Twitter: a tool for tracking criminals, or to stretch the truth?

News24 reported that the web was literally ‘atwitter’ this week when TechCrunch (http://www.techcrunch.com) discovered that a serial killer, known as dinner_guest, was tweeting about his murderous activities on Twitter. Speculation was rife as to whether the killer was for real; whether the tweets were part of a marketing campaign; or whether it was some type [...]

NASA broadcasts moon blast online

Thanks to the power of technology, people around the world were watching a live feed on NASA’s website at 13:30 South African time today. The reason for the sudden interest in the US space agency? NASA planned to crash a rocket into a crater near the moon’s south pole to kick up debris that scientists will then [...]

Another new Wave washes in from Google

This morning as I was scrolling through my Twitter homepage, I noticed a trend in the tweets of the more technologically-savvy of those I follow: much talk and hype about Google Wave, yet another development by the online powerhouse.
Upon further research, I found out that Google Wave is an online personal communication and collaboration tool [...]

Twittering teens add words to the dictionary

This week’s Sunday Timesnewspaper featured an article from The Times, London, titled ’smells like teen spirit’. According to the piece, “Twittering teenagers have shown their influence on the English language by introducing dozens of new words to the dictionary and helping re-invigorate older ones.”
This is just the kind of thing that piques my interest. Teens have long [...]

Email as a form of social media

Duct Tape Marketing has published an interesting post on the most neglected form of social media – email. The post points out that people have sent out email with ‘tell a friend’ or ‘forward to a friend’ buttons and links for years – as a result, it may well have actually been the first form of social [...]

Updating Facebook and Twitter simultaneously

There is a lot of discussion around the importance of knowing who your audience is on your various social networking accounts, and realising that certain social networking sites might be used for different purposes. Simultaneously, we are also constantly reminded not to neglect our social networking accounts once we have committed to them, so that [...]

Facebook’s privacy policy under scrutiny once again

Once again, Facebook’s privacy policy has been under scrutiny. This time it has been found to be in breach of Canadian law by holding on to users’ personal data indefinitely, even once they have deactivated their accounts.
This is not the first time that the issue of data rights has been raised in terms of social [...]

Being an open book could be risky for your career

According to an article on MyBroadband, job-seekers are being warned to avoid posting compromising photos and status updates, and even innocuous details like hobbies; political opinions; and personal lives, on social networking sites like Facebook as it is a growing trend for employers to routinely check potential employees’ backgrounds by doing online searches, sometimes even [...]

Facebook Lite – the cat’s (almost) out of the bag

News that Facebook is thinking of becoming leaner, has spread rapidly on the wonderful platform called the internet. Because this has been a project that has been relatively hushed-up, what the point of re-working Facebook is not really clear. I visited a few blogs to see what others had to say and this is what [...]

What’s hot and what’s not in social media

According to Abrams Research, which recently conducted a survey on the future of social media, Twitter is the best social media tool for business, pulling in 40% of the votes. This was followed by LinkedIn, then YouTube, and bringing in the rear with 15% was Facebook. However, the reverse was true when it came to [...]