It's August. It's HOT. Let the Hacking Begin -- August 7, 2009 Week in Review

From Our Sponsors & Advertisers

• AdClub Internet Day, featuring speaker Jesse Brown, is coming up on September 3rd - be sure to register here if you'll be in the Toronto area.

This week's WIR curator is Brad Grier. He blogs at blog.bradgrier.com and tweets up a storm as @bgrier.

Well, it's a day late but hopefully not a dollar short. Apologies to Kate and the OneDegree crew. [And then WE waited another day to post it. Ahh, the anticipation. I blame Georgian bloggers. -Ed.] I'm vacationing in Montreal and didn't anticipate my hotel having inconvenient WiFi. So I'm building this from the Dealers Room at the Anticipation 2009, the World Science Fiction Convention on borrowed WiFi. Enough about me, now on with show...

Seen Around the Blogosphere

It looks like social media took a beating this week. First up was a report that suggests the 'young-uns' are leaving social media sites in droves:

The proliferation of parents and teachers trawling the pages of Facebook trying to poke old schoolfriends and lovers, and traversing the outer reaches of MySpace is causing an adolescent exodus from the social networking sites, according to research from the media regulator Ofcom.

Then there was the social media outage. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Livejournal and Blogger were all attacked in a massive zombie-driven Distributed Denial of Service (DDos) attack.

The blogger, who uses the account name "Cyxymu," (the name of a town in the Republic of Georgia) had accounts on all of the different sites that were attacked at the same time, Max Kelly, chief security officer at Facebook, told CNET News.

Heard on/about Twitter

Not much.  :)  It was down for part of the week...but here's a few things that I caught trending...

• Pay Per Tweet -- Izea's Sponsored Tweet system launched this week. You'll soon see more tweets using the #spon hashtag. Is this a good thing or not? I explored this question on the Future Shop blog earlier this week -- some good responses in the comments!
• British troops encouraged to use Twitter:
  
  In a "liberalisation" of its social networking policy, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) said that British troops are no longer required to seek permission to use the sites but asks personnel to use common sense over the amount of detail revealed.
  
• Another report looks at demographic trends with Twitter:
  
  According to Nielsen's data, Twitter reached 10.7 percent of all active Internet users in 2009 "despite a lack of widespread adoption by children, teens, and young adults."
• Delicious Freshens Up With Twitter. Founder Hates It.
  
  The problem now is that there are plenty of other services people are already using to share stuff on Twitter. Most people still just paste links right into the update box, and Twitter uses Bit.ly to shorten them. This is allowing Bit.ly to collect a huge amount of data about what people are sharing — something which it could use soon to take on Digg and Delicious.
  

Interesting Bookmarks from the Backchannel

• Hot or not? -- Nissan Cube promotion suffers slings and arrows.
  
  In mid-July, a long post went up on the wiki-style muckraking website EncyclopediaDramatica.com accusing Nissan and Capital C of a variety of ethical lapses in the running of the Hypercube contest. Given that the arguments made in the Encyclopedia Dramatica post features more circumstantial evidence and crude language than hard facts—and isn’t even backed up by an author’s byline—the post didn’t exactly meet the generally accepted definition of a reliable source. Nissan and Capital C might have reasonably expected it to create only a small ripple.
• Social Media Marketing goes to the Klondike
  Klondike ice cream bars is doing some very clever marketing using Facebook as well as online video or webisodes as they are called.
  

Releases, Announcements and News

• The bikini barista comes to town
  Across the pond things are getting interesting at the neighbourhood coffee shop:
  

Is Bikini Espresso Cafe a clever niche-marketing idea, or just stereotypical exploitation of women, masquerading as a smart business move?

Other Tidbits

• Tweetblocker: Yet another Twitter management tool...not a bad concept though:
  
  TweetBlocker automatically identifies the spammers in your follow list and lets you easily unfollow and block them right from the TweetBlocker dashboard. Of course, if you are extremely careful about who you follow, chances are that you aren't even following a lot of spammers. If you auto-follow, however - or if you did so in the past - chances are that you are following quite a few spammers at this point.