Shortly after President Hosni Mubarak stepped down from power, an activist told CNN that “Facebook was responsible for the success of the Egyptian people’s uprising”. The revolution in Iran was attributed to Facebook, Tunisia to Wikileaks, Egypt to Twitter, and now in Britain, BlackBerry.

At the time of the toppling of the Egyptian government, Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron called it a “precious moment of opportunity” to move towards “civilian and democratic rule”. But today it’s the Blackberry smartphones that have won out, with their semi-encrypted messaging system, sending England into revolt, with Cameron scuttling into position, calling it “sickening”.

In the political context, this breakdown of civil order is inescapably based on poor young people of England wanting to take their plight to the streets, to defy the deeply unpopular police force and to damage the property of the rich. In short, to “take back” what they feel has been stolen from them.

A mother whose store was attacked in London described the looters as “feral rats”; not quite the voice of reason that accompanied the Egyptian people’s release from repression. In a BBC interview, two girls, who had been drinking all night on stolen bottles of wine, said in “Showing the rich we do what we want”: “Everyone just wanted to riot so bad…It’s the government’s fault.” When asked why they were then targeting local people and businesses, the girls responded: “It’s the rich people…we want to show the rich people we can do what we want.”

In an Al Jazeera article, one pundit put it: “So there is no single meaning in what is happening in London and elsewhere…We have a major problem with youth unemployment. There have already been cuts in services for young people. State education in poor areas is sometimes shockingly bad. Young people cannot afford adequate private housing and there is a shortage of council-built stock. Economic inequality has reached quite startling levels…”

Mr Cameron, meanwhile denouncing the “mindless violence” of the looters, continues to support a “system of political economy that was as unstable as it was pernicious,” as Al Jazeera put it. And when Cameron talked about preparing to stand up to the City to drive through reforms to break up Britain’s so-called casino banks, he failed, miserably.

However couched, even the best of us should have great difficulty in creating a credible link between global economics and inner-city rioting. As one looter in Clapham Junction, London, suggested, it’s not about the economy as such, he said, “I’m just getting my taxes back.” But as appealing as it is to dig out the root cause of it all, comments from the rioters have been incomprehensibly feeble, trite and vengeful.

And while writers of all political hues point the finger of blame towards “social media channels for inciting and spreading violence”, others believe it’s overarching police violence, racial conflict, ethnic tensions, social disadvantage and the failure of government to deliver appropriate services for the hopelessness of youth with nothing to look forward to, while still others blame the bankers and the politicians for an alleged theft they were left to service. No one, it seems, can make any real sense of what’s happened.

Just looking through some of the comments on Twitter for the hashtag #londonriots, some were enlightening. Lulu Rose thought: “The Youth of the Middle East rise up for basic freedoms. The Youth of London rise up for a HD ready 42″ Plasma TV.” While Aaron Peters thought: “Britons chose to be consumers over being citizens. This isn’t anarchy, this is the consumer society without the means.” More comically, Allison & Busby, writing for Waterstone’s bookstore, noted: “We’ll stay open. If they steal some books they might learn something,” while Declan Fay rallied with: “They’re blaming mobile phones for the #londonriots. Clearly they weren’t with Vodafone or the riots would’ve suddenly stopped after 1 minute.”

But these youths who are said to lack opportunity, some from their own making and inadequacy one must conclude, are angry at “the system” and have organised themselves using social media. But while the pro-democracy demonstrators of the “Arab Spring” marched in the hope of positive change and a better life, Britain’s violence has been positively narcissistic and nihilistic, focusing narrowly on arson and looting and are only too ready to cock a snook at the rich, by whatever means they feel able.

But whether this disenchantment is about today’s youth that don’t really care, the dynamics of social change is now powered by the rise of social media, a platform that allows immediate social organisation that governments are powerless to mitigate or regulate.

In the Maghreb, the riots were about escalating food prices, which turned into anger at the authorities. But in Britain, with its latent social problems, compounded by a perceived cover-up of a police shooting, is an altogether a different kind of revolution.

