growth has slowed to 5.2% year on year (down from 16% the previous year), Youtube is far and away the biggest online video property with 113.6 million unique viewers last month - up 6.7% on December.

Coincidentally, the Wall Street Journal reports that Veoh, one of YouTube’s initial competitors way back in 2005, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy this week. YouTube done good (or at least, done clever).


BRANDS GET SOCIAL ...

Nokia has given fans the chance to shoot and cut their own video for Noisettes' new single 'Saturday Night': 80 of them have used their Nokia N95 and 5800 handsets to film the band performing, and have uploaded their footage to a dedicated microsite where other fans can view and edit it.

Pizza Hut took advantage of Valentine’s Day to pull Twitter users in – they asked them to tweet their smoothest pick-up lines, followed by the hashtag #iluvPH. Free “chocolate-topped dessert sticks” (good lord!) went to the most creative entries.

To coincide with Fairtrade Fortnight, Tate & Lyle have launched a website to promote their Fairtrade products, which include Divine chocolate, Café Direct coffee and Traidcraft raisins. The website allows users to make their own virtual cakes, and share cake-based content across social networks: the creator of the most delicious-sounding recipe will have their cake whisked up for them for real - by The Ritz, no less.

Mars has partnered with the Daily Mirror to challenge four Snickers fans to a series of tasks, each of which will be shown as webisodes on the Mirror’s website. The campaign – titled ‘More Nuts’ and featuring tasks like the not-very-gruelling-sounding ‘kicking and catching footballs’ - will also be aired on Facebook and YouTube.

Aids project (Red) has launched a campaign called ‘Get Pucke(Red) Up’, which allows Facebook users to send lip-smackingly audible kisses to their friends. The initiative offers six different kissing styles, from the ‘Platonic Peck’ to the more emphatic ‘Can’t Get Enough’, and highlights the various real-world gifts which (Red) hopes users will buy to support their work in the developing world.

Dennis Publishing, which numbers techie titles Mac User, Computer Shopper and online-mag Gizmo amongst its publications, has launched a new consumer technology review site. Expertreviews.co.uk offers – well, expert reviews, as well as user-generated ones aggregated from previous buyers by Reevoo.


ON MOBILE ...

54.5 million smartphones were sold in the US in Q4 of 2009 - a giant leap of 39% on the previous year’s figures. According to comScore, much of this continuing growth is Apple-shaped: the iPhone increased its market share from 24.1% to 25.3% on the previous quarter. Google’s Android doubled its share from 2.5% to 5.2%, but the leading operating system by some considerable way is still Blackberry’s RIM, with a whopping 41.6% of the market.

On both iPhone and Android phones, social networking is by far the most popular activity. Socnet apps were used at double the rate of news applications, and four times the rate of mobile games, according to Flurry – though users tend to consume news in longer chunks than they devote to social media, at an average of ten minutes per session.

Meanwhile, UK firm Synchronica has developed an affordable smartphone which could be life-changing for users in the developing world, where monthly incomes would barely scratch the price of a regular smartphone. One of Synchronica’s models offers a basic push-email and messaging service, the other a full HTML Web browser, and access to social networking sites.

Finally, when US teens aren’t in school or asleep, they send a thumb-numbing average of 10 texts an hour, according to new Nielsen figures – that’s 3,146 texts a month, compared to less than 500 for all mobile users combined.


THINKING ...

If you have any time left over from the giddy social whirl this week, may we recommend the following?

Two books, one detailing the rise and rise of Facebook, the other the rise and – well, who knows? - of MySpace, are reviewed in fascinating detail in the New York Review of Books this month.

And here, Brian Solis charts the process by which brands are becoming their media, and explains why success depends on the quality of the content they provide.


That’s all folks!

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Video Archive from Wisekids Conference 2010

The WISE KIDS - WISP Young People in a Digital World conference took place on the 1st and 3rd of Feb 2010 in Swansea and Bangor respectively.

The video from the conference on the 1st of Feb in Swansea is now available here, and it really is an excellent webcast, both technically and for the breath and detail of its content. Amongst other great speakers to catch are Professor Tanya Byron (interviewed for the slot as she couldn't be there in person),  Sangeet Bhullar (WISEKIDS founder), Rebecca Newton (Moshi Monsters) and of course our own Tamara Littleton, talking about the behind-the-scenes work of moderation.  Tamara gives some fascinating - and occasionally horrifying - insights into children's behaviour  in virtual worlds.

