The UN's top health official tells a swine flu forum in Mexico that the spread of the virus worldwide is now unstoppable.
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A London council withdraws its action against a mother it accused of lying to gain a school place.
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Fans wishing to attend singer Michael Jackson's memorial service next week will have to register for the 11,000 free tickets, organizers said Thursday. The 20,000-seat Staples Center in Los Angeles, California, will host the memorial service on Tuesday.
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The UN secretary general will visit Burma to seek the release of political prisoners including Aung San Suu Kyi.
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Chancellor Alistair Darling warns bankers it would be "disastrous" if they return to their old ways and repeat past mistakes.
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The late Michael Jackson's ex-wife is undecided over whether to fight for custody of their two children, her lawyer says.
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Young witnesses in sex abuse or violence cases are being forced to wait more than a year to give evidence in crown courts in England and Wales, a report says.
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A federal judge tentatively overturned the conviction of a Missouri woman accused of using MySpace to deceive a teenage girl who eventually committed suicide, a U.S. attorney's spokesman told CNN.
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A top Latin American diplomat is due in Honduras where he is to demand the restoration of deposed President Manuel Zelaya.
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A U.S. soldier has been captured by militants in Afghanistan, the U.S. military and the Taliban said Thursday.
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A judicial council on Thursday admonished the chief judge of the nation's largest federal appeals court for having "sexually explicit photos and videos" on his personal Web site, but decided against any further punishment.
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Cash crisis leaves Ukrainian hospitals relying on charity
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The highest ranking Army officer to be killed since the Falklands War is one of the two latest casualties in Afghanistan.
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What secrets did this dinosaur mummy reveal?
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Security forces in the Russian North Caucasus city of Nalchik besiege a flat after coming under fire, Russian media report.
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Investigators and engineers begin the second day of a recovery operation after a jet fighter crash which killed two air crew.
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A Lockheed Electra turboprop flying over the Amazon rainforest on Christmas Eve in 1971 broke into pieces in midair, thrusting 17-year-old Juliane Koepcke into a free fall. She dropped 2 miles into the jungle canopy but survived with only minor injuries; the 91 other people on board died. With search crews unable to locate the site, her ordeal was far from over.
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Unlikely middleman between North Korea and the US
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In 2004, even after being captured by U.S. forces, Saddam Hussein told an FBI interrogator he believed Iran was a greater threat to Iraq than the United States, according to newly released FBI documents.
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Changes recommended after a fatal drug slip-up eight years ago have not been implemented, MPs say in a review of patient safety.
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US moonwalker Buzz Aldrin looks to new frontiers
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A US soldier is captured by militants in eastern Afghanistan, as the US launches a major anti-Taliban offensive in the south.
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Bloody attacks and midnight arrests, combined with a regime growing more tech savvy, have begun to stem the online information flow from dissidents in Iran, activists and human rights officials say. Once emboldened by an ability to dodge the government and spread news, many in the youth-driven protest movement, they say, now fear the consequences.
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Manchester United refuse to be drawn on growing speculation that they are in talks with striker Michael Owen.
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US marshalls seize the $7m Manhattan penthouse of imprisoned fraudster Bernard Madoff, forcing his wife to move.
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Twitter is all about facilitating conversations, but until you’re following some people, it’s just a blank page. Once you find people to follow and talk to, however, Twitter becomes exceptionally useful. You can share thoughts, ask questions, get updates about news, music, brands, and businesses, and discover helpful links and information. Finding good people to follow, especially for new users staring at a blank page the first time they log in, can be a bit daunting, though.

Thankfully, there are a number of ways you can find people on Twitter. Here are ten sites you can use to locate “tweeps” to follow. Let us know in the comments if you know of any others.

People Search

1. Twitter People Search – Twitter’s built in people search isn’t the greatest way to find people on Twitter, but it’s probably where you should start. Twitter searches the “real names” people enter in their bio fields, but because there isn’t much accompanying bio information and because Twitter doesn’t have any sort of requirement to use your actual name, that can make it a bit difficult to find people, especially those with common names. It also makes it hard to verify that the people you find are actually who you’re looking for. Still, it’s a good place to begin your search.

