It looks like the tides that swept up the Occupy Wall Street protest campaign – ongoing after three weeks – have broken national boundaries; ‘Operation Ubuntu’ has been set up to launch a simultaneous protests on the 15th of October in Cape Town, Durban, Johannesburg and Grahamstown, as part of the global Occupy Revolution campaign.
In another case of “Why didn’t I think of that?”, a Belgian record label that goes by the name of SonicAngel, identifies future stars by tracking trends on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Not only that, they also allow fans to invest in the artists’ success, with a six monthly return on their initial investment. Brilliant.
The New York protest movement, “Occupy Wall Street,” currently enjoying a crowd of 15 000 supporters, has inspired folk in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and other cities around the United States to join in on the fun/outcry. Some level of police violence is being seen in all cases, with Seattle police forcibly removing all “occupation” settlements.
Look, it’s nice to know Apple isn’t the only company that knows how to create buzz by accidentally leaking information. Ji Lee, Facebook’s creative director, tweeted about Facebook Music, which is set to launch tomorrow. The post was quickly deleted, but not before the Internet had time to get all excited about it.
The University of Washington has finally found a way to make us of the mental energy expended by online gamers – recruiting them to decipher the structure of monomeric enzymes, found in retroviruses like HIV, by playing an online game called Foldit. Researchers had been working on it for the past decade; the collective gamers did it in three weeks.
If people keep telling you that drinking alone is a sign of alcoholism, then you either need to drink less, or find a way to make sure that there are people to drink with all the time. The geniuses behind the social network app ‘Let’s Drink Tonight’ figured the latter choice made more sense too.
You’re not all on Twitter. I get that; I know people who don’t drink alcohol, either, and I don’t judge them for that. To all you cool social media cats, though, this is troubling: Twitter is readying a new ad product that will serve up ads to users from company accounts they don’t already follow.
Wikileaks is parceling out another bunch of diplomatic cables today, in case we’d forgotten about Julian Assange amidst all the other hubbub. Expect people to largely ignore the allegations of internal corruption and the details of John McCain’s conversations with that Gadaffi chap, and focus on the whole rape trial thing.
There is something encouraging coming out of the past three days of rioting and looting, even if it is a remote silver lining: the online mobilization of volunteer clean-up operations, mostly organized via Twitter and Facebook. By this time yesterday, #riotcleanup, was the second-highest trending topic worldwide.
Nonhle Thema single-handedly put tweeting excessively in CAPS LOCK and ellipsis back on the map. She has also spent the last month telling her Twitter followers exactly how awesome and untouchable she is… BOOM! But it turns out there might be such a thing as bad publicity after all. You see, M-Net’s Vuzu and Nonhle have apparently “mutually decided to put their on-screen relationship on hold.”
Pope Benedict XVI took to Twitter yesterday and composed a tweet on an iPad before sending it out into cyberspace. Granted, it did take about six other similarly aged cardinals and other officials to help him out, but it is the thought that counts, right? See a video of him tweeting, as well as his full Twitter message, inside.
Social Intelligence, a company approved a week ago by the Federal Trade Commission, is one that uses deep-search tools to do background checks on other companies’ potential employees. These guys could find your MySpace account, they’re that thorough. And if your deep-search profile doesn’t look good, you don’t get hired.
So Nonhle Thema – from Vuzu reality show Nonhle Goes to Hollywood, and the former face of the Dark and Lovely brand – seems to be having a bit of a freak-out on Twitter. She’s eager to tell everybody that she is “young and RICH……….LOL…..DEAL WITH IT PLEASE…” Over and over again.
Hot damn but I love the future. Iceland is drawing up a new constitution, in the wake of the country’s commercial banks collapsing. Which is news, but not news-news; the interesting part is how the former vikings are going about the process – they’re crowdsourcing the draft online, with links to Facebook, Twitter and Youtube accounts.
There was a fair amount of coverage about the apparent arrest of “Amina Arraf”, the pseudonym of openly gay Syrian blogger behind ‘Gay Girl In Damascus,’ which did a lot for getting word out about human rights issues in Syria. Except it turns out that Amina was invented by 40-year-old Tom McMaster, from Georgia.
I know this isn’t the worst thing to happen to French civil liberties by a long shot, but still; the interpretation of a law prohibiting ‘commercial advertising’ – which, in effect, will mean that newsreaders may no longer mention Facebook or Twitter, unless the story is about Facebook or Twitter – makes total social media sense. Total.
Surprise! Security firm Symantec yesterday reported that a hole in the Facebook security system allowed third-parties like advertisers access to user accounts and private data – and that this hole has been in place for the past four years, since Facebook first started offering apps to its users.
You’d be surprised at how many businesses are fond of censoring free speech in their workplaces. Following last year’s banning of the 2oceansvibe site in Virgin Active gyms, a recent study completed by OpenDNS has uncovered the ten most blacklisted websites by businesses around the world. You may or may not be surprised by the list.
It’s sort of hard to be on the internet right now without hearing about protests from whichever North African/Middle Eastern country is falling under the ‘freedom’ bandwagon, but this Google Maps/Twitter mashup contextualizes the online protest movement nicely – and in real time.
You might have been in the ‘cool group’ at school and you might even think you are ‘cool’ right now. Are you? Doesn’t matter, either way, it’s only fair if you give some credit to your social guidance counsellor – Facebook – for helping your coolness vibe resonate onto others. A study says so.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: drunk Facebooking ruins lives.
Thankfully the good people at Webroot Software have seen the urgent need to curb this scourge of humanity.
There was a time when a real man was expected to pay for dinner, hold the door open or even go as far as pretending to like Jack Johnson if he wanted to be regarded by the fairer sex as anything more than a grunting caveman. How times have changed.