Kara Swisher at AllthingsD is reporting that Facebook and Yahoo have brought an end to their back and forth legal wrangling and signed a strategic partnership.

The deal averts a possible legal battle that could be characterised as the the old web versus the new social web.

The row began in February when Yahoo! tried to force force Facebook to licence as many as 20 patents for technologies or face legal action. Read More »

An interesting piece on Middle East Voices looking at how Western journalists from the likes of the Washington Post, the Associated Press and Die Zeit are using social media and citizen journalists to help supplement their stories on the fighting in Syria.

With the government of President Bashar al-Assad trying desperately hard to keep the international media out of Syria reporters are taking advantage of the output of hundreds of Syrian activists who are producing YouTube videos as well as using Twitter, Facebook and Skype to tell their stories. Read More »

In a not wholly unexpected turn of events, digital sales continued to grow, with CD sales continuing to drop.  Nielsen SoundScan & Nielsen BDS Data showed that digital album sales in the US were up 14% compared with January – July last year, and digital track sales were up 6%.

The best selling overall and digital album was “21″ by Adele, who sold a staggering 3 million units overall. The second best selling digital album was One Direction’s Up All Night, although this changes to “Tuskegee” by Lionel Richie, when physical sales are included. In digital album sales, Tuskegee only came 8^th, indicating a younger demographic are still making up the bulk of digital sales.

Read More »

Home delivery firm Yodel, which handles packages for Amazon, Currys, Boots and O2 among others, has asked Twitter to delete dozens of critical tweets and accounts that it claims are defamatory and “constitute a serious libel”.

Yodel’s lawyers, Weil, Gotshal & Manges, wrote to Twitter on May 9 threatening legal action if the tweets were not removed.

It claims the statements in the tweets are “entirely false” and it includes a list of tweets that it wants removed. Read More »

Which agency discipline – PR, digital or advertising – is best placed to control and lead a brand’s social media strategy?

In a constantly-evolving area, it’s a pertinent question – and one that clients must find particularly challenging when, in the financial land grab for scarcer and scarcer marketing budgets, seemingly every agency in town is saying ‘We can do it’. So where does the truth lie? Read More »

Twitter is preparing to announce imminent changes to the way that its limited search function works.

This according to Twitter engineering manager, Pankaj Gupta, tweeted earlier today that big changes are coming to the service.

To date Twitter search has been hard to use and comes with limited functionality. It isn’t particularly sophisticated and doesn’t for instance allow you to search among your own followers or for your own tweets. Read More »