2. Tweepz – Because the biographical information Twitter collects is minimal, no Twitter people search engine can improve on Twitter’s that much. Third-party site Tweepz does an admirable job, though. Tweepz lets you limit searches to specific parts of Twitter’s user information (like name, bio, and location), filter results by follower/following numbers, location, and other extracted terms, and greatly improves on the layout of the search results.

3. TweepSearch – TweepSearch lets you search by Twitter name or location, or search a specific username to get a list of all friends and followers. However, if the “indexing” number listed on their main page is accurate, they’re crawling about 600,000 less Twitter user profiles than Tweepz.

4. TwitDir – TwitDir is another search engine, but if the crawling stats are accurate, it’s well behind the curve, searching about 3 million fewer users than Tweepz. Still, it’s not a bad people search engine, and has some helpful “top” lists if you’re concerned with who the most popular or prolific people on Twitter are (then again, they’re also not that up-to-date — the site doesn’t seem to know who @aplusk is, for example).

Directories

5. Twellow – Your best bet for finding like-minded Twitter users might be to use a directory, and Twellow is certainly one of the most complete. Nearly 6 million Twitter user profiles are indexed in Twellow and placed into a huge number of categories. You can search the entire lot of profiles, or confine searches to a single category. Twellow also operates a local directory called the “Twellowhood.”

6. WeFollow – Created by Digg founder Kevin Rose, WeFollow is a Twitter user directory that organizes people by hashtags. WeFollow is user-generated and anyone can add themselves by tweeting @wefollow with three #hashtags that describe them.

7. Just Tweet It – Just Tweet It is another user created Twitter directory. It’s not quite as well organized or easy-to-use as Twellow or WeFollow, but it is certainly large enough that you should give it a browse when trying to locate people in your interest areas to follow.

Recommendations

8. Twubble – Twubble recommends people to follow by spidering the people you’re already following and recommending users that they’re following. The idea is that the people you’re following are interesting to you, so if more than one of them are also following another person, that person might also be interesting. Of course, that means that Twubble can’t be your first stop when finding people to follow — you already need to be following some people for the service to work.

9. Twitterel – Twitterel attempts to find people you might be interested in following by doing keyword searches of tweets. The service can update you by email, direct message, or @reply when it finds new people it thinks you might be interested in following. It’s kind of like Google Alerts for Twitter follow recommendations.

10. Who Should i Follow? – Enter you Twitter username into Who Should i Follow? and the service finds users who are similar to those you’re already following. The site doesn’t disclose information about how it works, but in my experience it is pretty accurate at finding users whose tweets are similar in content to your followers. The results can be filtered by how popular the people are, and how close they are to a specific location.

BONUS: Mr. Tweet – Mr. Tweet is a very popular Twitter app that lets you give and receive recommendations about Twitter users. The app also provides more helpful statistics about users, such as tweets per day or the percentage of tweets containing links. To get the most out of Mr. Tweet, consider installing the Firefox plugin, which gives you access to statistics and user recommendations while you’re browsing Twitter.

More Twitter resources from Mashable:

- 19 Twitter Desktop Apps Compared

- 6 Gorgeous Twitter Visualizations

- Top 7 Twitter Tutorials on YouTube

- 5 Ways Twitter Can Save You Money

Reviews: Digg, Twellow, Twitter, WeFollow

Tags: Just Tweet It, people search, tweepsearch, tweepz, twellow, twitdir, twitter, twitterel, twubble, wefollow, who should i follow

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This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.

Name: UserTesting.com

Quick Pitch: Provides real users who record their screen and voice as they use your website. $29 and 1-hour turn-around.

Genius Idea: If you’re launching a new web app, ideally you’ll have time to organize a focus group and watch real users interact with your software, and tweak it based on the feedback. Unfortunately, that can be both expensive and time consuming. UserTesting.com looks to solve this problem by bringing together users that are willing to do usability tests (for $10 each) with companies that need testing done on their products (who pay $29 per user for the service).