As John Bassett, a former senior official at the British signals intelligence agency GCHQ and now a senior fellow at London’s Royal United Services Institute, put it: “It does look as though social media is changing the balance of power between the state and the individual, whether that is manifested as regime change in Cairo or looting in Tottenham.”

In Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Italy, countries that are suffering from a sovereign debt crisis, governments are struggling to placate market demands and delivering austerity. And in Britain and elsewhere, it’s been young people who have been at the vanguard of protest.

But if social media really is going to be the panacea to society’s feeling of loss and lack of future, the people using it should also offer a platform of hope and engagement rather than co-opting to fight bland consumerism and materialism for their own sakes.

Until that time, the politicians, the police and the rich should brace themselves for the onslaught of social unrest as the angry poor have discovered they can steal Blackberrys and organise anti-social events in great numbers.

In a bygone age, the English revolutionary would have been considered it most uncivilised to stage a riot, except of course at Lord’s cricket ground when an umpire declared “rain stop play”, followed by crustless cucumber and cress sandwiches being hurled at him in an undignified pique of rage.

To be taken seriously, Britain’s counter-culture of hedonistic impulses seem to have evolved into little more than a new set of dumb leisure pursuits that engage in social media as a means to satisfy a silent, dirigible “revolution” of dispossession. Yet as the second wave of recession arrived, Britain is being stifled once again by coordinated, counter-intuitive rebelliousness against those that meet the shaky criteria of solvency.

From the recent reports on Britain’s riots, it seems that the dispossessed aim to get what they want by burning and looting as some kind of parlour game. But just maybe the riots are really a token gesture against a growing police state and perceived institutionalised theft that is viewed as so objectionable.

The “rich” in this context, both political and economic, have once too often been found colluding with each other to get their paws in honey jar, then acquitting themselves and absolved of all wrongdoing, while at the same time having the cheek to demand that the poor finance and forgive the corruption of excess.

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V9 Design and Build (http://www.v9designbuild.com) produce web design services in Bangkok, Thailand, including eCommerce and social media.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Social media and the Blackberry Riots

The introduction of Google’s recent Panda update changed its search engine algorithm with a view to diminishing a site’s ranking that provide “low-quality content”. The “Panda” update, as Google refers to it after a Google engineer, or the “Farmer” update, as Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land has been calling it because its apparent target is content farms, has been received very cautiously by the SEO community.

As a result, some of the web’s most popular sites have seen a huge drop in traffic. This marks a major change in Google’s rankings, which has affected around twelve per cent of Google’s overall search results. The SEO industry is still digesting its impact and implications.

The RSS feed, a dynamically-generated summary of information or published news, either in the form of a blog or a dedicated news site, provides a glimpse of the article by providing a headline and, generally, the first few lines of the story’s introduction.

Some media sites have described the practice of using “authoritative” sites’ RSS feeds as “spam sites”. Not exactly, perhaps, but one could for example plug in the RSS feed from Search Engine Watch, as your own.

Quite simply, you can grab the feed url, paste it into feed2js.org, customise it, then grab the generated Javascript code and publish it on your website. As soon as new articles are added to the SEW website, and therefore the RSS feed, the content is then displayed on the “low-quality” website that has uses its content.

Wired.com asked, in an interview with Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow and the head of its core ranking team, and Matt Cutts of Google’s Search Quality group specialising in search engine optimization issues: “How do you recognise a shallow-content site?” Singhal responded that it is “a very, very hard problem that we haven’t solved, and it’s an ongoing evolution how to solve that problem.”

Not perhaps very helpful but Matt Cutts went on to explain: “I think you look for signals that recreate that same intuition, that same experience that you have as an engineer and that users have. Whenever we look at the most blocked sites, it did match our intuition and experience, but the key is, you also have your experience of the sorts of sites that are going to be adding value for users versus not adding value for users. And we actually came up with a classifier to say, okay, IRS or Wikipedia or New York Times is over on this side, and the low-quality sites are over on this side. And you can really see mathematical reasons…”

Again, a bit opaque in its definition, but what Matt Cutts seemed to be referring to here is identifying the source. I doesn’t strike me as too difficult, given the date stamp on a story’s publication, but Google’s engineers say it’s a complex problem that is being addressed and so it must be thus. They are also “cautiously” applying it to mixed-quality sites, “because caution is important” according to Singhal.