Tanya Byron gives a really interesting guide to the background to and thinking behind her report 'Safer Children in a Digital World', and if you haven't heard her speak before, do grab this chance.  As Rebecca Newton has said elsewhere on this blog, she's a bit of a Rock Star, and very clear and convincing in her arguments that we need to teach our children how to cope with their digital challenges, rather than simply try to restrict them.

Also at the conference, a new ning network, Digital Youth Wales, was launched: a network for practitioners who are interested in the digital/Internet literacy of young people. Its aim is to be a space for professionals (teachers, youth workers, LA staff, and others) interested in the Digital Lives of young people to share their good practice, resources, questions and knowledge in order to better prepare, support and inspire young people in their Digital Lives.

WISE KIDS is a not-for-profit company, founded in Oct 2002 by Sangeet Bhullar. WISE KIDS provides  innovative training programmes and consultancy in New Media, Internet and Mobile Technologies, Internet Proficiency, Literacy and Safety.

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Social Media Round-up #28

Welcome to eModeration's round-up of all that is intriguing, alarming or odd in the world of social media, compiled by Kate Williams.  For more social media snippets, follow her on @emodkate  - or for general twittery @KateVWilliams.

In this update: Will Buzz fly? MySpace gets WD40; and Beaker's Ballad.

THE HEADLINES ...

THE LOWDOWN ...

IN OTHER NEWS ...


THE HEADLINES ...

A proud week for Google, as it presented to the world its latest social media baby: the sweetly-named Google Buzz. Google is clearly very, very keen to socialize its offer, and, as a follow-up to its recent launch of Social Search, it’s effectively turned Gmail into a social network - in the process delivering what Mashable is calling a “hybrid of Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook and Yelp."

Gmail is already the third largest email provider globally – and now lets users post updates, including YouTube video and Flickr photos, as well as aggregating other services to enable users to hear their own social circle above the digital din. Comments on users’ updates will go straight to their inbox, and friends’ updates will be ranked according to whether other users have ‘liked’ them or not - so far, so Google.

Both Microsoft (who you’ll recall has a considerable chunk invested in Facebook) and Yahoo were predictably scathing, with Microsoft sniffing that “busy people don’t want another social network” and Yahoo needily insisting they’d launched “Yahoo Buzz” years ago. More worrying for Google, though, is its previous form in the social space – if the words Orkut and Jaiku mean nothing to you, the point is made.

Observers call our attention to the fact that Buzz’s Twitter integration is only half-hearted, and – worse - that the search giant has not invited the Facebook fairy to the feast: as Mashable continues, Buzz won’t fly without Facebook connectivity. Finally, in what is now a rite of passage for any aspirant social network (though admittedly rarely before the poor wee thing is a week old) a ‘Huge Privacy Flaw’ has been identified by Business Insider.

Over at MySpace’s office, it seems the revolving door has had an enthusiastic application of WD40: Owen Van Natta, announced as CEO last April, is out after less than a year at the helm. Commentators had noted that his simultaneous appointment with Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn amounted to leadership in triplicate – and parent company News Corp, who last week reported digital earnings down by some $32million, clearly agrees.

The Digital Economy Bill is insufficiently clear on the detail of its ‘three-strikes’ rule for illegal file-sharers, according to the Joint Select Committee on Human Rights. The government hasn’t shown how they plan to cut the broadband of illegal down-loaders without affecting other members of the household, and may therefore be violating human rights law. The committee was also troubled by the “over-broad” powers that the bill would give the authorities.

Meanwhile, in news which will have privacy hawks a-squawk, the FBI has said it wants ISPs to hold information on every IP address, domain and website that individuals visit - for two long years. The Feds insist this is a simple matter of updating the rights they already have over telephone networks – now largely superceded by the internet - and that new powers would cover only points of contact, rather than actual content. Nevertheless, any attempt at legislation is likely to spark a ferocious response from the US’s hefty privacy lobby.

The Australian government this week suffered a co-ordinated hacktivist attack, in protest at its plans to lay a comprehensive filter across the Aussies’ bit of the internet. Hackers papered the PM’s home page with pornography, and crashed the Australian parliamentary website for nearly an hour, to express their opposition to the filter.