When you request a test, UserTesting claims it can start returning results within an hour from members of its panel, though that can be delayed a bit if you request specific demographics. Nonetheless, the final result seems like a good value: a video that shows how the user interacted with your site (essentially a screen cast) with their voice commentary. The user also submits a written report detailing what the user liked, disliked, or found confusing.

Here’s a sample video for a usability test done on behalf of TripAdvisor:

The idea seems to fill an obvious need, and UserTesting.com has received some fairly high profile endorsements, including Evan Williams of Twitter, as well as executives from Amazon.com, Justin.tv, oDesk, and lots of other prominent websites. Between a great name, a valuable service, and lots of success stories, UserTesting.com seems like a winner.

Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark

BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

Entrepreneurs can take advantage of the Azure Services platform for their website hosting and storage needs. Microsoft recently announced the “new CloudApp()” contest – use the Azure Services Platform for hosting your .NET or PHP app, and you could be the lucky winner of a USD 5000* (please see website for official rules and guidelines).”

Reviews: PHP, Twitter

Tags: usability, usability testing

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Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw angers Tories by saying "a deep strain of homophobia still exists on the Conservative benches".
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With 3.3 million+ YouTube views in the past two days, the video “Unknown Lifeform in North Carolina Sewer” (below) is taking the web by storm, becoming the most viewed video this week and beating out a performance of Michael Jackson’s Thriller. The clip, which shows an alien-looking life form living in a North Carolina sewer, was posted along with a claim that it was extra-terrestrial life.

Today mainstream news has taken notice and corrected the myth: the video is indeed real, scientists say, but the strange creature is very much a terrestrial phenomenon. News14 writes:

Ed Buchan, environmental coordinator at the Raleigh Public Utilities Department, said staff biologists have confirmed that the “creature” is actually a colony of tubifex worms. The colonies attach themselves to roots that gradually work themselves into weak points in the pipes. “They seem to respond to the light from the camera,” Buchan said. “That light is pretty hot.”

The worms naturally occur in sewage and pond sediment and are actually sold both live and dried as fish food in pet stores. He said other staff members in the department have seen it before, although sightings aren’t particularly common. “I’ve seen a lot of sewer TV before and I’ve never seen them,” he said. “We were surprised. We didn’t know immediately what it was.”

It’s unclear what made the clip such a YouTube phenomenon: most likely it’s explained by the mystery surrounding the strange creature, much like last year’s Montauk Monster mystery.

Reviews: YouTube

Tags: creature, lifeform, youtube

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The 12-year-old survivor of the Yemenia air crash returns to Paris as the search for debris goes on.
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How Air France debris gives clues to jet's break-up
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Social activity aggregator FriendFeed, which re-designed earlier this year to show updates from friends in real-time, has just extended that same functionality to search. Now, when you search for a given term – like “Michael Jackson” – you’ll see updates from FriendFeed users stream in real-time in your browser.

Just as on your homepage, you can hit “pause” on the real-time results, which, after a few minutes of staring at items about Jackson being shared, is definitely a needed feature if you’re actually attempting to keep up with a topic. After hitting pause, FriendFeed will tell you how many items have been queued, and you can then hit play to see them and resume the live streaming updates.

Personally, I’m not so sure that I don’t prefer the latter approach – simly checking search results for a given term (I generally keep “mashable” open all day on Twitter search) periodically rather than watching it constantly in the browser.

That said, the coolest aspect of FriendFeed’s real-time search might be that you can extend it to your own website via an embeddable widget. To embed a search, you can simply click the “Share / embed search” option that accompanies each search result and grab the embed code, like such:

Reviews: FriendFeed, Twitter

Tags: friendfeed, real-time search, Search

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Google Blog Search has just added a few features that users of other Google services are likely familiar with.

