2 Days Ago - Here's a switch. Instead of newspapers trying to protect the identities of the people posting to their websites, the newspaper is the one outing them. As described by editor Kurt Greenbaum of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, someone posted a vulgar word in the paper's online commenting system, and... (Read More)

13 Hours Ago - We're already heard about people being fired for calling in sick and then posting on Facebook. Now a woman has lost her insurance. According to CBCNews, Nathalie Blanchard, 29, has been on leave from her job at IBM for the past year and a half after she was diagnosed with major depression.... (Read More)

21 Days Ago - Calling social media sites a "productivity black hole," the UK IT services group Morse said that staff who use Twitter and other social networking sites while at work are costing UK businesses £1.38bn every year, according to the BBC. More than half those surveyed said they used social... (Read More)

28 Days Ago - Twitter, Inc., has shut down 33 fake Twitter accounts created by Republicans using the names of Democratic state representatives, but fake websites using the Democrats' names are still up. The story was reported in the Hartford Advocate, an alternative newsweekly. State Republican Chairman... (Read More)

33 Days Ago - The 2008 presidential election featured a new emphasis on using the Internet, ranging from raising money to advertising to getting support. It's still going on. Facebook, in particular, due to the ease in which people can set up affinity groups, is proving to be a new source of online activism,... (Read More)

Sep 30th, 2009 - GovLoop, an online social network for government workers that was started by a federal worker, has been sold to GovDelivery Inc., a venture-backed government communications platform, with GovLoop founder Steve Ressler as its head of social networking. Terms of the sale were not disclosed. The... (Read More)

Jul 1st, 2009 - It's been known for a while that current and potential future employers look at people's profiles on social networking sites such as Facebook. And it's also been known that people are using social networking sites to announce the status of their relationship -- or lack of one. Now the two... (Read More)

Sep 28th, 2009 - A poll on whether President Barack Obama should be assassinated, which was posted to Facebook on Saturday, has been taken down after an investigation by the Secret Service, according to NPR. The poll consisted of a single question: 'should obama be killed? ' with the choices yes, maybe, if he... (Read More)

Sep 21st, 2009 - In an attempt to build support for a bill that would roll back a ban on Internet gambling enacted when Republicans led Congress, the online gambling industry is running online ads noting that legal online gambling could raise $48 billion for the deficit-plagued U.S. government. "At a time when... (Read More)

Apr 28th, 2009 - A mainstay of situation comedies is when one of the characters plays hooky at work to go do something else -- bowling, watching a ball game, going to the movies -- and gets caught. Never fails. Now there's a new wrinkle for them to try. Reuters is reporting that a Swiss insurance worker for... (Read More)

Aug 1st, 2009 - Convention and visitors bureaus -- perhaps more than 300 of them -- are increasingly using Twitter to help market their locations, and a recent study examined how they do that. Development Counsellors International, a New York-based tourism firm, said it looked at the convention and visitors... (Read More)

Aug 3rd, 2009 - The Twitter Platform Team is recommending to all Twitter developers that they make sure their applications support 64-bit integers because the popular service has almost reached the limit of 32-bit unsigned integers. "Twitter status ids are fast approaching the maximum 32-bit *unsigned* integer... (Read More)

Jul 26th, 2009 - A recent panel sponsored by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) discussed the issue of gay characters in online games, some of which forbid them. Games produced by Bay Area-based Electronic Arts Inc., such as the Sims properties and Spore have no restrictions about revealing... (Read More)

Jul 9th, 2009 - It's said about writers that you should never get into a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel. But United Airlines has learned not to get into fights with musicians who have videocameras. As Dave Carroll, of the folk-rock group Sons of Maxwell, reports on his blog, it all started on... (Read More)

Jun 29th, 2009 - If Richard Posner, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago, gets his way, blog postings like this one could be illegal. On his blog, Posner recently suggested that copyright law might need to be expanded. "Expanding copyright law to bar online access... (Read More)

Jun 15th, 2009 - "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." John Gilmore, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in 1993. In the same way that people in Mumbai used Twitter last fall to publicize news of terrorist attacks in that Indian city, Iranians are using Twitter to let the... (Read More)

Jun 7th, 2009 - Given that some courts have found that people can be charged for violating the terms of service of a particular site, it's important to keep track of what the terms of service are so you don't inadvertently violate them. (Incidentally, some other courts are finding that violating... (Read More)

May 19th, 2009 - The continuing saga of Craigslist vs. the state attorneys general took another turn, with South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster contending that the continued presence of ads for "erotic services" on the site constituted a criminal violation for which Craigslist management was personally... (Read More)

May 28th, 2009 - As expected, Representative Barney Frank, D-Massachusetts, has introduced legislation that would roll back a ban on Internet gambling enacted when Republicans led Congress. The legislation would allow the Treasury Department to license and regulate online gambling companies that serve American... (Read More)

May 31st, 2009 - In what may be a first, a company has bought rights to a Facebook page -- in a bidding war, even. OraBrush, a company that makes tongue cleaners, has outbid Hershey's for the rights to the "Kisses" public profile, according to the Inside Facebook blog. Pricing was not disclosed. The Kisses... (Read More)

