Winters in Boston are bitterly cold and excessively long. So it’s little wonder that residents greet Patriot’s Day – the mid-April, Massachusetts-only holiday marking the Revolutionary battles at Lexington…
Facebook “slut shaming” pages reflect deeper problems with society’s discriminatory attitude towards women.
Flickr/Franco Bouly
“Slut shaming” may be the latest cause célèbre to sweep to our shores, but it just looks a lot like old-fashioned misogyny. From the US-based Salon and The Guardian in the UK, to the Canberra Times in…
As a publicly traded company, Facebook faces a responsibility to increase its revenue. But is its revamped news feed a step in the right direction?
AAP
Late last week, Facebook broke the news of another major change to users' news feeds, sparking interesting discussion across the globe. Described by Mark Zuckerberg as your new “personal newspaper,” the…
The reputation economy is growing – and it may not even need you to do it.
Image sourced from www.shutterstock.com
At first it was organising and selling user-generated content and data, now it seems “they” don’t even need you.
What if there was a company that scraped the web and mapped your connections, showing you…
Raytheon’s “extreme-scale analytics” system can track people’s movements like never before.
c-reel.com
The recent publication of a leaked video demonstrating American security firm Raytheon’s social media mining tool RIOT (Rapid Information Overlay Technology) has rightly incensed individuals and online…
How many likes for news that social networking can increase users' sense of wellbeing?
owenwbrown
We stalk our ex-partners on it, we are friends with celebrities on it, we play games on it, and we post photos of ourselves on it. But what are we really getting out of the time we spend on Facebook…
Graph Search will allow users (and businesses) to pick out the information they want … assuming we let them in.
vincos/Flickr
Initial responses to Facebook’s newly announced Graph Search (a name only a software engineer could love) appear to be split into two main camps:
those who have celebrated the level of nuanced detail…
Instagram’s revised terms and conditions may or may not be good for your image.
Philippe Moreau Chevrolet
Instagram’s announcement yesterday of a new set of terms and conditions has elicited a backlash from many of its 100 million users, with many vowing to ditch the service before the changes take effect…
Programmers will find ways to harness the massively distributed global internet.
Night Owl City
Today I’m annoyed at Facebook. Among the amazingly witty and touching postings from my friends and Amnesty International are “pages you might like” and advertisements for things I don’t need, especially…
You like? You buy? Friends aren’t the only ones you share with.
escapedtowisconsin
Facebook is currently trialling a range of new buttons that could influence how your data is harvested.
The trials have been construed by some observers as a response to the corporation’s anaemic share…
Facebook is no slouch at putting names to faces.
christoph_aigner
It may be time to move beyond Facebook’s assurance of its trustworthiness and specifically restrict the company’s use of face recognition. Changes within Facebook Europe would seem to suggest so.
For…
The Advertising Standards Bureau has ruled that comments and photos on the Facebook pages of VB and Smirnoff have breached the industry’s code of ethics.
louisa_catlover
Recently, the advertising regulator has made what have been called “landmark decisions” relating to the use of Facebook by two prominent alcohol brands.
Two weeks ago, the Advertising Standards Bureau…
A recent decision by Australia’s Advertising Standards Bureau around comments left on Smirnoff’s Facebook page comes as companies re-evaluate its value.
Flickr/Owen W.Brown
Imagine a world in which advertising companies were held directly accountable for the vision of the world their ads portrayed. Accountability could range from simple things like why deodorants don’t immediately…
Kristen Stewart engaged in classic oversharing when she admitted to a dalliance with director Rupert Sanders.
EPA/David Maung
Along with Caltex job losses and concerns over whether Our Leisel has thunder thighs, I woke this morning to news that Kristen cheated on R-Patz.
Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson – for those not yet…
Attorney General Nicola Roxon appears to be in two minds over proposals to widen intelligence gathering powers.
AAP/Lukas Koch
Earlier this month the Hon Nicola Roxon asked the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS) to conduct an inquiry into the Government’s proposals for a major revamp of Australia…
Thanks to digital medium such as email and Facebook, privacy is being eroded in the workplace – yet Australians appear to show a worrying lack of concern about this.
Flickr/Nathan O'Nions
The development of digital monitoring and surveillance has increased dramatically over the past decade and pervades all aspects of everyday life, to the extent that most people don’t even notice it.
In…
Mark Zuckerberg rings the Nasdaq’s opening bell from the Facebook Headquarters in California.
EPA/Zef Nikolla
With almost a billion accounts and growing, Facebook still has as strong a lock on the concept of sharing as Google does on the concept of search. As such, while no company is immune to failure, the current…
Facebook’s float on the Nasdaq has been controversial, but assessing the real value of shares is complicated.