First, you can now subscribe to any topic via RSS or Atom, like you already can do in Google News. This means every time there’s a new story in the “Technology” category, or more specifically a search term like“social media” you can get that update pushed to your RSS reader. There’s also a new iGoogle gadget if you’d rather access the topic or search term via iGoogle.

The Google Blog Search homepage now also features a “Hot Queries,” which, is similar to Google Hot Trends. This shows what searches are currently hot in Blog Search, as opposed to Google Trends, which shows what’s hot in the broader search engine. That said, both lists appear to be fairly similar, though Blog Search only shows a top ten at this point.

There’s also a new “Latest Posts” feature on the homepage that simply lists new posts that Blog Search has picked up. It’s a nice update, but one that makes me wonder how much utility separate blog search really has at this point. Google News already includes plenty of blogs in its database (there are now more than 25,000 sources in total), and as evidenced by the similarities in Google’s two different trend lists, users are generally searching for the same things at any given point in time. In other words, blog search might be filling a need that no longer exists.

Are you still using blog search engines regularly? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Reviews: Google

Tags: blogging, Google, google blog search, Search

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The Air France plane that crashed last month with 228 people aboard "did not break up or become destroyed in flight," the French air investigation agency announced today. "The plane went straight down," investigator Alain Bouillard said.
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The US space agency's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft sends back its first images since reaching the Moon.
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Climate change is causing a breed of wild sheep in Scotland to shrink, according to research.
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Ideally, your brand has the same name across all of the social sites you use, and, it matches your domain name (for example, we’re mashable.com, twitter.com/mashable, and facebook.com/mashable).

Realizing this fact, popular domain registrar GoDaddy has integrated Twitter registration into its domain manager, allowing you to see if the Twitter username that matches your URL is available, and if so, register it.

The target here is GoDaddy’s small business users. The company explains in the tool that you can “Join today and start “tweeting” about your next sale, when you’ve updated pictures on your site, or other things that may be going on with you or your business.”

To use the feature, just login to your GoDaddy account and click on any of your domain names to access the manager (where you also go to do things like update name servers). There’s now a Twitter option under “Domain Enhancements” from which you can check your username availability.

While this probably isn’t a big deal for most our readers, it could be for Twitter. This integration puts the service in front of millions of people that are actively managing their online identity, many of whom have probably heard of Twitter, but haven’t actually signed up for the service. As if being featured on Oprah and on the cover of Time wasn’t enough free publicity …

Reviews: Twitter

Tags: godaddy, twitter

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President Obama warns Moscow ahead of a visit that "Cold War approaches" to relations with the US belong in the past.
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Justice Secretary Jack Straw provisionally refuses an appeal for a pardon for jailed Liverpool football fan Michael Shields.
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Not to be confused with the first music video about the iPhone 3GS (”Got My Mac on With iPhone 3GS“), the first video purportedly shot using the camera on the new device is making its way around the web.

The video – “Technologic Overkill” – is directed by filmmaker Steve Ellington, and shows “the plight of a little blue robot and his attempt to be relevant in an increasingly technological world,” set to a song by the band XFYA. Check it out below:

As we recently noted, mobile video certainly seems to be at a tipping point, with dozens of services offering apps to get your video from your phone to the Web, and YouTube seeing a huge upswing in mobile uploads since the iPhone 3GS launched. Technologic Overkill is perhaps a small symbol of this movement, in what will likely be just one of many firsts that we see as people get their hands on the new Apple phone.

See Also: HOW TO: Post Video to Twitter With the iPhone 3GS

Reviews: YouTube

Tags: iphone, iphone 3Gs, music videos, video

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US investigators publish accounts of interviews with Saddam Hussein, giving a wealth of detail about the Iraqi leader.
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French investigators believe the Air France plane that crashed in the Atlantic broke up on contact with water, not in mid-air.
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The number of jobs lost in the US last month came in at 467,000, which is much more than had been expected.
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Serena Williams will face sister Venus in Saturday's Wimbledon final after prevailing in a marathon tussle with Russian Elena Dementieva.
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Retweeting, as we explained in our article How To Retweet on Twitter, has evolved as the main way to reshare content you like on the social media service. There’s also a great deal of data we can glean from retweeting behavior, as we outlined in the article The Science of Retweets.