In an intriguing twist to Google’s Chinese saga, government authorities claim to have nixed a popular ‘how-to’ site for cyber-hackers, which they say was responsible for ‘thousands’ of attacks. Google had responded to the recent hack of activists’ emails with a refusal to censor its Chinese results – it’s not yet clear if the government’s announcement is an attempt at a rapprochement.

The Iranian government imposed an info-blockade on its citizens in the run-up to this week’s anniversary of the Iranian revolution, during which opposition forces were calling for protestors to take to the streets. The US State Dept did not mince its words: “It is clear that the Iranian government fears its own people."

THE LOWDOWN ...

Last week the Facebook page of Colin Gunn - who is serving a 35-year sentence for conspiracy to murder – was taken down, after police revealed that he’d been using it to intimidate his old associates. This week the Times reports that Jack Straw has asked Facebook to pull the pages of a further 30 prisoners who’ve been harassing victims and their families via social media.

Young People in ‘Not As Thorough As They Might Be’ Shocker! The Telegraph reports that, in comparison with older users, youngsters are more likely to ‘flit around’ the net, and less likely to thoroughly research a topic in depth. They conclude that the internet is rewiring teen’s brains – though a quick flick through our own school exercise books might have set them right.

Am I living in a box? Why yes, I am! ‘Controversial’ media personality Tim Shaw will soon be spending 30 days locked alone in a box, unaware of his location, live-streaming every second to an awestruck world. Since its aims are charitable, it seems impolite to point out that this box-thing was rather tedious when that Blaine chap did something similar several years ago. So instead we will tell you that the person who correctly deduces Tim Shaw’s location via daily web clues and Google Map references will win £30K and unlock the box. If no-one does he stays for the full 30 days. In a box.

If you have ever idly wondered whether it’s possible to update an 80s puppet-based phenomenon for a social media age, we have the answer you seek: the Muppets present “Beaker’s Ballad,” which is well on its way to becoming a soaraway internet sensation.

With big eyes and comparatively small head, 14-year-old Rebecca Flint from The Isle of Man bears an uncanny resemblance to a Japanese anime character. Now, in a peculiarly post-modern variation on the Cinderella fable, she has become a Japanese YouTube sensation. Videos of Rebecca dancing to J-pop in her bedroom while dressed as a giant cartoon character have already had 8 million hits – and now canny promoters have renamed her Beckii Cruel and released a DVD, which looks set to go straight to number one in the Japanese charts.

If you are approaching Valentine’s Day with some trepidation - perhaps anticipating your beloved’s baleful glances across the restaurant table, as you surreptitiously check Twitter beneath it – then the following news will be useful. Herbert and Zelmyra Fisher, the world’s longest-married couple, will spend V-day on Twitter, responding to your questions on the secret of sustaining romance. (@longestmarried).

As their entry to a competition by Fireworks Popcorn, Dave Britt and Justin Goeres have created Popcorn Tweets. Software combs Twitter for the hashtag #popcorn, then launches a Heath-Robinson-with-robotics contraption which cooks …some popcorn. Like me, you may be struggling to spot precisely which gap in the market these fellows are seeking to plug - but it behoves us to remember that the history of digital innovation is strewn with successes which met initially with scepticism.


IN OTHER NEWS ...

Google has warned the creators of lookey-likey Chinese search engine Goojje that their logo, which is indeed very similar to the one we all know and love, infringes their trademark rights, and must therefore go.

The most popular ad shown during the US Super Bowl – traditionally a Big Deal in the Stateside ad industry – was user-generated. The Doritos ‘Underdog’ ad, which won competition-winner Joshua Svoboda $600,000 for an initial outlay of $200, prompted the New York Times to warn: “Be afraid, Madison Avenue. Be very afraid.”

Edelman’s 2010 Trust Barometer reveals some surprising findings in the matter of whom we trust online. According to its latest research, those who believe that their friends and peers will give reliable information about any given brand has dropped by nearly half, from 45% two years ago, to only 25% now.

Here’s rather crushing news for Apple – the percentage of consumers who have heard of the iPad, but are not interested in buying one, has doubled since its launch - from 26% to a crunchy 52%. Retrovo expresses the stats in a pretty graphic here.

Commentators have long predicted that the coming election will be fought on two key battle-grounds: at the school gates, and in social media. Now both Labour and the Conservatives are running ads on parenting website Mumsnet, which has hosted webchats with all three party leaders. Here, The Telegraph explores how social media is changing the terrain of politics.

