News of significant job losses and organisational restructuring at Fairfax has thrown new spotlight onto the continuing transformation of the Australian media landscape. It’s clear that newspapers in their…
The Olympic Games are a fascinating yardstick for how much things have changed in the preceding four years. As Beijing’s fake fireworks beamed across our TV screens, Kevin Rudd was still Prime Minister…
With each passing day commercial interests seem to find new ways to harness the tools on which the web was built. Policy initiatives such as the US’s now-defunct SOPA and in-progress CISPA now involve…
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…
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…
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…
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…
For major brands, the road to social media infamy is paved with what seemed like good ideas at the time. Just this week, Qantas succeeded in having Twitter suspend the well-known spoof account, @QantasPR…
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…
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…
In the age of social media, if we’re able to get online, engage with a few tools and connect our ideas to others who sympathise, we’re able to initiate social change. Or that’s the theory. The world begins…
The increasing spread of information and communication technology has changed just about every aspect of Australian society – except democracy. The opportunities to engage citizens in the democratic process…
I know my mood over the course of a day and so, it seems, does Twitter. Over the years there’s been a lot of work on mood cycles. Much of it has been based on neurochemicals such as serotonin and dopamine…
On Saturday, hundreds of protestors congregated in the Wall Street area of New York at the start of a protest dubbed #OccupyWallStreet. The aim? To “flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens…
This week, the American National Labour Review Board ruled to reinstate five workers fired for complaining about a co-worker on Facebook. The board decided writing about work on Facebook was equivalent…
There’s a colourful and evocative term among regular users of social media: “headdesking”. It’s what you do when somebody says or does something so stupid that your instant reaction is to smack your head…
On Tuesday, the ACT government held Australia’s first virtual community cabinet using Twitter. Four ministers faced a barrage of tweets in an hour long question and answer session held with the electorate…
On July 4, a hacker took control of one of the Twitter accounts of US broadcaster FoxNews.com and sent out several tweets announcing President Obama had been shot. Because it was a national holiday and…
Facebook, with more than 500 million members, has now reached superpower status. If Facebook were a country, its supporters often say, its population would rank behind only China and India. But there is…