But apart from the obvious, what makes a retweet different from a tweet? What makes some types of tweets get shared more than others? And what can you learn from that data if you’d like to get retweeted more?

This week viral marketing scientist Dan Zarrella dug into the data on retweets and published some interesting stats about retweet behavior. These help us understand why people retweet things, and might help you too.

1. Retweets Contain More Links

Retweets tend to contain a link, Zarrella explains – 56.69% of retweets contain a link versus 18.96% of normal tweets. So retweets are being used to share content from around the web.

Key point: If you’d like to get retweeted, include links in your tweets more often.

2. Longer Words / More Syllables

Retweets also appear to have more syllables per word than ordinary Tweets – tweets have an average of 1.58 syllables/word, versus retweets at 1.62 syllables/word. This isn’t necessarily what you’d expect, since the most viral ideas are often said to be the simplest ones.

Key point: Using long words is not a barrier to getting retweeted – in fact it seems to help.

3. Higher Reading Grade / More Complex

Another unexpected finding, perhaps: Zarrella found that retweets require a “higher level of education to understand” – 6.47 years of education versus 6.04 years according to the Flesch-Kincaid test. The graph also shows the Simple Measure of Gobbledygook test, which found similar results: 6.13 years of education for retweets versus 5.88 years for tweets.

Key point: Tweets don’t have to be stupid-simple to get retweeted.

4. More New Words and Concepts

Perhaps unsurprisingly, retweets tend to add new information. By creating a “novelty” score that counted how many times a word appeared in the entire sample versus in the retweets, it was found that retweets tend to contain more unique words.

Using a sample size of over 10 million tweets, Zarrella discovered that “in the random Tweet sample, each word was found an average of 89.19 other times, while in the ReTweet sample each word was only found 16.37 other times. This shows us that while simplicity may not be very important to ReTweetability, novelty certainly is.”

Key point: If you want more retweets, try adding new information.

5. Less Self-Referential

Also unsurprising: retweets tend to be less self-referential than ordinary tweets. In other words: talking about what you had for breakfast is less likely to get retweeted than talking about what Obama had for lunch. This was found using the LIWC (“Luke”) method, which is a little complex to explain here but you can learn more on the site. Another LIWC finding: people tend not to retweet swear words.

Key point: Don’t talk about yourself too much if you’d like to be retweeted.

So there you have it: if you want to get retweeted, don’t talk about what you had for breakfast, don’t swear, and throw in a useful link from time to time.

Mashable’s Best Retweeting Resources

If you’re looking to continue your education in the art of retweeting, then we encourage you to read some of our most popular Twitter and retweeting posts:

- How To Retweet on Twitter – Ben Parr offers a primer on how retweeting works, plus tools to retweet more efficiently and track the most popular retweets.

- The Science of ReTweets – Dan Zarrella explains which factors make certain tweets more viral than others.

- Retweet iPhone App for Twitter – Our review of the Retweet iPhone App.

- 15 Fascinating Ways to Track Twitter Trends – Covers some of the best tools for tracking trends on Twitter.

Reviews: Twitter

Tags: retweet, twitter

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Wendell Potter says he is finished defending the insurance industry, which he says is "beholden to Wall Street."
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Jammie Thomas-Rasset, the woman who was charged with copyright infringement through online file sharing, tried to fight, and subsequently lost, will appeal the verdict in her case, which ordered her to pay $1.92 million in damages to the recording industry that sued her.

As we’ve noted, her case was always on shaky legs, and it was probably taken into account by the jury which set a very harsh penalty. However, it’s questionable whether the verdict is constitutional, and Jammie Thomas-Rasset will appeal on that grounds.

“She’s not interested in settling. She wants to take the issue up on appeal on the constitutionality of the damages. That’s one of the main arguments–that the damages are disproportionate to any actual harm,” her attorney Joe Sibley told CNET.

