William Hague got caught up in the media crossfire this week for addressing allegations about his private life which had surfaced on the influential blog Guido Fawkes.

What became interesting was that a swarm of PR experts came out to express how Mr Hague had exacerbated the problem by making his statement public.  The eminent PR guru, Max Clifford, said that the former Conservative leader had turned a “small problem into a huge problem”, saying that what was under a closed circulation had now been turned into a much bigger media affair which had now caught the attention of the wider public.

The rise of the internet has spawned a myriad of blogging sites reporting news, gossip and reviews on everything from films to recommendations on new products. But can web users trust the tittle- tattle of the new chattering classes and should corporations trust using bloggers as a new channel for their marketing communications?

A survey by Ofcom found that 58% of people polled chose the internet as their most trusted medium, with TV polling 54% and Newspapers getting 34%. So far, so good. But reports by Forrester and Edelman show that bloggers are far down the list when it comes to users trusting a review posted on an unknown blog site, even when the blog has a large readership.

As a brand, how do you filter all the twittering and chattering, especially when the internet is littered with spurious news and spin masters? As the example of “the curious case of Masal Bugduv showed, well-known journalists and publications can be taken in by hoaxers, exposing the fact that even the respectable media are sometimes too lazy to really investigate the validity of a story or are quite happy to ‘re-tweet’ into the mainstream because the buzz is more salacious than the truth (that’s working on the assumption that a journalist’s aim is to publish the truth of course).

Steve Rubei writes that “both marketers and publishers continue to focus on reach, missing the big picture. Trust is by far a more important metric, one that clearly rules when it comes to influence”.

Blogs are now part of media and have a heavy influence on traditional media and users alike. In the same way that brands need to be cautious about spurious research findings, or have a plan to tackle press relations, they should also interrogate the quality of the blogosphere if they are to maintain integrity of the brand across modern media channels.

Friends and acquaintances will come and go; work colleagues move in and on in life but the nature of Facebook and other sites means that we can stay all connected, forever, even when we shouldn’t. But as people exit your life, should you ‘unfriend’ them? Dr Larry Rosen, author of “Rewired” believes that it is important that you allow yourself to unfriend someone as this allows authenticity of the digital relationship that you have had.

But how should we decide who remains our friend?  Teachers at Lee County School in Florida have been issued with guidelines suggesting that they don’t correspond with students on the social networking sites as inappropriate contact could lead to complicated legal and workplace issues. Also, I bet the girl who was sacked after ranting about her boss on Facebook wished she’d never friended her work colleague. And do we really need to know every move of our teenage relatives?

But if you do remove a friend from Facebook, they will not notified. So, as Facebook users have an average of 130 friends they probably won’t notice your departure anyway? So if you are making a stance, you may be best to make a more dramatic exit some other way.

Google has created three categories for e-mails: “Important,” “Starred,” and “Everything Else.”

“Important” e-mails are determined based on:
1. How often you e-mail or chat with a person
2. Keywords that appear in e-mails that you read
3. Selection of either a positive or negative button ( ) to mark an e-mail as more or less important
4. Adjustments to the manual inbox controls

“Starred” e-mails are marked by the user, with Gmail’s pre-existing star system. All other e-mails will be placed in the third tier, “Everything Else.” Google even has a colloquialism for this tertiary level: “bologna” or mail that is not quite spam.

As Priority Inbox is based on user behaviour, it is both personalised and likely to improve gradually. Indeed, Google argues that, over one year, Priority Inbox will save users about one week’s worth of time.

At Altogether, we do hope that the Wiser makes it to the first tier of your inbox!

QR codes were initially used to track parts in vehicle manufacturing, however they are now used in a much broader context, for example in commercial tracking apps and convenience-orientated apps, which is where it starts getting interesting.

QR codes are a perfect vehicle to link the real world such as magazines, billboards, buses or business cards with the digital world using a mobile or smart phone. Technology has moved on leaps and bounds since 1994, especially with regards to mobile phones. Pretty much everyone, however tech savvy they are, has a camera on their phone nowadays and most people have the technology (applications) to scan a QR code – they simply don’t know what they are!

Some companies are trying to get QR codes off the ground again with the latest being Calvin Klein Jeans and their Uncensored QR code Advert Billboard (SishFW).

So why would we care about something from before I started High School?

We should care because to deliver truly integrated marketing campaigns, we need to be able to link up offline and online and give consumers a seamless experience.

Location-based marketing is all the rage in the digital world. Everyone is trying to find a brand to do something cool with Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp or BrightKite. Over the last year Foursquare has taken the social media world by storm (just the social media world for now) with their Lo-So Network which has just logged their 100 millionth “check-in”.

From a brand’s perspective, which of the following two scenarios is more attractive? A consumer sits on a bus reading a magazine, sees a QR code on a press ad, finds the nearest store (either online or physical) and eventually buys the product. Or: a consumer walks into a physical store, checks in (and tells all their friends), views a QR code on the products in the store, downloads more information on their smart phone, which leads them to making a purchase that would not have happened otherwise.

Linking online and offline is hard and it will be a slow process. However, as my generation gets older and the younger generation, who are already tech savvy beyond my wildest dreams, starts earning more money, this is going to change the consumer landscape well beyond our current comprehension.

Let’s not get carried away though. There are problems with both QR codes and Lo-So. There are far too many disparate applications for both and it’s asking quite a lot of our consumers to understand which application they need for which store in which country. But don’t fret, there are solutions on the horizon.

Stickybits is leading the way in the next generation of QR codes using red lasers barcode scanning technology to enable consumers to scan a barcode and discover a social interaction behind the product, be it a picture, video or even a recipe for the product. Stickybits have the added leverage that scanning barcodes for price comparisons, especially in a recession/recovery, has been an increasing trend in consumer behaviour.

