The debate about fake Twitter follows is continuing to echo in the political Twittersphere. I wrote earlier this month about former Conservative parliamentary candidate Mark Clarke who experienced an eye raising rapid rise in Twitter followers since he joined in the microblogging network in March.

Now Louise Mensch, the Conservative backbencher, chick lit author and prolific tweeter, has gained a whopping 40,000 fake followers on Twitter in the last 24 hours — not apparently willingly. Read More »

It was bound to happen. So much talk of London 2012 being the first social Olympics, noting here only this morning how a social media faux pas was almost certain, and now, regrettably, it has and before the competition is even underway.

Greece has sent home triple jumper Voula Papachristou after she tweeted racist comments to the dismay of the Greek Olympic movement. Read More »

Mail Online is now a profitable business

Daily Mail & General Trust has today confirmed Mail Online is now a profitable business on a “run rate basis”, and posted a 3% lift in group revenue to £509 million in the second quarter.

The news comes just as the concept of paywalls, or more specifically metered access, was starting to gain traction as the most likely model for newspaper websites in the future.

The success of Mail Online’s lean digital operation, based primarily in the UK and US, could yet prove to be an industry inflection point. Read More »

London 2012, which kicks off this Friday, will arguably be the first Games where it will be possible to keep up to date on who’s winning and losing, and who’s on the podium, as it happens, without actually watching any of it – the first ‘social media’ games. If you’re following the right people on Twitter or specific pages on Facebook or Google+, you’ll be up to date on the action.

The volume of tweets is increasing all the time, and the continued sophistication of smartphones encourages broadcasting and connection on the move. At Ipsos MORI we know that nearly as many Twitter users are accessing the site on their mobile than on a more traditional device, such as a PC or laptop, in GB (65% vs. 68%) (Source: Ipsos MediaCT TechTracker). This isn’t altogether surprising. The key to Twitter is the spontaneity of it, the immediacy with which opinions can be shared. Smartphones fit this requirement perfectly.

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Dominique Jackson (@deejackson) writing on the Mail Online picks up the social media and journalism debate and points out some of the bad habits she sees journalists engaging in as a result of Twitter.

The piece, ‘Twitter will play a significant and disproportionate role in the coverage of London 2012′ in part looks at what will be the world’s first ‘Social Olympics, from tweeting athletes and the stories that will emerge, but she also talks about the negative impact that Twitter has had regarding the way that the working practices of journalists have changed because of it. Read More »

Can this be a surprise? The seemingly draconian way that Locog is attempting to protect the rights of Olympic sponsors appears to be backfiring and is diverting traffic and attention to their fiercest rivals, according to data from Experian.

UK traffic to the websites of non-sponsors Pepsi and Nike had been declining in volume in the lead up to the games, while those of London 2012 Partners Adidas and Coca-Cola saw substantial rises.

However, the trend reversed this weekend following widespread reporting that the brand clampdown could mean that visitors to the games who displayed the logos of non-sponsor firms could be barred from entry. Read More »

HTML5, the next evolution of HTML, or Hyper Text Mark-up Language, forms the backbone of almost every site on the Internet. Since the launch of HTML4 back in 1997 HTML has been poked, prodded and tweaked here and there as the internet has evolved.

Somewhere along the line HTML5 has become synonymous with “everything we needed Flash for” and a number of the major changes have attracted much media attention as the battle lines between HTML and Flash have been drawn, but a lot of the less flashy changes (no pun intended) are overlooked. Read More »

Facebook has announced today that it is opening its first engineering office in London and is looking to hire an engineering team.

It has openings for as many as 22 engineers  in London which will become Facebook’s first international  engineering office joining its Menlo Park HQ, New York and Seattle.

The new office will be headed by Philip Su, a software engineer at Facebook who previously worked at Microsoft, who is moving to London. Read More »