And disproportionate they are. 80,000 dollars for sharing a song – one song – on an online network? However you look at it, it’s an arbitrary number. If you tried to apply the same standards in other cases, you’d get ridiculous results. Together with the fact that Thomas-Rasset doesn’t have that kind of money, trying to appeal the verdict is a logical choice.

No one can tell whether she will succeed or not, but in a case as important as this one, it’s good that she’s putting up a fight. Awarding such huge damages for online file sharing is a dangerous legal precedent that might result in further pressure on ISPs and governments to implement draconian measures to stop it, as well as give them more rights to monitor online activities not only of file sharers, but all of us.

Tags: Jammie Thomas-Rasset, lawsuit, riaa

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Baby girls removed from parents who broke China's family-planning laws have been sold for adoption overseas, it is reported.
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A descendant of India's last Mughal emperor is rescued from a life of penury near Calcutta by gaining employment with state-run Coal India.
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Samir Balwani is a social media marketer who helps businesses create effective web strategies. You can follow him on Twitter and get his newsletter.

One of the biggest misconceptions by brand managers is that the web is not a luxury market. The truth is that people are spending more money online and it’s a place luxury brands must build a presence. However, most have a nagging fear of ruining their brand reputation.

So, how can luxury brands engage in social media?

The Luxury Market Online

Before we answer the previous question, let’s define the luxury market. According to The Journal of Brand Management, Luxury as a concept is defined:

“…within the scope of socio-psychology as a result of its connection to a culture, state of being and lifestyle, whether it is personal or collective. When linked to brands, it is characterized by a recognizable style, strong identity, high awareness, and enhanced emotional and symbolic associations. It evokes uniqueness and exclusivity, and is interpreted in products through high quality, controlled distribution and premium pricing.“

So, brands with scarce products and high prices must find a way to find consumers online. The questions we haven’t answered yet are, “are premium, affluent consumers online?” and “does making a product available online hurt controlled distribution?”

In November 2007, eMarketer published a report titled “Affluent Internet Users: How the Rich Live Online.” In the report they concluded that the number of affluent Internet users will grow from 43.7 million in 2006 to 57.1 million in 2011.

Now that we know that there are luxury consumers on the Internet, and that the demographic is growing steadily, we need to determine how a brand can engage these consumers.

Problems With Luxury Brands Online

The unique luxury brand must overcome a number of obstacles upon entering the online space. Here are some of the challenges:

1. Luxury implies a sense of exclusivity; that it isn’t for everyone. It’s difficult for a brand to selectively choose who to interact with and, unless done properly, this segmentation could cause a major backlash.

2. Most luxury brands are extremely hesitant to experiment with new marketing strategies. They feel that trying new things is too risky for their brand image. Instead, this hesitation can actually limit online opportunities, hurting the brand in the long run.

3. Because of a luxury brand’s need to maintain the appropriate aesthetics, social media can be a more expensive proposition for them. Building an application or web page is an expensive, arduous task for any major brand. It’s important to remember that social media for brands is not free.

Finding Solutions

The first and most obvious solution is to simply trust your consumers. If your internal perspective of the brand aligns with the customers’ view of the brand, everything will be fine. If not, you’ll finally learn who your core demographic really is and what they are looking for.

Just as a product can be exclusive, so can sites on the web. Creating an exclusive social network, an invite only site, or a suggestion site for actual customers are ways to limit the demographic.

If you decide you must engage on a public site like Twitter or Facebook, throw out any hopes of being exclusive. Selectively following or befriending users can quickly cause a backlash as customers complain about being left out. One way to engage on public sites is to target those sites with the closest demographic to the brand’s consumers. This limits the number of “outsiders” engaging with the brand.

Lastly, if the brand finds a mention that they aren’t comfortable with, it may be better not to respond. The web is huge; not everything will be seen by the masses (especially as we move towards real-time conversations). Responding or seeking removal of a message may legitimize and simply bring attention to any negative sentiment.