Most of the sites Google have targeted in this update are labelled “content farms”, sites that extract data from other sites using automated tools. But what do these sites need to do to recover?  If a site’s pages are thin on content, built on copied content or have an excessive ad-to-content ratio, the chances are they have been affected by this update and changes need to be put in place.

But what exactly? In another article on SeoChat, it mentions Aaron Wall as having come up with a list of “defining characteristics” for “useful” content: the ability to pass a human inspection; not being a copy of another document, not being ad-heavy; being well-linked to externally; being created by a brand with a distribution channel that goes beyond the search engines; and not having a 100% bounce rate. Vanessa Fox, writing for Search Engine Land, recommended “removing low-quality pages or moving them to a different domain could help your rankings for the higher quality content.”

Last week we launched SEO South Africa. Coincidentally, Google had just announced that it will be launching a startup enterprise incubator in South Africa. The company, Umbono, a Zulu word for “vision” or “idea”, is to be based in Cape Town with the aim to support web- and mobile-based startups by offering them finances, local connections, offices, tutorials and mentorship, access to seed capital and angel investors.

The original design had the SEW feed on it to give visitors information on the SEO industry, but after reading about the Panda update it was quickly removed. Social networking and social media, it seems,  is not only here to stay but has subtly been reinforced as best practice SEM.

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V9 Design and Build has just launched SEO South Africa (http://www.seo-southafrica.com) to provide expert SEO services. We will endeavour to support the Umbono initiative, which we hope will be successfully rolled out.

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Social media and Google’s Panda update

Isn’t it somehow absurd that social media usurped tyranny in the Maghreb and the Middle East and that Facebook toppled Hosni Mubarak in the ten days that shook the world. Isn’t the real cause youth unemployment and the economic crisis aided by media?

As the protests sweeping through the Maghreb and the Middle East continue unabated, CNN cites the following reasons behind them:

In Tunisia, protesters complained about high unemployment, corruption, rising prices and political repression; in Egypt the complaints were about police corruption and abuses, lack of free elections and economic issues, including high food prices, low wages and high unemployment; in Libya, high unemployment fueled the protests, as have anti-Gadhafi groups; in Bahrain they demand the introduction of a constitutional monarchy and complain about discrimination, unemployment and corruption; in Yemen, high unemployment is fuelling much of the anger among a growing young population steeped in poverty; in Jordan, the economy has been hit hard by the global economic downturn and rising commodity prices, and youth unemployment is high; in Iraq, the protesters are angry about corruption, the quality of basic services, a crumbling infrastructure and high unemployment; in Algeria it’s about escalating food prices, high rates of unemployment and housing issues; and in Syria, opponents of the al-Assad government claim massive human rights abuses and an emergency law.

The common thread in all these protests across the region is steeped in high proportions of youth unemployment and corrupt, repressive regimes. And it looks likely that all these street-level Arab revolts, each having a slightly different origin but all sharing the common denominator of youth aspirations and unemployment, are a result of economic hardships and the power of new media to disseminate these events.

It was economic want and inequality as much as political repression that incited the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions. The converging effects of population growth, climate change and energy depletion have transpired to set the backdrop for this looming and inevitable crisis.

Add to this hydrocarbon energy depletion: in its World Energy Outlook for 2010, the International Energy Agency argued that conventional oil production worldwide probably peaked in 2006, and is now declining.

Official world oil reserves had been overstated by up to one-third – implying that we are on the verge of a major “tipping point” in oil production. Perhaps as early as 2015, the contribution of Middle East oil to world energy consumption could become negligible.

This all makes perfect sense, but a report titled “Social Media and Free Expression in the Arab World” argues that several months before the unprecedented popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and other countries of the region, “[people] were enabled by communication and citizen mobilisation via social media platforms – Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube — as well as mobile technology.”

Social media advocates seem to routinely and conveniently ignore the economics of the region and sternly point out that the “awakening of free expression that has now entered the body politic of Tunisia and Egypt and has helped break down the stranglehold of state-sponsored media and information monopolies in those countries.

