The Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe has announced that it will adopt two sets of recommendations that favour human rights approaches for search engines and social media platforms. In Recommendation CM/Rec(2012)3, the Committee has adopted a series of impressive-sounding policies that recognise the growing importance of search Read more
So, Facebook’s Timeline is upon us, and there is nothing you can do to stop it. Well, in theory one can quit, but I’ve been there, done that. Still, I find Timeline so disturbing that I’m seriously considering giving up on FB again altogether. The thing about the new interface Read more
I’ve just finished reading the fascinating case of AMP v Persons Unknown [2011] EWHC 3454 (TCC) via the IP Osgoode blog. This is a BitTorrent case with a twist, as it is NOT a copyright case. Perhaps we have grown accustomed to BitTorrent technology, it is used to share legal Read more
There has been quite a lot of talk in social media in recent days about Klout. This has been prompted in large part by an adjustment in Klout scores, which saw a huge drop in influence (10 points in my case). To a lesser extent, some discussion has been generated Read more
Many of us have been following with interest the adventures of Amina Abdallah Araf al Omari, better known as A Gay Girl in Damascus, a half Syrian, half American girl writing about her struggles in the Arab Spring. I have to admit that although I have read some of her entries, Read more
I’ve been following with great interest (and a bit of amusement) the media saga taking place in the UK at the moment involving the naming of a footballer who allegedly had an extra-marital affair with a model. Perhaps some background is warranted to introduce this discussion. Imogen Thomas, a British Read more
Back in May 2009, I publicly quit Facebook in one of the most read and linked articles that I have written in this blog (apparently it still comes up quite high when people search for that topic). There is no need to go into a lot of detail into the Read more
Twitter has been in the news quite a lot this last week here in the UK. First, we were presented with the Twitter Joke trial, where accountant Paul Chambers lost an appeal and was fined £2,000 GBP for posting a threatening message on Twitter, or more accurately, he posted a Read more
SocialMediaLand has been flooded in the last couple of days with stories about Firesheep. In case you have not heard about it, Firesheep is a Firefox add-on that allows anyone to hijack other people’s social network accounts in open wifi zones. The way the application works is staggeringly simple. If Read more
As one of the millions of people who reuses passwords, I found this xkcd utterly brilliant: I wonder if it would be possible to program a web search that looks for the frequency of use of the words ‘xkcd’ and ‘brilliant’, ‘wonderful’, ‘utterly brilliant’, ‘amazing’ and ‘WTF?’ The results I Read more