Examples of Luxury Campaigns

Case studies analyzing social campaigns are a great way to determine how to position a brand online. However, too closely emulating a campaign can have a negative affect. Social media success requires implementation of something new and exciting; some kind of added value.

Use the following case studies to see what they did right and as a means to understand the fundamentals for a luxury brand in social media.

Gucci On Facebook

Gucci has built an amazing following on Facebook, with over 404,000 fans on their official Page. By continually updating the page, and introducing new content such as photos and videos the brand is keeping its consumers engaged. Each update receives over 200 interactions in the form of “likes” and “comments.”

By opening Gucci to everyone, and not selectively deciding who gets to join, or inviting only specific people, Gucci has built a community. Even though many of the Gucci fans may not be able to afford actual products, the Facebook fan page builds “lust for the product.” This idea of “one day I’ll be able to afford that,” is part of the luxury appeal.

Not only does the Facebook Fan Page build consumers’ desire for Gucci products, but also enables the community to offer free feedback, publish images, and share Gucci content.

Mercedes Benz Social Network

Scarcity online is only achieved in a closed system. Usually this is against the accepted best practices of a social campaign, but for a luxury brand it can work. Mercedes highlighted this idea by creating a closed social network for Gen Y’ers.

GenerationBenz.com, is an invite only social network where consumers can give feedback on vehicles, as well as give Mercedes Benz insight into their younger customers.

By creating a network that includes only those that are either previous buyers, Mercedes members, and potential consumers, the brand has targeted exactly the demographic they want. Mercedes is able to engage users without fear that the brand reputation will be tarnished.

Creating a successful private social network can be costly, but the return on consumer loyalty may be great. Allowing brand customers to connect with each other while connecting with the brand, as well as creating a place to introduce new products to a brand’s core demographic, can be an invaluable asset.

Summary

Social media can be a powerful tool for a luxury brand. With a growing affluent market, the online world is a place high-end brands need to be. The question is, how are you going to maintain guardianship of your brand identity, keep your product premium-priced and exclusive, or engage your customer?

Knowing that releasing your brand to your consumers doesn’t necessarily hurt brand reputation is the first step.

More social media resources for brands:

- 10 Twitter Best Practices for Brands

- 40 of the Best Twitter Brands and the People Behind Them

- 5 Tips for Optimizing Your Brand’s Facebook Page

- 8 Essential Apps for Your Brand’s Facebook Page

- The Importance of Focus: A Guide for Social Media Brands

- A Control Freak’s Guide to Social Media Influence

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Erdosain

Reviews: Facebook, Twitter

Tags: brands, business, gucci, luxury, mercedes, social media

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Hans Pandeya, the CEO of Global Gaming Factory (the Swedish company that had recently acquired The Pirate Bay for $7.8 million) has an ambitious plan for the new Pirate Bay. It seems bold, perhaps even too bold at first, but Hans thinks he has a plan that will make everyone – the file sharers, the ISPs, the content providers – happy.

Talking to the BBC, Pandeya said that he plans to make legal file sharing (which is what The Pirate Bay will be focused on from now on) more attractive than illegal file sharing by paying the users for sharing files. He also plans to pay the content providers that provide the files, and he plans to raise money from the ISPs by reducing their traffic overload.

“Let’s say a popular song comes out. Rather than a million downloads from a site – which would cause a considerable strain on that ISP – we can take that song and put it out on P2P,” he says.

Unfortunately, when you try to put all of the pieces of this puzzle together, you’ll find out that one piece is always missing. Yes, The Pirate Bay is a huge source of traffic. But this traffic comes from file sharers who will not appreciate the fact that one day, The Pirate Bay will get a “temporarily closed” sign while they work out the deals with all the content providers out there. They’ll quickly move on to other torrent sites; yes, The Pirate Bay was much loved for their activism, but when your goal is to download a new Kanye West video, you’ll just take it from whoever offers it. Need examples? One word: Napster.

