The ongoing Murdoch versus Google story continues to unfold, providing food for thought about the future of online news and user behaviour.

The stand-off between the newspaper and online industries went up a notch last week when America’s largest metropolitan newspaper The New York Times announced that it will start charging readers for online content from 2011.

Following the subscription model of the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal, The New York Times will offer a limited number of articles for free viewing, after which users will have to register and pay for any additional content.

NYTIMES.com is the most popular online newspaper in America and New York Times Company executives are hoping that the new system will enable them to profit from the loyalty of regular users, without completely blocking the site from its millions of occasional readers.

Announcement: the Orwellian, Minority Reportian, Matrixian age of the thought police is here.

Remember a time when the biggest risk of using social media was having your boss stumble upon your Facebook photos from the weekend? Those days are long gone and now your online activity could turn you into a convicted criminal.

On 13 January 2010 Paul Chambers answered a knock at his front door to find some stern policemen outside. The first thing he thought was that something terrible had happened to a friend or relative, until they handed him a print out of his Twitter page.

The 26-year-old was arrested under the Terrorism Act and made to endure a seven hour interrogation, following which his laptop, iPhone and home computer were seized. His crime: a Twitter update in which he jokingly threatened to blow up Doncaster’s Robin Hood airport if his flight was delayed due to snow.

When I think of Hackers, I think of that mid 90’s cult movie starring Angelina Jolie and some other unknown actor that clearly didn’t make it in the industry. I have seen it numerous times and because of this my perception of hacking involves American secret services, floppy disks and roller blades. However, hacking is a major problem and hackers can be a big deal even in the world of SEO.

In light of the recent Twitter hackings at the end of last year, I decided to look at the world of hacking and see if it was just as serious a problem in SEO as it is in say, the social media networking sector. We are constantly seeing Facebook comments saying something ridiculous like “look at this pic of you!” These account hackings were rife last year and many of us had no clue why we were getting all these spammy comments about pictures we did not know we had. As word spread, we began to wise up to the social networking hacking and most of us now send a friendly to the victim saying something along the lines of “dude, you have been hacked.”

A Swedish court has found the file sharing site, The Pirate Bay, guilty of copyright infringement. The four co-accused(who are also the founders), have been ordered to pay a fine of 20 million Swedish kroner or £2.4 million, and serve one year in jail.

The Internet community has been following the trial with baited breath ever since it commenced in mid February. The trial was streamed live by the Swedish public service, and, unsurprisingly, the verdict was leaked on Twitter.

According to the founders, the site did not host infringing files it just made it easy to access them. The site made it possible for users to upload and download music and movie files for free. Basically, the site worked as a search engine for finding torrents and other illegal files online.
Although the verdict only impacts Sweden, the news has been welcomed by the music and movie industries. Paul McCartney has come out in support of the verdict. The former Beatle states: “The problem is you get a lot of young bands coming up and some of them aren’t going to last forever.”

Online advertising is an art form that not many, especially regular internet users, appreciate. In a world where consumers have more power than ever before, and where they use that power to demand greater relevance, efficiency and enhanced performance without having to do any work, online advertisers have to rely on all the advantages that technology has to offer. Even casual observers have to admit that the job is a difficult one. Companies such as Phorm and BT Webwise in the UK and NebuAd and DoubleClick (in partnership with Google) in the US have received an enormous amount of flack from the public for their information tracking and behavioural advertising technologies. As with so many issues that cause public outrage, the online advertising furore is far less serious and far simpler than it has been made out to be.

Are you receiving email, after email, and more email? It can be an overwhelming task in the average employee`s working day. Haven`t you ever wished that you could just turn it off for the day? One of the problems with doing that is email is often your only avenue for communication with clients or even fellow colleagues. This is especially true for companies that have international branches that need to communicate with each other.

Well, that actually isn`t entirely correct. Humans were given the gift of speech and some clever guy called Alexander Graham Bell did invent the first telephone in 1876. By now, you would think we would have learnt how to use it constructively. This device acts as an alternative form of communicating with the world out there beyond your computer. However, for some strange reason, people seem to prefer sending a quick email to picking up the phone or getting up from their desk to talk to someone who is down the passage. Laziness is possibly the best explanation for this.

On the 24th of June, the Wall Street Journal published a piece claiming that Google would be releasing a new and free internet usage statistics product, due for release within a matter of days.

In the article, author Emily Steel considers that the product would rival the services offered by existing internet usage data providers, namely the prominent ones: Comscore and Hitwise. She muses that, given the sheer size of Google`s data infrastructure, they could significantly shake the web measurement market place, especially if they offered that data up for free.

I have been digging through the official Google and Google AdWords blogs, in search of some mention of this alleged product, and so far the predictions from the esteemed WSJ have not been actualised.

Is the younger generation really smarter? Just because we have an insatiable demand for knowledge and want everything, including answers to all our questions, NOW, doesn`t mean that we are getting any better at analysing or interpreting our information. In fact, it seems that we are over reliant on the big G to provide us with answers!

For the first time, the seeking behaviour of a digital reader has been profiled by age. A report by the CIBER research team at University College London Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future (PDF format; 1.67MB) shows that research-behaviour traits that are commonly associated with younger users – impatience in search and navigation, and zero tolerance for any delay in satisfying their information needs – are now becoming the norm for all age-groups, from younger pupils and undergraduates through to professors.