New research from the Advertising Association show that UK online advertising spend grew by 4.2% during 2009 – one of only two sectors to do so in the grimmest ad recession since their quarterly survey began in 1982. The internet’s gain was press advertising’s loss – it fell by an identical 4.2 percentage points.

Finally, Tuesday was Safer Internet Day, with a host of launches aimed at keeping kids safe online. CEOP targeted 5-7 year olds (80% of whom are estimated by Ofcom to use the net) with a cartoon aimed at teaching them about trust and what content to put online. The UK Council for Child Internet Safety (UKCCIS) launched a three-step campaign called Zip It, Block It, Flag It –including press ads to encourage parents to tell kids to “zip it” when it comes to keeping their passwords private. And Microsoft launched a version of IE8 which allows kids to report worrying websites and to get advice on cyber-bullying – part of the ‘Click Clever, Click Safe’ campaign which was launched in December. eModeration’s Tia Fisher gives her thoughtful take on SID2010 here.


That's all folks!

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YouTube launches Safety Controls

Following our publication yesterday of our new white paper on the importance of moderating your brand's presence in social networks, I was really happy to hear this morning about the new YouTube safety feature:' 'Safety Mode'.  This is a new filter feature which can be turned on and 'locked' (so they say) and will filter out offensive content.

Turning 'Safety Mode' on apparently:

• Filters search results - so that a search for 'naked' for example reveals no results. Other searches return only 'safe' results.
• Hides comments by default - users can choose to view them again, but all offensive words will be asterixed out
• Makes it impossible to view links where the content falls foul of the filter.
• Applies to the column on the right hand side also, so that all related videos, videos being watched now etc. are also filtered.
• Can be locked to stop your 14-yr-old satisfying his curiosity against your wishes.  According to the video, you just set your preference, log in to your account, and once you log out again it's set, and can't be unset unless you have the account password (this did seem to work, although I was able to look in with my Google password combo too)

Great stuff from YouTube, and the need for it is ably demonstrated by the bunch of imbeciles who have commented underneath.  But I turned on 'Safety Mode' and they obligingly disappeared :-)

I do however have two queries - easy to understand that a black list word filter has been applied to text, including comments, titles and descriptions.  But as YouTube has millions of UGC items, and is is not feasible for moderators to post-moderate every one., who is categorising the content uploaded?  If I describe my film as 'Sweet Valentine' and it contains pornography, unless it is flagged by another user, would the Safety Mode stop it being returned in a search?

In an attempt to test it, I did two searches for 'sex', with and without the Safety control.  See the screengrabs for the results - they do vary a little, so I can see a couple of the more dubious videos have gone - but what hasn't disappeared is the sponsored 'featured' video, which I would have thought fell firmly on the wrong side of the safety filter.

 

 

Is this a YouTube Fail or a really good YouTube attempt at protecting vulnerable users?  Let me know if it works for you ... and if anyone from YouTube can get in touch and explain how they categorise ALL their content, I'd be really happy.

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eModeration releases white paper: 'Moderation in Social Networks'

After what feels like an inordinately long labour (mostly because Facebook kept on changing), we’re proud to give birth to our latest white paper: ‘Moderation in Social Networks’ - free to download from our website.

Marketing to consumers on social networks is a fast-growing area for brands, who now want to “fish where the fishes are” as Coca-Cola’s recent social media strategy put it.   The aim of this guide is to arm brands and agencies with the knowledge they need to deal with user-generated content on social network pages.

We’ve been moderating an increasing number of Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and YouTube pages and channels on behalf of agencies and brands, and, to be honest, it’s not as simple as it might at first appear.

To start with, social networks (and we deal in our white paper with the ‘big four’: MySpace, Bebo, Facebook and YouTube) were not primarily designed as marketing tools: the rules that govern them are not clear, and the rapidly-evolving nature of the platforms makes it difficult to keep abreast of the latest developments. There is little or no consistency between the processes of the major social networks and this can be a minefield for brands.

The paper, written by eModeration’s CEO, Tamara Littleton, guides brands through the following issues:

• The status quo: is content safe on social networks? This includes a brief look at some of the complex legal issues surrounding the responsibility for areas including users’ safety and defamation.
  
• Who is responsible for keeping users safe? This lays out what brands should know about what the big four networks are doing to ensure safety on their sites.
  
