You could call it a learning experience, a far cheaper lesson for the rest of the world than for Ray Lam, a Vancouver political candidate who withdrew his nomination after racy pictures of him surfaced on Facebook.

Lam says the photos were on his private account, and those vetting the candidate hadn’t discovered them. If so, one of Lam’s “friends”…

Newspapers should be using social media more effectively to engage their readers and boost online revenue, according to a new survey by Gartner.
"In the wake of the economic challenges facing the U.S. newspaper industry, publishers are losing focus on the crucial imperative of how to capitalize on those consumers who remain loyal, engaged online and print readers," said Allen…

Google recently announced 2 new improvements to Google Search. The first is an expanded list of related searches, and the second is the addition of longer search result descriptions.
The company says it’s deploying a new technology that better understands associations and concepts related to searches. Google explains:
…one of its first applications lets us offer you even more useful…

The AP is launching an all out assault on any use of its content that is not licensed (purchased) for use by Internet publishers and search engines. As I have said in the past, the AP is not just focusing on the blatant violators such as spam blogs or sites that quote paragraphs without attribution or link. On the contrary,…

GeoCities, that mainstay of the mid-to-late ’90s Internet, is about done for.  New GeoCities accounts are no longer available, and although it hasn’t yet given a specific date, Yahoo has made clear that GeoCities will be shut down sometime later this year.

Yahoo acquired GeoCities in 1999.  Not too long after, the service’s popularity pretty well took a nosedive.  Now,…

Today YouTube has launched the beta version of YouTube RealTime, which comes in the form of a toolbar that resides in the lower right corner of the page on YouTube.
From this toolbar, users will be able to see which YouTube friends are currently online (much like Facebook) and what they’re watching. A history of their recent activities on the…

Online engagement by Internet users is increasing in part as a result of a shift toward video content and social networking, according to a new report by Nielsen.
Since 2003, interests of the average online user have shifted significantly. Categories that consisted of portal-oriented browsing sites, such as shopping directories and Internet tools/Web services, used to be the most popular…

Mobile advertising platform AdMob has released its Mobile Metrics Report looking at statistics for the month of March. It highlights some interesting trends in smartphone applications.
AdMob serves ads for over 6,000 web sites and 1,000 apps and stores and analyzes the data from each ad request, impression, and click. The report is intended to provide insight into trends in…

The Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind Wikipedia, is partnering with European mobile provider Orange. The partnership will see Orange devices carrying co-branded content for customers in France, the UK, Spain, and Poland.
"At Orange we are committed to giving people maximum access to the widest range of digital technologies and to simplifying the way people use these technologies to access…

Today Google announced Google Product Search for Mobile. Android and iPhone users will now be able to type a product query into Google.com and get Google Product Search Results formatted for their phones.

This provides for convenient mobile access to online ratings, reviews, prices, and product details (Microsoft announced a similar feature for Live Search about a year ago). "Whether you’re…