“Indeed,” they say, “from Morocco to Bahrain, the Arab world has witnessed the rise of an independent vibrant social media and steadily increasing citizen engagement on the internet that is expected to attract 100 million Arab users by 2015. These social networks inform, mobilise, entertain, create communities, increase transparency, and seek to hold governments accountable. To peruse the Arab social media sites, blogs, online videos, and other digital platforms is to witness what is arguably the most dramatic and unprecedented improvement in freedom of expression, association, and access to information in contemporary Arab history.”

The Washington Post, in its article, “In the Middle East, this is not a Facebook revolution” contends that “the catchy notion” of a “Twitter Revolution” or a “Facebook Revolution” is being debated – and tweeted, of course – from Washington to Cairo and beyond.

While they argue that, “Few can deny that social media has enabled the most significant advance in freedom of expression and association in contemporary Arab history” and that, “during the protests, social media aggregated, disseminated and accelerated vital news and information,” the article concludes, “but in the end, Facebook and YouTube are tools – and tools alone cannot bring about the changes the world has witnessed in recent weeks…Deep-seated social ills – repression from the top and political and economic frustrations from below – are at the core of protests sweeping the Arab world, much as they have been in revolutions throughout history.

“So do not confuse tools with motivations. Thinking of this moment as a “Facebook Revolution” only demeans the challenges the protesters and populations are overcoming. Had Facebook or Twitter – or the internet itself – not been around, would the revolutions still have happened? With large segments of Arab populations unemployed, marginalised and feeling powerless to change their futures under authoritarian regimes that were increasingly out of touch, all the elements for upheaval were there; social media helped make the grievances all the more urgent and difficult to ignore.”

In 1452, with the aid of borrowed money, Gutenberg began his famous Bible project and printed two hundred copies. The printing press certainly initiated an “information revolution” on par with the internet today and printing could and did spread new ideas quickly and with greater impact. And there were revolutions as a result.
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V9 Design and Build (http://www.v9designbuild.com) produce tasteful web design in Bangkok, Thailand, including ecommerce shopping cart solutions, with functionality that allows owners to set up and maintain their online stores.

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Arab youth, social media and the tipping point

It is  being claimed throughout Google News that the fireworks that lit Cairo’s skies and the joyous tears of the protesters that ended 30 years of despotic power of President Hosni Mubarak, is all down to Facebook.

On Friday, President Hosni Mubarak stepped down as Egypt’s after widespread anti-government demonstrations. The country is now in the control of the armed forces. US President Barack Obama called Egypt an “inspiration”, and said that “Egypt will never be the same again”.

However, the advocates of social media quickly claimed victory for themselves, in that social media had “helped build an international community of support for the Egyptians” and was somehow instrumental in bringing about an end to Mubarak’s presidency.

Wael Ghonim, Google’s marketing manager, led the charge with: “They lied at us, told us Egypt died 30 years ago, but millions of Egyptians decided to search and they found their country in 18 days,” he wrote on Twitter, while a New York City-based digital strategist opined that: “Social media was a driving force in the revolution.” Apparently, Mr Ghonim dubbed it “Egypt 2.0″ in a cliche delivered in an interview to CNN.

Meanwhile, CompterWorld chimed in with the headline: “How Facebook Toppled Hosni Mubarak” and that in a battle with the dictator of the largest nation in the Middle East, “it took Facebook 18 days to help topple the Mubarak regime in Egypt”.

But doesn’t this sound all too obsessive? Not according to some, as ComputerWorld continued with its ruminations: “The significance of social media isn’t lost among political and military observers, as Facebook served as the key tool used by protesters to organise huge, effective protests.”

In another article from the same source, it seems as if another writer held the voice of the opposition to these far-flung claims in: “Is the role of social media in Egypt being overstated?” In this article he went on to explain that Facebook in Egypt is extremely small, about 5.2 million users, or less than 7 out of every 100, while only about 31% of Egyptians who have internet access have a Facebook account. So, a minority of educated Egyptians changed the face of a nation and brought about democracy. Hardly.