• What is the risk to a brand? This section takes brands through the potential risks and pitfalls of a social network campaign (focusing on user safety and brand reputation).
  
• The rules on social networks. Each of the big four social networks has a different set of rules and processes to follow when engaging with users. This section gives a detailed breakdown of what each of the four sites does and doesn’t allow; and a guide to best practice for brands on moderating content on each.
  
• Should a brand moderate a third-party site? This is the big question for many brands. This section of the paper lays out questions brands should ask themselves, such as how far it knows (and trusts) its audience; what the risk might be to a brand’s reputation of being associated with negative content; and how to protect users.
  
• Can brands stop people saying negative things about them? There is a very clear difference between moderation and censorship. Brands must be prepared to take negative comments on the chin, but they don’t have to put up with abusive posts.
  
• What should a brand look for when moderating content? The obvious areas are bullying, abuse or illegal content. But there are other, less obvious pitfalls such as avatar images, swear-words in user names, harassment messages, spam and off-topic posts.

Keeping it updated:  We’re not pretending that this is an exhaustive guide, and we know that changes are likely to happen which will make it out-of-date quite quickly.  That’s why we’re going to ask for your help to keep it updated, so it will remain a valuable resource for brands and agencies.  Please add comment below or email me at tia@emoderation.com with any updates or edits, and we’ll revise it periodically.

Thanks in advance, and we hope Moderation in Social Networks proves useful to you – let us know!

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Safer Internet Day 2010

Today is Safer Internet Day 2010. Organised each year by Insafe, and coordinated in the UK by CEOP, Safer Internet Day aims to promote safer and more responsible use of online technology and mobile phones, especially amongst children and young people across the world. In 2009, Safer Internet Day was celebrated through 500 events in 50 countries all over the world.

This year's theme is 'Think B4 U post!', with the message that anything anyone posts online remains there for an indefinite period and accessible for everyone. This can have serious consequences: children and teenagers need to be made aware that they can control their online identity.

Through the activities organised in the various countries, parents are being asked:

Do you know if your kids:

 - use the privacy settings offered by social networking services?
 - select friends online that they can trust?
 - publish their own photos after thinking carefully about the potential consequences?
 - publish pictures of their friends only with their permission?

Here's the TV spot made to publicise this year's campaign:



With Facebook's recent default change (making everything you post publically viewable unless you go into your privacy settings and change them) this message is more important than ever.  And it's not just for kids.
Adults need to learn that what they do online may impact their lives, and the lives of others, forever.  (Just ask the Vodaphone employee who thought it would be funny to send out an offensive tweet on his company's Twitter account last week).

CEOP are tackling the job of trying to reach the children and their parents with this message with a mass of resources (assemblies, activities, videos) on their portal .  If you live in the UK and want to get involved, click here to see a list of Safer Internet day activities in your area.  Another great organisation with some good resources is Beatbullying - check out their lessons plans.

It's great to see so many of the schools' activities being aimed at the parents and carers: it's hard being the passport-holder of a digital native.  We can't expect them to be able to monitor their children's activities if they haven't been given the tools and training to do so.

If you're reading this, and especially if you're a parent, please take a moment to think how you may be able to help spread the word.  Give a talk at your local school?  Arrange some training for a group of local parents?  Forward the resources to your local school? Just pass on the message to friends?  Whatever it is, we can probably all do something to make our children aware of the consequences of posting, whether to themselves or others.

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Social Media Round-up #27

Welcome to eModeration's round-up of all that is intriguing, alarming or odd in the world of social media, compiled by Kate Williams (@emodkate).

In this update: Now Facebook Is Six; ITN's German Celeb-Channel; and YouTube's rental predicament.


ON FACEBOOK ...

ON TWITTER ...

ON YOUTUBE ...

BRANDS GET SOCIAL ...

VIRTUAL AND GAMES ...

THINKING ...


ON FACEBOOK ...


As we briefly noted on Friday, it was Facebook’s 6th Birthday last week – and (after the piñata and the scary clown) it emerged that the little tike had scooted past the 400-million-user mark with barely a grazed knee.

And hasn't he grown! The 'Book now rivals Yahoo's position as the third largest web entity in the world, which would rank it second only to Google and Microsoft.

Monthly users now number more than 108 million – most of whom will now have seen the Book’s revamped homepage, comprising upscaled photo display, a far easier messaging facility and rationalized notifications – all messages, updates and alerts are now pulled together into the top navigation panel.

