This week’s temporary suspension of comments on China’s two largest micro-blogging services Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo highlight the ruling party’s discomfort with social media’s growing popularity…
They are everywhere: people in cafés or supermarket queues, staring at their smartphones with determined concentration, occasionally shuffling yellow tiles of letters to use all of them in a killer move…
Loud, large and lovable, the Sulphur-crested Cockatoo has become a well known inhabitant of Sydney. It has always been present around the fringes of Sydney and west of the Great Dividing Range, but over…
Much has been said about Invisible Children’s video campaign to rally awareness towards the atrocities of Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony. But more important is what Kony 2012 means in our ongoing relationship…
With every recent election, in Australia as well as elsewhere, parties and politicians are adding further to their arsenal of digital campaigning tools. In the 2010 federal election campaign, my colleagues…
“I’m still trying to understand the whole thing but there must be something to it. It’s really popular!” That’s my sister-in-law writing on Facebook in late January about Pinterest – one of the real up-and-comers…
There have been enough social media disasters of late to make one thing clear: manipulating sentiment through social networks is next to impossible. The McDonald’s #McDStories campaign in January was supposed…
“Kony2012” is trending worldwide on Twitter. Really, people? Why couldn’t we just stick to making tweets about the Kardashians, Justin Bieber, Angelina Jolie’s leg and sexist hashtags? Snark aside, I knew…
My central problem with branded clothing is my reluctance to actually be branded. Why on earth would I pay to advertise someone? When a Kiwi can make a motza from auctioning her buttock flesh to a strip…
Almost half of all businesses and organisations in the private and public sector in Australia and developed Asian countries are now using social media, according to research by KPMG. A new term – “the…
In the brave new world of contemporary sport-watching, the goalposts have moved. Watching the big game (once a simple matter of grabbing a beer and some chips and settling down in front of the television…
Twitter is being sued for defamation by a Melbourne man who was wrongly identified as the author of a “hate blog” directed at writer and TV personality, Marieke Hardy. Hardy posted a tweet last year to…
The release of Sky News UK’s Twitter guidelines for its journalists – or rather, the Guardian‘s not entirely disinterested commentary on those guidelines – has caused a bit of a stir across social media…
Facebook announced overnight that it’s going to sell US$5 billion of shares in its long-awaited initial public offering (IPO). Company executives filed the official paperwork to get the IPO process underway…
It is a very 21st century story. A Twitter account purporting to be that of noted Australian criminal Mark Brandon “Chopper” Read takes offence to an ad featuring ageing singer Normie Rowe and uses his…
Email has moved from being the internet’s first killer app to being a productivity killer. You can make news by claiming to hate it, ban it or kill it. But the problem with email is not the technology…
Diaspora co-founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy passed away over the weekend. The 22-year-old was one of four former NYU student developers of Diaspora, an open source social network platform that has been the basis…
Pretty soon, not being involved in social media will be just as implausible as not having a telephone. If my 80-year-old dad is on Facebook and women over 55 are the fastest growing demographic on the…