I had always thought that Facebook was merely a communications tool and not one that can claim to be the mastermind behind toppling repressive regimes. And while social media certainly played a dissenting role in disseminating information on the end of the Mubarak era to the rest of the world, and amplified what was going on, the idea that “the combination of Facebook, Twitter and mobile phones left Mubarak and his security forces powerless to stop the protests,” is simply too fantastic a statement to take it seriously.

Mr Ghonim, perhaps, was in a state of fevered intoxication when, in a conversation with CNN he claimed that, “Social media brought democracy, at least for now, to Egypt.” Democracy? But Egypt is in the hands of the military, if the mainstream media have any right of voice in this.

Robert Fisk, a staff writer for The Independent newspaper, who has been covering Egyptian political affairs since 1976, writes: “History may later decide that the army’s lack of faith in Mubarak effectively lost his presidency after three decades of dictatorship, secret police torture and government corruption.” He continues: “The chains which bound the military to the corruption of Mubarak’s regime were real. Are they to stand by democracy – or cement a new Mubarak regime?…As yesterday afternoon’s events proved all too clearly, it was the senior generals – who enjoy the luxury of hotel chains, shopping malls, real estate and banking concessions from the same corrupt regime – who permitted Mubarak to survive.”

Predictably, Mashable weighed in with: “Egyptian president steps down amidst groundbreaking digital revolution” and led into the piece with: “From the beginning, the revolution in Egypt was propelled by the use of social media…Subsequently, the government blocked Facebook and Twitter and eventually shut down internet access completely…For perhaps one of the first times in history, history itself has been recorded instantaneously, as reporters took to Twitter to share 140-character updates…Images of the turmoil spread around the world via Flickr and Youtube, too. Al Jazeera made its images available by a Creative Commons license and its work reached an even broader audience around the world.”

Well, perhaps, but the claims that social media has somehow usurped this tyrant and brought “democracy” to the Middle East, sounds to me just quaintly absurd.

V9 Design and Build (http://www.v9designbuild.com) produce tasteful web design in Bangkok, Thailand, including ecommerce shopping cart solutions, with functionality that allows owners to set up and maintain their online stores.

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Facebook rejoices at Mubarak departure?

A writer at LinkedIn posed the question: “Will businesses pay to have a social media consultant manage their Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc…In my opinion, most business owners don’t have a clue where to start regarding social media and mobile text advertising. Dan Hughes

Before we start with a precis of certain opinions on the subject, it may well be worth reading an article on The Guardian website, which headlined as: “Social networking under fresh attack as tide of cyber-scepticism sweeps US” where it is argued that: “The way in which people frantically communicate online via Twitter, Facebook and instant messaging can be seen as a form of modern madness, according to a leading American sociologist…A behaviour that has become typical may still express the problems that once caused us to see it as pathological,” MIT professor Sherry Turkle writes in her new book, Alone Together, which is leading an attack on the information age.” For the full report, see http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jan/22/social-networking-cyber-scepticism-twitter.

Now, getting back to the debate on LinkedIn, I think, besides the “pathological” desire to be “connected” even at the most enduring moments of one’s life that it is extremely rare for senior management to understand the benefits and economics of SEM in organic search and how it can lead to extended market reach and more customers.

Too much of the time they seem to take the view that to increase revenue, or in a recession to maintain it, they need to fall back on the reliance of traditional media. The result of this is that migration languishes and profitability targets stagnate. We somehow need to convince them otherwise, but I would estimate that only 10% of my clients actually have an understanding of the mechanics and involvement in successfully promoting social media campaigns. SEO is a tricky enough subject to convey, but social media?

Selecting random posts to comment on, maybe it would be useful to loosely define what “social media” actually is. Let’s assume it means article writing, blogging/RSS, social bookmarking, maintaining Facebook pages, posting tweets, engaging in forums and creating videos/podcasts.

There were a number of responses to this: “Paul wrote that the “consultant” only has experience at a “surface level at best” and that there is “little substance to their consultancy other than how to create a Facebook fan page and Twitter account.” This I would mainly hold as true as a “consultant” is not a Jack of all trades but a master of some. Calling oneself a self-proclaimed “social media consultant”, which I onerously do, is tantamount to saying that I am a “web designer” when I use designers to design, programmers to program, coders to code and animators to animate.