Most intriguingly though, the search pane has come right out of its shell – it’s bigger and better and – crucially - more social. Confirming its centrality to Facebook’s Bigger Picture, search now auto-completes the names of those with whom you share the most connections, and indexes items like Pages and Applications to two degrees – so your friends’ friends content is now indexed.

What’s more, Facebook’s new payment system, launched last week, is out of the gate like a skinny hound on a fat rabbit. Initial research suggests users are choosing Facebook’s payment service over alternatives, and the Book is clawing a whopping 30% from publishers – revenue from this first year alone looks set to rake in $125-250 million, if not more. Seems Facebook has Paypal locked in its sights.

And look! eMarketer calculates that ads will earn Facebook a stonking $605 million globally this year, a 39% hike on last year’s figures. And that’s before analytics - “Facebook is sitting on a gold mine of consumer information” according to their analyst.

It’s not all Polyanna-this and ‘bright future’-that, however. Last week it was Tim “Made By Many” Malbon’s turn to toll a son’rous bell for Facebook’s future: he detects hubris, and prophesies doom. “Facebook is gambling on owning the one social graph (the data about me, my contacts and what we all do) to rule them all,” he writes. “The problem is that they don’t.”


ON TWITTER ...

For the second week in a row, there is no meaningful Twitter News this week. Oh, hold on; there’s something scrunched up at the back here… okay, goddit: Ah yes, only 8% of US teens use Twitter, and only 1 in 10 school-age kids – shockingly low in the context of other social networks’ stats. Of this small cohort, the girls are marginally keener: 13% of 14-17 year old girls are microblogging.


ON YOUTUBE ...

ITN is solidifying its YouTube alliance with its first international offering - a German showbiz channel named Promi411. Good news indeed for fans of Claudia Schiffer and.. erm, The Hoff - but also for those of the broader global celebretariat: the channel will feature international celebrity news, packaged by a German producer based at ITN, with all revenue split between ITN and Google.

YouTube’s Great Sundance Rental Experiment – you’ll remember that users could rent festival entries at $3.99 a pop – has not been an unmitigated success: they made $10,709.16. From this (or indeed any) angle, the numbers aren’t great; nevertheless it might be worth casting your eye over this piece from Venturebeat, which suggest that YouTube rental might just prove itself yet.


BRANDS GET SOCIAL ...

Domino’s Pizza has sponsored a “Superfan” Facebook app which challenges their fans to recruit their own friends to Domino’s fan page, and doles out pizza-based treats to all, as stats rise.

Pringles is dusting off its "Can Creator" website, which it launched a couple of years ago to push cause-related campaigns. For each customized design submitted by the public, they’ll donate 50 cents to the US Winter Olympics team, to a maximum of $40k.

Honda Europe has launched ‘Live Every Litre’, a crowd-sourced campaign which asks users to pitch for funding to film their own extraordinary journeys. Hopefuls will be able to promote their entries via social networks from the campaign site, and the winners will be chosen by public vote, with additional input from an independent panel of bloggers. The campaign coincides with Honda’s sponsorship of Channel 4 documentaries.

Dunkin' Donuts recently completed its quirky ‘Twinter Games’ campaign: users tweeted entries to hashtags like "#3WordsAfterIcedCoffee" to win a fifty-buck gift card. Facebook fans uploaded photos of themselves cradling iced-coffees, to feature as ‘YeDDi of the Week’. (It’s an initial-based pun on the brand name, in case you’re reading this first thing before brain kicks in.)

Oh Lord, is it really Valentine’s Day already? [slumps] To keep our minds off the postman’s knock, Target is offering customers the chance to choose how it splits the $1million it’s pledged to 5 educational charities. Its Facebook app, “Super Love Sender” allows users to create interactive cards for their darlings, and to nominate one of the five organizations while doing so.

JetBlue is trying to boost its Facebook fan numbers, in order to match their million-plus Twitter followers. They’ve launched a sweepstake on Facebook – the self-explanatory ‘All You Can Jet’ campaign.

Visa’s Go World YouTube channel is having a makeover, and will platform six new Winter Olympics ads featuring US team athletes. Their Facebook page will also feature behind-the-scenes Olympic snippets, and athletes’ own photos and footage.

Benetton is hosting an online casting - those who think they could become the 2010 face of its brand can upload photos and video describing their style on YouTube, for an online casting. The finalists will be chosen by a public/panel combo, and will be whisked to NYC for an A/W 2010 fashion shoot.

