Newsletter No. 4

Hello and welcome to my latest newsletter.  

A combination of holidays and not having fully established which part of the month I send these out has resulted in a longer gap than usual. In fact I'm going to drop the month from the title and simply number the newsletters and send them out when there is enough of interest to say.

Twitter attacked

A number of events recently have confirmed things that I have been concerned about for some time and raised them in the public awareness. The first of these was the denial of service attack instigated, apparently, by the Russian government on Twitter, Facebook and Livejournal in their attempts to silence a blogger from Georgia. It has been clear for some time that as the significance of online activity, and its increasing pervasiveness, affects more of our lives, the ability to achieve influence by restricting those abilities is likely to increase. The inevitable issues around civil liberties will be made even more complicated by the global nature of the Internet.

URL shortening service Tr.im folds

Something else I have been banging on about for some time is the vulnerability of short URLs. The web has been built on the ability to reliably point to content with persistent links that allow information to be retrieved from anywhere at any time. The 140 character restraints of Twitter have spawned a number of services that shorten real URLs to much more concise links. The risk has always been that if the services that provide these shortened links go bust what happens to all the links? It has been interesting to watch the responses to the demise of Tr.im. 

Facebook buys Friendfeed

I have been a big fan of Friendfeed for some time, and in fact have been rather disparaging of Facebook, so it is very interesting to see that Facebook have acquired the Friendfeed team. I look forward to seeing whether this means I get the best of both worlds or the worst of both.

Government guidelines for Twitter

Interesting to see that the UK Government has produced guidelines on how to use Twitter. I recently passed around a link to Laura Papworth's excellent roundup of social media guidelines from a wide range of organisations which some of you may find useful. 

Book Recommendation

I have a page on my blog with suggested reading, and also have a link on the front page to the book I am reading at any time, but I thought that it might be useful to include some of the best of them here in this newsletter. 

I have just finished reading Kevin Kelly's wonderful Out Of Control. It was written about 10 years ago and I regret not having read it before now. It is an entertaining romp through a wide range of fascinating and complicated scientific discoveries all of which he relates to the web, organisational life, and the modern worldview. Great stuff!

Guru Online

If you haven't had a chance to look at the video Q&A I did for Guru Online you can still find them here. 9,500 views so far!

As ever I hope you have found this newsletter useful. If you have, do please feel free to tell a friend or pass this email on! 

Cheers

Euan