What do you get when you buy 900 million user experiences, mostly from smart devices?
Facebook’s float has been dogged with controversy: on Monday, its shares plummeted 11% and dropped another 8.9% to…
Could hacking Mark Zuckerberg’s social media giant lead to a fruitful career?
Hegemony77 doll clothes
As reported late last week, Facebook is encouraging hackers to try hacking its security systems to find weaknesses.
Those who succeed will receive a reward of US$500 or more and have their name added…
World Health Organisation data suggests less than 10% of the world’s transplantation need is currently met.
AAP
Facebook has introduced a new tool allowing users in Australia to display their organ donation status to their friends, following the introduction of the initiative in the United States and the United…
Tweet success and sweet success increasingly go hand in hand.
Scolirk
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…
Going public is not without its risks, even for internet giants.
Peter DaSilva/EPA
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…
Smartphones are changing the way we take (and share) photos.
Apple
According to the Wall Street Journal, camera manufacturer Kodak is preparing to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, following a long struggle to maintain any sort of viable business.
The announcement has…
Christmas office party revellers: don’t let any of these people update their Facebook right now.
AAP
As Christmas party season approaches, many will begin turning their attention to the office party. While some may focus on concerns about the venue and cost-cutting measures (in the current economic climate…
Is tighter online regulation a cause for despair or jubilation?
kelvin255
Battle lines have been drawn in the US between proponents of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), currently being debated, and those who oppose any regulation of the internet.
On one side are organisations…
Electronic tools can help advance research into rare diseases through creating virtual registries.
Gautheron
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…
We need to make sure quality is more important than quantity in our online engagement.
Flickr/joshfassbind.com
Social media provokes some of the most voluminous and heated responses in two key areas of contemporary society – democracy and privacy. Promoting the first and threatening the second, social media is…
The major social network sites have recently been touting improved privacy settings to allow users to customise post audiences. Google+ Circles, Facebook lists, and now Unthink’s branches are engineering…
Unthink is positioning itself as a force of “emancipation”.
Unthink.com
On October 25, Unthink invited public beta users to put aside their YASNS (Yet Another Social Network Site) fatigue. Since then, it claims to have attracted more than 100,000 registered users.
The site…
The scorecard for Google+ to date shows pluses and minuses.
Birgerking.
Features are not friends. That’s the simple message to Google+ from 40 University of Queensland students after using the system since its invite-only launch in July.
To say the service’s fortunes to date…
Barack Obama’s web campaign helped him win the presidency. Parties should learn from it.
Flickr/Scorpions and Centaurs
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…
Protestors from the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York City.
AAP
The occupation of Wall Street began in the deserts of Western Sahara and on October 15th it will spread to our Australian cities.
In El-Ayoun, Moroccan controlled Western Sahara, in the Gdeim Izik refugee…
Zuckerberg’s big pitch is in, and it could make Facebook millions.
AFP/Kimihiro Hoshino
The world is currently embroiled in on- and offline discussions about changes that are affecting the lives of millions.
The subject is not climate change, the global financial crisis, political upheaval…
It’s getting harder to know where home starts and the office ends.
webtreats
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…
A battle is raging over search and serendipity online.
AndYaDontStop
The latest salvo in the internet attention wars has come in the form of figures from StatCounter.
A relatively small content driving service called StumbleUpon drove more than 50% of all social media…
Social media is helping, not hindering, police efforts in the UK.
AAP
By Axel Bruns, Queensland University of Technology
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…
Last week, Facebook introduced one-to-one video calling. With a claimed userbase of 750 million accounts, the potential for ubiquitous video calling seems obvious.
But, will it work?
Of all post-industrial…
Health promotion has a lot of catching up to do on social media.
Steve Kay
Smokers who quit with the assistance of a text messaging service are nearly twice as likely to be smoke-free six months later than smokers with no support, according to a study published this week in The…
Google+ faces an uphill struggle to win hearts and minds.
Google
Google is hoping that the saying “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try, again” will work out for them with Google+.
Launched as a private beta version on Tuesday, Google+ is the search giant’s latest…
Your Facebook snaps now come with a hidden catch.
rishibando
Around 2 million photographs are uploaded to Facebook each day. As of this week, every new image will be processed by automatic face recognition software, designed to identify the people in the photographs…
Facebook is a key tool for the modern revolutionary.
AAP
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…
Do you trust Facebook as much as you would your best friend?
Karen Bleier/AFP
Unless you’ve been chained to a fax machine for the past seven years, you’ll have noticed that Facebook is immensely popular.
Users numbered 641 million by February of this year.
Making and maintaining…