American Greetings is asking its Twitter followers to answer daily questions in their ‘Follow the Love’ contest, for a chance to win cash gift-cards.

Sara Lee’s site offers an interactive tool which shows users the positive environmental impact of choosing the brand’s EarthGrains bread. To encourage fans towards its Facebook page, they’re also pledging $1 towards farmer outreach for each new fan.

Budweiser, to support its big Superbowl buy-in, ran a multi-layered Facebook campaign which asked fans to vote for the ad they wanted to see aired during the game.

Coke Zero is crowd-sourcing basketball fans, in the newly-launched ‘Dept of Fannovation’ section of their website. The brand wants fans to come up with creative ways to experience NCAA’s March Madness (bi-i-ig tournament, for those Brits who don’t know). The top 64 submissions will compete for $10,000 and game tickets, with the online fan community voting for the most intriguing ideas.


Jim Beam Bourbon is asking the friends and families of US servicemen and women to nominate them to win VIP event trip packages, through their Facebook Fan Page. It’s an extension of their relationship with Operation Homefront – which helps returning U.S. soldiers adjust.


VIRTUAL AND GAMES ...

Linden Lab is in the process of shutting down its barely-used Second Life forums, and replacing them with new discussion areas in its Clearspace blog/forum hybrid. The Labs announced that "the forums have become jammed with cruft over the years" - previously-released figures showed that as few as 700 of 18.1 million registered users had ever posted in the forums.

Sid Meier’s Civilization is coming Facebook, in what Mashable predicts may well be an excellent game/platform hook-up. The beta will be along ‘soon’ – the full game, not till next year.

What might be the implications of Google’s new StreetView patent on ad overlays? Dan Misener discusses the impact on real/virtual world advertising in this podcast.


THINKING ...

If you have pondering time this week, might we suggest the following?

A concise and to-the-point pep-talk from Aliza Freud to get your community-building juices pumping.

On which topic, Radian6’s recently published e-book Building and Sustaining Brand Communities looks as though it might be a rewarding read.


That’s all folks!

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Social Media Round-up #26

Welcome to eModeration's round-up of all that is intriguing, alarming or odd in the world of social media, compiled by Kate Williams (@emodkate).

In this update: Do U Haiku?; Facebook in 'News' news; and Engadget's off-switch.

And do remember to check back later in the week, when we'll be casting a perky eye over Facebook, Twitter, and the most social brands.


THE HEADLINES ...

THE LOWDOWN ...

IN OTHER NEWS ...


THE HEADLINES ...

Hillary Clinton this week dispensed a blunt warning: the West urgently needs to develop its virtual defences against cyber terrorism. The US Secretary of State declared that tanks, bombers and missiles were “no longer sufficient” to protect cyber and energy networks - nor to neutralise ‘threats of terrorism and destructive ideologies.’

A Tory government would apply market-based thinking to deliver superfast broadband speeds of ‘up to 100 Mbps’, the Shadow Chancellor George Osborne said this week. He’d let private investors piggy-back BT’s ‘local loop monopoly’ to fund cabling upgrades – and would happily extend the current 3.5% levy on the license fee if private investment failed. But Labour critics crowed that the move would be cheering news for both Rupert Murdoch’s Sky, and The Carphone Warehouse – whose cofounder has donated £150,000 to Tory Party coffers.

Ach, they grow so fast! You look away for five minutes and the next thing you know, your little social network (bear with me) has grown into a strapping news portal! Facebook this week celebrated its 6th (I know!) birthday by crossing the 400m user mark, updating its look - and becoming a player in online news. Last week, 3.5% of visits to sites in the news and media category came from Facebook – up from just 1% this time last year, and comfortably outranking Google News to claim fourth place in the Big List of News Portals. (Intriguingly, Venturebeat here analyses the extent that Facebook could administer First Aid to newspapers.)

Elsewhere in the world of online news, a steely-jawed (bear with me again) Rupert Murdoch reiterated his attachment to paywalls – and simultaneously delivered a sideswipe at The Guardian’s Alan Rusbridger, who recently said that news-subscriptions were akin to “sleepwalking to oblivion”. Murdoch’s response: a John Wayne-esque “sounds like BS to me”.

