When EU summit organisers in Brussels embraced social networking in the form of a giant "tweet-wall" it must have seemed like a great online marketing gimmick, but when Italian Twitter users realised their comments regarding Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi would become a live feed to the delegates the screens were filled with insults.
With Christmas fast approaching and the busiest shopping day of the festive season for online retailers soon to be upon them, the importance of SEO for eCommerce websites should never be more apparent.
Internet users who trust e-commerce sites, web banking and know that all manner of sensitive data is transferred over supposedly secure encrypted channels may be alarmed to hear that, according to the United States, a Chinese telecommunications firm hijacked 15 percent of global internet traffic for a total of 18 minutes earlier in 2010.
Finally, it has been confirmed, in a roundabout way, that social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter do have certain value in a search engine optimisation campaign.
A highly reported question and answer series with representatives of Google and Bing has thrown up some useful little nuggets of information. For instance, Google, in particular, credits data found in Twitter's "firehose".
As Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg launched the social-networking site's e-mail service in San Francisco recently he told reporters and analysts that online messaging needs to be modernised.
In a survey conducted by the Marketing Society and the Royal Mail, marketing heads were asked which 3 channels they thought would be the most important in the coming financial year. SEO was the top result, chosen by 45% of respondants, closely followed by social media (42%) and word of mouth (37%)
Details have begun emerging as to why Burst.net were ordered by the FBI to shut down over 70,000 blogs on a free blogging platform called Blogetery. Latest rumours state that material on some of the blogs included messages from Osama Bin Laden, detatils of how to make bombs and explosives and lists of US citizens to be targeted for assassination by al Qaeda.