There are also those who are taking this type of marketing to the next level and maximising on the success of sites like Perplex City. One such company is SCVNGR (scavenger hunt-like challenges) which is a game where users check in places, do challenges and earn points. Unlike Foursquare the fun doesn’t stop there! SCVNGR (not a catchy name I must admit) has forged itself a new, unique place in the market, with a lot of business potential, thanks to challenge-based discovery that goes on past a simple check in. They have teamed up with the likes of the Smithsonian Museum and The Boston Globe to give people a unique insight into the museum or the city respectively.

It’s going to be interesting to see if any of these services gains enough traction or if it’s going to be a case of multiple platforms coming together. Only time will tell.

Thanks to Agência Cachaça for the image.

In the last few weeks we have been produced a number of Facebook applications for our clients, including the Andrex “Pup-o-Matic” and Coral’s “Ask a Pro“. Their levels of popularity have been extremely impressive, with the Pup-o-Matic in particular getting astounding levels of traffic – 3.9million spins of the wheels and counting.

However, whilst we are delighted when someone chooses to allow these applications access to their Facebook profiles, there are undoubtedly a number of folk who do not feel comfortable with 3rd parties taking a peak at their private data. In fact the issue of privacy is such a hot topic on Facebook that they have recently updated their policy to ensure users know exactly what information they are granting access to. And whilst that is great news for the civil liberties activists amongst you, there is another issue that few developers appear to have catered for: what happens when a user denies your application access to their details?

Take, for example, the EA Sport’s FIFA Superstars application. EA are one of the world’s largest games producers, so you would assume they would put immense attention to detail when producing a Facebook application. Sadly though, they have not tested one of the first pieces of functionality that their application presents: the “Don’t Allow” button. Because, if you press this button, you’ll find that you are merely redirected back to the same authorisation request page. Go on, give it a try, I’ll wait… See what I mean?

However, it is not a great surprise that this issue has not been addressed in the vast majority of applications on Facebook (the Pup-o-Matic and Ask a Pro obviously do not fall into this category as our QA processes are extremely detailed ). I say this because the documentation, correct me if I am wrong, does not actually exist for this functionality. Previously developers could specify a URL for users to be redirected to if they choose to deny your app access. However the new version of Facebook’s API, the Graph API, users are simply redirected to the application’s canvas page. And since the canvas page was what initiated the authorisation request, you as the user are sent back into the authorisation process again. And thus the Facebook infinite authorisation loop has you. So how do we capture this event to save you hapless souls lost in this vortex? The answer lies deep within the Facebook bugs list, in a notice only posted just about a month ago. When the user clicks the deny button, a query string is appended to the canvas page url, with the variable “error_reason=user_denied“. So adding a simple check for this query string (in PHP use if($_GET['error_reason'] == “user_denied”){) and you’ll save the sanity of a few Facebook users.

I wonder what the equivalent of a ‘nice cup of tea and a sit down’ is for a webserver? I almost feel sorry for it.

This visualisation was generated using Logstalgia.

In audiotool you can create by yourself or collaborate to create, whole music tracks that can then be shared or even remixed by the larger community. The interface is very intuitive and playful. It’s been one of the best flash applications out there for a while but now with a social networking slant it could become a benchmark of what we do and how we play in the digital realm.

Thinking that we may not be the only “dev-bots” out there that would find these of use, I have decided publish a list of the best (and worst) that have been sent around:

• http://haxe.org/ – an open source, platform independent programming language that can be “compiled” into a number of more commonly used programming languages (e.g. swf, js, php etc)
• http://websec.wordpress.com/2010/03/19/exploiting-hard-filtered-sql-injections – an interesting article about sql injection filters and how to sure up your defences, or get around them, dependent on your point of view
• http://www.kirsle.net/wizards/ttf2eot.cgi – a TTF to EOT font converter, ideal for those who are looking to move to @font-face for their custom font needs
• http://blog.twitter.com/2010/03/anywhere.html – much hyped move to make Twitter integration as simple as a few lines of javascript
• http://netvibes.org/download/ – netvibes Exposition libraries and server, allowing you to server widgets from your own site rather than relying on iframes
• http://br.mozdev.org/multifox/ – firefox plugin to allow you to have multiple logins for the same sites in different tabs
• http://www.appcelerator.com/ – Titanium Appcelerator allows developers to build iphone and android applications (as well ask desktop apps) using only HTML and Javascript, and version 1.0 has just been launched!
• http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/ – Internet Explorer 9 platform tests (yes, I know it feels like 8 was a minute ago)
• http://getfirebug.com/firebuglite – Embeddable firebug so you can use it on Safari and Internet Explorer
• http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/other/top-20-mysql-best-practices/ – a nice article with a top 20 of best practices for mysql
• http://code.google.com/p/grepwin/ – Grep for windows
• http://www.whoisgregg.com/blog/2009/05/optimizing-for-facebook-share-preview.html – excellent article on how to optimise your website for the facebook share preview
• http://kickasswebdesign.com/wordpress/2007/06/ie6-min-height-hack-that-isnt/ – how to get 100% height on a div without using css hacks (including IE6)
• http://www.zamfbrowser.org/ – an AIR-based service browser for Zend AMF, since it doesn’t come with one built in
• http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/xhp-a-new-way-to-write-php/294003943919 – facebook invention to allow for xml syntax in PHP
• http://spriteme.org – an automated sprite generator
• https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/bnbbfjbeaefgipfjpdabmpadaacmafkj – Firebug for Chrome
• http://dummyimage.com/ – a nice dummy image generator to put in place while you’re awaiting assets for your site

Okay, I think that’s a pretty decent start, and that takes us back almost to the beginning for 2010 in the email list. If I get some more free time, look out for a new list in the coming months.