I can write, sure, but am I a journalist that can back up my arguments by unique industry quotes? I can write searchable headlines but I’m not a qualified headline writer. I also cannot shoot professional video or write music. A guy called Yoav agreed with this lack of substance when he said that tweets and posts “are not enough” and that clients need someone that will “drive high quality traffic to your business”. He doubted that the “social marketing consultant” is qualified to do this.

I would have to disagree with this at some level as most of the onsite blogs I produce often produce far more site traffic than the site itself. As to the broadening of enquiries, well I doubt that, although it does a site’s rankings no harm.

Another argued that the key for any social media consultant is relieve business owners of the tasks “since they simply do not have the time”. Let’s add to that understanding, resources, commitment and ability. There’s a whole spectrum of content running in the social media construct, and it requires almost other-worldly skills to fully introduce its benefits to senior management when they offer opposition due to “the bottom line”.

This, of course, leads us on to money. Kate thought the “biggest obstacle” to social media consulting is being able to “prove the return on investment to managers”, and that “top executives [often] fail to understand the benefits”. Not only that but “ROI is very hard to measure and for that reason I think it will struggle as a stand alone outsourced marketing services function.”

Mashable wrote about the subject of ROI last year, saying: “Last month, we reported on a survey that found that 84% of social media programs don’t measure return on investment (ROI)…Companies and executives are finally beginning to really jump on the social media bandwagon, and that’s fantastic. However, for social media to fully work (for everyone), businesses and brands need to be able to evaluate the impact their social media use is having, both positive and negative. Measuring social media ROI isn’t impossible, but it can be difficult because many of the pieces that need to be evaluated are difficult to track.”

I’m not so sure this has changed that significantly and I think we need to be far clearer about what we mean by a “social media consultant” in that it defines a myriad of diverse skills. What I agree is the “biggest obstacle” is to convince management is that it’s not only ROI we are measuring but disseminating social messages and interacting with customers about products and services. This, I would argue, is achieved via distinct media that all comes within the ambit of the all-encompassing term “social media”.

My understanding of social media is just that, of communicating, rather than relying on mere economics alone. It is a new paradigm not exclusively modelled on the profit motive. That’s advertising’s job. But back to the original question: “Will businesses pay to have a social media consultant manage their Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.” An unqualified “yes” if the consultant knows their subject

But hold on a minute, let’s just take an extreme and hypothetical case of a company, PestStopper, that wants to engage in a social media experiment and is selling electronic rat killer online. We know that their extermination methods are top-notch but we also know that their English and the description of their product is shocking.

You are now employed to write a press release about PestStopper’s new and hyper-efficient RatKiller 3.0. There is no brochure to accompany the release and little can be gleaned from their website. So, you research other rat killing products on the web and make a stab at a press release. You post it on social media sites. Then, you set up a Facebook fan page. You post a brief summary about the company and its product. But who would wish to be a fan? And when you tweet, who will follow you?

There would probably be no issue following a company on Twitter that sells cute puppies, as is the case with ZeitGeistNews with 4,166 followers, but a company that sells electronic rat killer?

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V9 Design and Build (http://www.v9designbuild.com) produce tasteful web design in Bangkok, Thailand, including ecommerce shopping cart solutions, with functionality that allows owners to set up and maintain their online stores.

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Is there a market for a social media consultant marketing RatKiller 3.0?

The WikiLeaks releases has sparked a push for greater control of the internet and the setting up a global “working group” to “harmonise” global efforts to regulate it and are pushing for censorship. Is Assange the ‘patsy’ or is it just a conspiracy?

Wikileaks has given the cables in full to five media groups, including the New York Times and Guardian newspapers, and ever since they started to break talk has mostly been ambivalent at best.

I have read a wry smile or two into his antics, some with misplaced admiration, others like Max Hastings who headlined his opinion piece “This megalomaniac sleazeball embodies the nightmares we face in the anarchic age of the internet” but nothing quite stopped me in my tracks as much as when I read Assange’s claim that if the US succeeded in extraditing him from Britain or Sweden, there was a “high chance” of him being killed “Jack Ruby-style”.