Meanwhile, NewsCorp’s strategy is attracting renewed attention, after Star TV’s head honcho was bussed in to oversee News International’s online sites. Commentators are intrigued by the possibility that Mr Murdoch is contemplating an extra 50p a week on Sky subscriptions, to help pull off his putative paywall plans – and they cite magazine rival Newsday’s recently-averted paywall disaster, in which a laughable 35 initial subscribers to Newsday.com was translated into a respectable 1.5m users by bundling online news in with cable subscriptions.

Mega-tech site Engadget took action this week, after a mass Trollathon broke out on their comments pages, following their coverage of the iPad launch. After page upon page of abusive posts – many of which accused the site of being Apple stooges – Engadget’s weary editor Joshua Topolsky took action, and flicked the ‘comments’ switch to OFF. Whilst the strategy does not feature heavily in the book of social media best practice, it’s hard not to admire his grit (though we’d love you to come and have a word with us next time, Josh...)

THE LOWDOWN ...

Three elegiac cheers for Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, who poignantly tweeted his resignation haiku this week: "Financial crisis / Stalled too many customers / CEO no more." Here at the Round-up we feel that Haiku – a form beloved of all rilly-deep (but also rilly time-poor) thinkers everywhere – should certainly be more widely employed; join us in agitating loudly for Twitter to formally adopt a five-seven-five syllable rhyme-scheme for its outage notices.

She’s in and out like a fiddler’s elbow, that Lily Allen. The Sun reports that the headstrong songstress has at last returned to Twitter, after an interruption of four whole months. "Hello, I'm back" was her re-opening gambit – and she promises "exciting news" to come. Out of chaos, comes order.

In confirmation that there’s nothing we Websters like more than a snifter of salacious tittle-tattle with our morning tea, Forbes magazine has crowned Perez Hilton King of the Web - news which cannot but conjure visions of Michael Arrington (2nd), Pete Cashmore (3rd), and those Twitter guys (4th) all doing brave smiles, whilst furiously penning Op Eds deploring the rise of Sleb-Web culture.

Facebook has rushed to nix the page belonging to notorious underworld boss Colin Gunn, after he used the network to make not-even-thinly-veiled threats against former associates. The gangster – who is currently serving a 35-year sentence for conspiracy to murder – managed to maintain a Facebook page despite rules which say prisoner’s access to the internet must be strictly supervised.

And in Incontrovertible Proof that the coming general election will be all about social media (well, maybe a bit about the Economy, and Tax, and other stuff), Labour MP Derek Wyatt has launched an iPhone app to let voters tell their local MP what they think. Currently, Mr Wyatt is the only member using the service – and he’s stepping down at the next election - but we’re quite sure more will be along presently.


IN OTHER NEWS ...

In an admirably imaginative collaboration, Childline has partnered with teen girls’ social net Stardoll to encourage young women to express their emotions, through a range of online tools. The move follows an earlier partnership during National Beat Bullying Week - a contest which attracted 250,000 votes. Read more here on the eModeration Blog.

In a comprehensive rundown of the social media habits of teens and young adults, the Pew Research Centre reports that 62% of US teens head online for news and current affairs – rising to a mammoth 77% during a major event like an election; a massive 86% of social networking teens post comments on friend’s pages; and teen blogging has dropped from 28% to 14%. For the full monty, Pew’s research is here.

Meanwhile, another study finds a link between excessive internet use and depression – but doesn’t say which comes first. Researchers from Leeds University found that small proportion of teenage web users could be classed as ‘addicts’ – and that this group were more likely to also suffer from depressive illness.

Speculation mounts that Amazon is planning to upgrade its e-reader Kindle with touch-screen tech, to go head to head with the iPad. The company this week acquired New York start-up Toucho, which has recently been working on an interpolated, pressure-based – and cheap – touch-screen capability.

In other Amazon news, the e-tail giant was this week forced to back down in its standoff with publisher Macmillan, and accede to the publisher’s demands for a higher cover price for bestseller and hardback releases. Macmillan’s titles – including the current Man Booker winner - were briefly removed from Amazon’s virtual shelves as the two tussled over a disputed price hike.

Skittles.com – whose social media makeover gained much industry attention last year for its inclusion of a live stream of Tweets on the brand, whether or not they were positive – has stepped back from a strategy of absolute transparency. The new site offers users a range of ‘offbeat’ shareable content including YouTube videos and quirky photos – but the ‘chatter’ stream has now gone.


That's all folks!

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