May 13th, 2009 - Following the lead of Facebook users whose uproar over a change in terms led the social media company to change them back, Twitter users are now clamoring about a change in what Twitter shows. Twitter users "follow" other users, meaning they see their posts. People can either create new posts or... (Read More)

May 11th, 2009 - People are continuing to find new and interesting things to do with Twitter. One is Stweet, a combination of Twitter and Google Map's Streetview that uses georeferencing. Select a city from the picklist (or enter another city at the bottom of the screen) and it'll show you the most recent... (Read More)

May 1st, 2009 - Along with a number of other changes brought forth by President Barack Obama’s administration, another one might be the re-legalization of online gambling -- particularly poker -- in the United States. Online gambling in the U.S. was made much more difficult, though not technically illegal, in... (Read More)

Apr 28th, 2009 - Craig Newmark, the San Francisco-based founder of the Craigslist want-ad site, is reportedly refusing pressure to shut down his site's Erotic Services section in light of an alleged murder where the victim advertised there, according to a story in the Huffington Post. Philip Markoff, a Boston... (Read More)

7 Days Ago - Twitter has suspended its new retweet function. Now, this takes me back. When I started writing about technology this stuff was commonplace. A software company would announce a new version or a new package, its target date would come and go and then it would be released as buggy as anything.... (Read More)

Aug 28th, 2009 - The wires are abuzz with stories of Twitter and Facebook customers being robbed. It's fairly simple; you Tweet or tell your Facebook friends that you're going on holiday and a thief reads it; they break into your house, knowing full well you're away, and you lose a load of stuff. Insurance... (Read More)

Aug 19th, 2009 - Facebook is going on trial for an alleged breach of privacy it appears. The full story is here. I don't know American law at all but I'm writing in the UK and over here, if a case is coming to court, we have to be very careful about prejudicing the outcome by commenting on it. Given that, plus... (Read More)

Aug 6th, 2009 - ITV has finally put all the rumours into perspective and sold FriendsReunited. It's lost millions in doing so and there's no getting away from it - it was a bad deal. It's worth noting a few details about FriendsReunited. It began as a tiny business putting people back in touch with old school... (Read More)

May 28th, 2009 - Twitter has struck again according to reports. The German elections had their results leaked online, both on Twitter and over the open Internet. In the same week that the UK heard that it was going to have insufficient broadband bandwidth to meet the needs of the Digital Britain initiative, critics... (Read More)

May 27th, 2009 - Is this the beginning of a backlash? It looks as though there's some research out there to suggest that the over-55s are starting to desert Facebook. There could be a number of reasons for this. The best guesses I've seen mostly involve money. This time last year you might recall there was a... (Read More)

10 Days Ago - Everyone seems to be talking about how first Facebook and now Twitter are being adopted by business users, as if the concept of social networking in a business environment was somehow new. Of course, the truth is that services such as LinkedIn have been providing just that for many years now. ... (Read More)

32 Days Ago - GigaTweet has been counting the total number of messages posted to Twitter in real time, and the rolling count is almost hypnotic. Overnight the 5 billionth Tweet was posted. So what was it? Perhaps someone speaking out against corporates trying to gag freedom of the press again? Nope. ... (Read More)

Oct 12th, 2009 - I love Twitter, and post a lot of links to security related stories via my @happygeek account. But now I am getting a little worried that I might suffer the same fate as a well known, and highly respected security expert. Mikko Hypponen is a familiar face around the security conventions, and a... (Read More)

Oct 4th, 2009 - It would appear that a political activist from New York has been arrested by the FBI in connection with helping orchestrate G20 summit protesters in Pittsburgh. According to The Guardian the man, Eliot Madison from Queens, has been charged with hindering prosecution after helping G20 protesters... (Read More)

Jun 2nd, 2009 - Here is an interesting dilemma: if 99 percent of Generation Y consumers have an active social networking profile, why do only 22 percent of them use Twitter? Could it be that celebrities are killing the micro-blogging service? A newly published study by the Participatory Marketing Network and... (Read More)

May 27th, 2009 - I have to admit that I Tweet from pretty much anywhere and everywhere, the beauty of the medium is that you don't know if I am on the toilet or in the theatre, at my desk or naked in my bed. Or, for that matter, even on holiday. A survey from online travel site Lastminute.com reckons that British... (Read More)

12 Days Ago - What do you use Twitter for? Telling your circle of online friends what you are up to? As an alternative to email? Maybe a little bit of legal celebrity stalking? Perhaps, but if you are an Indian Twitter user the chances are you are treating it primarily as an online news source. That is the... (Read More)

33 Days Ago - Apparently, women are more than twice as likely to go online and vent when stressed than speak to their partners. That's according to the results of a recent survey which also suggests that when stressed many women go and blog instead of turning to alcohol or chocolate. The survey, conducted by... (Read More)

Apr 1st, 2008 - If you don't know anything about the microblogging phenomenon called Twitter, it's about time you started. The idea behind microblogging is that you summarize your thoughts in 140 characters or less -- you're actually limited to the space available. Blogs with 250 word minimums need not apply. ... (Read More)

May 28th, 2009 - I've been to a couple of conferences recently where I was surprised to see representatives of the U.S. military on panels discussing various uses of technology, but I was shocked to learn that the military was on the cutting edge of the technologies being discussed. To be honest, my perception of... (Read More)