Proving that silver surfers are not necessarily inhibited by technology if the content is attractive enough, those aged over 50 now account for more 31 per cent of the total people online. As grandparents join social media sites as a new way to connect with their family and friends, the presence of over 50s online [...]

As the nation takes to the polls for the closest election in a generation, the true winner of the first digital election has already been identified as social media. Following its influential role in Barack Obama’s 2008 US election campaign, the key party leaders have all identified Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as ways to engage [...]

Google recently added forum results to its search listings. The aim is to include more social media in its results mix. But is it a good idea? Well they say variety is the spice of life and it terms of delivering a wide scope of options, including social media would be a good thing. This [...]

Social networking is becoming a risky business if recent news headlines are any indication. It seems that we must be wary of the myriad of ways cyber criminals are using social media to entrap us. Apparently, we have become quite savvy about spotting email threats, so the scammers and malware purveyors are turning to new [...]

About a month ago I blogged about the possibility of Twitter becoming a viable commercial venture for its owners. Back then I surmised that Twitter wanted it to be so, as did its venture capital backers who had pumped millions of dollars into the micro blog site with a view to recouping profit. But I [...]

Big online news stories at the moment all seem to be about getting hold of the gold at the end of the rainbow from new media web portals. In terms of pure visitor numbers the likes of YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are undoubted giants of the internet but all are yet to successfully convert their [...]

In the UK, many businesses are discovering the benefits of working with social media in order to build their brand. It is often seen as a leap of faith for a business to put its stall out on a site like MySpace or YouTube or Flickr. Managing directors are held back by the idea of [...]

If anyone still needs convincing that politics can feed its message through social networking then they only need to look at the battle going on between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. MySpace has created a section called Impact in the last week to encourage closer ties between the American Presidential candidates and it’s users. Similarly [...]

Heather Hopkins at Hitwise has an excellent piece of research on her blog about the strength of MySpace within TopShop’s marketing strategy. It seems that MySpace is now sending more traffic to TopShop than MSN and Yahoo Search combined. If you ever needed a sign that social networking could lead to dramatic traffic generation, this [...]

The Internet is driven by the need to monetise, that’s a given, but as the fastest growing industry in the world it seems to work much faster than any other. Just as articles spring up on the Internet about the gap between social networking sites and brand advertising the solutions also start to present themselves. [...]