Do you use Hootsuite as your Twitter client? As of now you might notice ads for major brands such as Starbucks, Virgin and Red Bull popping up in your timeline. In contrast to Pomoted Tweets, which were introduced in April and appear at the top of searches on twitter.com, these ads will appear in your actual Twitter stream.

Targeting the ads is of course key to each brand’s campaign, so if you’re the sort of person who follows coffee outlets and regularly praises the joys of caffeine in your updates, you’ll probably find a Starbucks ad appearing in your feed. Read More »

A couple of good pieces around on Twitter. A piece in the New York Times on why Twitter’s CEO Evan Williams demoted himself and its early problems and a piece that serves as a timely reminder that Twitter, unlike say Facebook, is a social network truly defined by its users. And how that pretty much saved its bacon. Read More »

Blekko: slashtags make search relevant

“So this guy gave me his card and then I totally went and blekkoed him.”

“Oh yeah, and has he been slashtagged?”

Well, that might be what the founders of the latest new search engine, blekko (rhymes with ‘echo’), are hoping will be a comprehensible conversation one day in the not too distant future. (Actually, I doubt anyone’s going to be asking if people have been slashtagged). Read More »

Australian futurist Ross Dawson has come up with these sobering graphics predicting the global extinction of newspapers in the coming decade. He is predicting the extinction of newspapers in the US around 2017 and in the UK by 2019.

Iceland’s papers will also go in 2019 with Canada and Norway in 2020. On a global level some of the factors leading to the (much written of) death of print include the rise in terms of availability of mobile phones, tablet computers and e-readers; the development of high performance digital paper; and the uptake of paid content and paywalls. Read More »

What a combo. A beleaguered President Barrack Obama is teaming up with a beleaguered AOL. Together the pair might just be stoppable. No wait that can’t be right.

But seriously folks, ahead of the key mid-term US elections Obama is to appear on AOL tomorrow in an effort to get the president’s vote out (let’s hope that idea doesn’t backfire) and to signal the relaunch of AOL.com’s homepage. Read More »

Apparently Stephen Fry is quitting Twitter. Again.  This time it was (as I’m sure you read) he was quoted by the Observer saying the only reason women slept with men is that “sex is the price they are willing to pay for a relationship”.

His bio now reads “no longer in service” and his last tweet simply says “Bye bye” after another tweet berated journalists for misquoting him and leading to Fry getting a public kicking from women’s groups, feminists and just about everyone else. Read More »

Don’t you find yourself asking occasionally just how awesome is the internet exactly? You’re not alone in this as others too are asking and someone has helpfully come up with an answer.

As this infographic details the internet is really pretty awesome with1.9 billion of us logging on in one form or another accessing more than 190 million domains. That’s a lot of surfing. Read More »