With each passing day commercial interests seem to find new ways to harness the tools on which the web was built.
Policy initiatives such as the US’s now-defunct SOPA and in-progress CISPA now involve…
Censorship has now caught up with new social media and technology in China.
Flickr/bfishadow
This week’s temporary suspension of comments on China’s two largest micro-blogging services Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo highlight the ruling party’s discomfort with social media’s growing popularity…
Newman and Bligh face off in real life, but how do they fare online?
AAP/Dave Hunt
By Axel Bruns, Queensland University of Technology
With every recent election, in Australia as well as elsewhere, parties and politicians are adding further to their arsenal of digital campaigning tools.
In the 2010 federal election campaign, my colleagues…
Kony2012 seemed to be everywhere, but attention has now turned to the makers of the video.
Reyhan Dhuny
There have been enough social media disasters of late to make one thing clear: manipulating sentiment through social networks is next to impossible.
The McDonald’s #McDStories campaign in January was…
Tweet success and sweet success increasingly go hand in hand.
Scolirk
In the brave new world of contemporary sport-watching, the goalposts have moved. Watching the big game (once a simple matter of grabbing a beer and some chips and settling down in front of the television…
Comments posted by the writer have seen Twitter sued for defamation.
Mosman Library
By Peter Black, Queensland University of Technology
Twitter is being sued for defamation by a Melbourne man who was wrongly identified as the author of a “hate blog” directed at writer and TV personality, Marieke Hardy.
Hardy posted a tweet last year to…
Brands like Qantas are finding controlling their message on Twitter is not easy.
AAP
By Axel Bruns, Queensland University of Technology
For major brands, the road to social media infamy is paved with what seemed like good ideas at the time.
Just this week, Qantas succeeded in having Twitter suspend the well-known spoof account, @QantasPR…
There's no turning the tide when it comes to Twitter.
Rosaura Ochoa
By Axel Bruns, Queensland University of Technology
The release of Sky News UK’s Twitter guidelines for its journalists – or rather, the Guardian’s not entirely disinterested commentary on those guidelines – has caused a bit of a stir across social media…
Electronic tools can help advance research into rare diseases through creating virtual registries.
Gautheron
Pretty soon, not being involved in social media will be just as implausible as not having a telephone. If my 80-year-old dad is on Facebook and women over 55 are the fastest growing demographic on the…
Have the #occupy protestors been gagged?
AFP/Timothy A. Clary
In the age of social media, if we’re able to get online, engage with a few tools and connect our ideas to others who sympathise, we’re able to initiate social change. Or that’s the theory.
The world begins…
Barack Obama's web campaign helped him win the presidency. Parties should learn from it.
Flickr/Scorpions and Centaurs
The increasing spread of information and communication technology has changed just about every aspect of Australian society – except democracy.
The opportunities to engage citizens in the democratic process…
What we tweet, and when we tweet it, gives insight into global mood patterns.
joelaz
I know my mood over the course of a day and so, it seems, does Twitter.
Over the years there’s been a lot of work on mood cycles. Much of it has been based on neurochemicals such as serotonin and dopamine…
The numbers in Manhattan streets are far outnumbered by those on social media.
Don Emmert/AFP
On Saturday, hundreds of protestors congregated in the Wall Street area of New York at the start of a protest dubbed #OccupyWallStreet.
The aim? To “flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens…
It's getting harder to know where home starts and the office ends.
webtreats
This week, the American National Labour Review Board ruled to reinstate five workers fired for complaining about a co-worker on Facebook.
The board decided writing about work on Facebook was equivalent…
Social media is helping, not hindering, police efforts in the UK.
AAP
By Axel Bruns, Queensland University of Technology
There’s a colourful and evocative term among regular users of social media: “headdesking”.
It’s what you do when somebody says or does something so stupid that your instant reaction is to smack your head…
Can social media temper growing public antipathy towards political parties?
Mandel Ngan/AFP
On Tuesday, the ACT government held Australia’s first virtual community cabinet using Twitter. Four ministers faced a barrage of tweets in an hour long question and answer session held with the electorate…
Not sharing your password is one of the basic rules for online safety.
Michael Reynolds/EPA
On July 4, a hacker took control of one of the Twitter accounts of US broadcaster FoxNews.com and sent out several tweets announcing President Obama had been shot.
Because it was a national holiday and…
Facebook is a key tool for the modern revolutionary.
AAP
Facebook, with more than 500 million members, has now reached superpower status. If Facebook were a country, its supporters often say, its population would rank behind only China and India.
But there…
