Great news this week as the new Pages feature on Google+ was announced. I’d been holding off creating profiles on this new network until this option was offered, to avoid having to go through the whole process of doing it twice.

And now I’ve been using it for a few days I’ve got this uncomfortable feeling that Facebook – where I’m the admin on seven different Pages and am often caught grumbling about the usability and other quirks – has more to offer brands in need of a social platform. Here’s why. Read more on Hate to say it, but Facebook does Pages better than Google+…

Internet Week Europe 2011, the second annual celebration of Europe’s digital industry, kicks off next week. Running from 7th to 11th November, the event will see 200 conferences, workshops, panels, entertainment, social media meet-ups and parties taking place across London.

Facebook is creating a massive new data farm on the edge of the Arctic Circle. The first created outside the US, the site in the Swedish town of Lulea will cost $121 million to build and should improve performance for millions of Facebook users in Europe.

As part of the first Internet Week Europe Skype is to enable free public WiFi throughout the UK next week.

The five-day festival celebrating the best of Europe’s digital industry hopes to replicate the success of Internet Week New York.

It will see over 80 events taking place, from parties, creative breakfasts and talks to cycle tours, hack sessions, exhibitions and meet-ups, with hosts including like the BBC, Yahoo!, Creative Review, Google, Lonely Planet, Channel 4 and other members of the European internet community. Read more on Skype celebrates Internet Week Europe with a week of free public WiFi across the UK…

Google has taken the slightly unusual step of writing to Gmail users via email, to say they’ve reached a settlement in a lawsuit regarding Google Buzz in which they were sued by a group of users concerned about privacy.

The full details of the settlement are outlined on the website BuzzClassAction, which explains that it is alleged that Google ‘automatically enrolled Gmail users in Buzz, and that Buzz publicly exposed data, including users’ most frequent Gmail contacts, without enough user consent.’ Read more on Google writes to users over Buzz privacy settlement (but don’t expect a payout)…

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…

If you enjoyed director Chris Milk’s innovative and haunting HTML5 creation for The Arcade Fire and Google Chrome, The Wilderness Downtown, you’ll love The Johnny Cash Project, a global art collaboration to produce a music video for the Man in Black’s last studio recording, Ain’t No Grave.

Users are invited to use a single frame from the video as a template and draw their own portrait of Cash on top. When strung together and played in sequence over the song the portraits create a unique crowd-sourced music video. Read more on 250,000 people contribute to crowd-sourced Johnny Cash music video…

A report out today called The Connected Kingdom says that the internet in the UK has surpassed larger traditional industries such as utilities, transport and construction and is worth £100bn to the economy.

The report, commissioned by Google and produced by Boston Consulting Group, is ‘an independent analysis of where the UK’s successful internet businesses are and what their future growth might look like’.

Against the current background of public spending cuts and fears of a double dip recession, it certainly makes a welcome change to hear some positive statistics regarding the economy. Read more on Internet worth £100bn a year to the UK economy…

More people are now following the New York Times on Twitter than are actually buying the paper. What does that mean for its future?

Supermarket giant Tesco is trialling a scheme which will see customers using their iPhones or iPads to scan their shopping and navigate through their stores. Read more on Supermarket to offer iPad and iPhone scanning…