The file sharers might be inclined to stay on The Pirate Bay because they’d receive money for their troubles. But I’ve long held the theory that piracy is not only about money; it’s also about choice and availability. A torrent tracker needs to have a lot of content; if it doesn’t, getting paid a small amount to use it won’t help.

Now, about those content providers. There are a lot of them, and many of them hate The Pirate Bay with a passion. They probably don’t even like the name. Working out deals with all of them will be nearly impossible; especially since The Pirate Bay is surrounded by legal problems, recently losing a lawsuit from the same companies they should be doing deals with now. The content providers aren’t as passive as they used to be; they’ve got Hulu and Epix, and I’m afraid that few of them feel the need to deal with The Pirate Bay.

Finally, we’ve got the ISPs. Whether they would be willing to work with the Pirate Bay at all is questionable. Whether The Pirate Bay will remain such a huge traffic source to be interesting to the ISPs after the “true” pirates move on to other torrent trackers and after they’ve cut the deals with content providers is also uncertain. BusinessWeek raises several technical and legal issues surrounding such a deal.

Yes, the entire idea sounds nice on paper – after all, everybody wins, right? But transitions such as the one proposed by Pandeya are tough even when you’re not talking about one of the most notorious torrent trackers out there. In the end, The Pirate Bay might end up trying to sell traffic they don’t have, harnessed from content they also don’t have, to ISPs that are reluctant to buy it. It’s not a very promising future for the pirates, I’m afraid.

Reviews: Hulu

Tags: piracy, the pirate bay, torrent, TPB

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Twitter users can now buy followers to boost the audience for the messages they send via the micro-blogging service.
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Barack Obama often seems to have much of the planet at his feet in rapt attention to his every word.
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Syria's president scraps a law limiting sentences for men who kill their female relatives in the name of family honour.
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Surf the web for a couple of minutes, and – usually without anyone asking you – you’re giving away a lot of personal data to the various companies that are tracking your browsing habits. Yes, you can set your browser security to high and turn off cookies, but then half of the web won’t work properly. In the end, people just accept the fact that they’re being tracked and stop caring about it, even if it has serious implications for their privacy.

This might change soon, as a new set of guidelines for web tracking are due to be unveiled today. These new guidelines are set forth by trade associations representing some of the biggest companies out there, including Google, Microsoft, Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble. It’s an attempt at self-regulation; the US Congress and the Federal Trade Commission have recently been looking into online advertising practices, and the major companies probably decided it’s better to act now than have to adhere to more strict guidelines set by someone else in the future.

So, what do these new guidelines mean for your privacy? Well, companies can still track your online behavior. However, they need to tell you you’re being tracked, explain to you what it means, and (most importantly) provide you with an easy way to opt out of web tracking. In practice, it also means we soon might see a uniform link or an icon that’ll take you to a disclosure page. Finally, companies will have to ensure that the data collected from the users is stored securely; moreso if it’s sensitive data such as children’s personal information, financial data and medical records. Companies will be monitored for their adherence to these guidelines, and answer to federal agencies if they don’t adhere.

Is it enough? Well, it’s an ongoing debate. Measures such as this will provide the users who are concerned about web tracking and their online privacy with a way to ensure they’re not being tracked. On the other hand, one could say that web tracking should be opt-in instead of opt-out; that consumers should be tracked only if they willingly approve of it beforehand, and that no one should be tracked by default. When you consider that cookies change or get deleted, that users often change browsers and work on several different computers, opting out of every web tracking attempt out there might become a never ending chore.

The new guidelines are definitely a step forward; we’ll be able to judge how big when we see some of them implemented in practice.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, caracterdesign

Reviews: Google

Tags: online privacy, privacy, web

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President's removal that passed many Hondurans by
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US actor Karl Malden, best known for his roles in films such as A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront, dies at 97.
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Homosexual sex between consenting adults is no longer a criminal act in India. Will it change life for gay people?
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An Indian court rules that homosexual intercourse between consenting adults is not a criminal act, overturning colonial law.
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