Not that I remember but Jack Leon Rubenstein, who changed his name to Jack Ruby in 1947, was an American nightclub operator of The Carousel club in Dallas, Texas, and was convicted of the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963.

Jack Ruby’s statement to reporters after he has been permitted a new trial read: “Gentlemen, I want to tell the truth, but I cannot tell it here. If you want a fair shake out of me, you have to take me to Washington…When I mentioned about Adlai Stevenson, if he was vice president there would never have been an assassination of our beloved President Kennedy.” Asked if he would explain that statement, Ruby continued: “Well the answer is the man in office now”. That man was Lyndon B Johnson.

Before her death on 22nd June 22 2002, author and lecturer Robert Gaylon Ross conducted an 80-minute interview with Madeleine Duncan Brown, who claimed she had been the mistress of US President Lyndon B. Johnson for more than two decades. From that discussion (available on YouTube) she said that LBJ told her at the time: “Those SOB’s will never embarrass me again”. It is said by some that this is the biggest smoking gun on JFK there is.

There’s no hard evidence to suggest that Jack Ruby was the “patsy”, but it is interesting that numerous people say they saw Lee Harvey Oswald at Ruby’s club, The Carousel, weeks before assassination. In an article by Don Fulsom, he states that MC and magician-ventriloquist Bill Demar publicly identified Oswald as a recent patron. Comedian Wally Weston, who preceded Demar, also claimed Oswald was at the Carousel “at least twice” before the assassination.

Ruby and Oswald could well have been part of this conspiracy; and Ruby could have been activated to kill Oswald after Oswald’s arrest. This could be what Oswald was indicating when he insisted “I’m a patsy” and it could also have been what Ruby was referring to when he declared, “I have been used for a purpose”. Maybe Private Manning and Julian Assange feel the same way?

Bring in Private First Class Bradley E. Manning, 23 years of age. Manning enlisted in the US Army in 2007 and became an intelligence analyst in Iraq, sifting through classified information. He was arrested and charged with the unauthorised use and disclosure of classified information and is now being held in solitary confinement and faces a court martial. The BBC reported that Wikileaks has a cache of 251,287 cables sent by US diplomatic staff at its disposal. Julian Assange claims he has never met Bradley Manning.

Manning is said to have tracked down and communicated with Adrian Lamo, a well-known former computer hacker in the US, who he thought would help him get information out. He was also said to have boasted that he had used blank CDs to download classified information while pretending to be listening to Lady Gaga. Wikipedia describes Adrian Lamo as a “threat analyst” and “government informant” known principally for breaking into a series of high-profile computer networks including the New York Times, Yahoo! News, and Microsoft.

Alongside all this, Australia IT News has reported that because of the WikiLeaks releases it has sparked a push for greater control of the internet and that it is considering setting up a global “working group” to “harmonise” global efforts to regulate the internet and are pushing for censorship. It also said that the UN is “mulling over” its internet regulation options and that it is considering whether to set up an inter-governmental working group to regulate the internet.

Seen by some as conspiratorial, at a meeting in New York last Wednesday, “representatives from Brazil called for an international body made up of government representatives that would attempt to create global standards for policing the internet — specifically in reaction to challenges such as WikiLeaks…India, South Africa, China and Saudi Arabia appeared to favour a new possible over-arching inter-government body.”

However, this is not strictly as scary as it sounds, as the Brazilian delegate stressed “that this should not be seen as a call for a ‘takeover’ of the internet,”; it was, I believe, meant to wrest control from the current US regulators such as ICANN.

This has aroused the suspicions of the Conspiracists though, as in one recent blog it says: “Something about the entire affair just doesn’t add up…that is the crux of the problem for the global elite. For as long as there is freedom of speech they cannot control the content of the internet and that means they can’t hide their dirty laundry. If you really want to know the truth behind anything just follow the money trail.”

The argument being made here is that a “shadowy” family, the Rothschilds, wants the internet strictly controlled and have used WikiLeaks as a cover with “patsy” Assange working on their behalf.

The Rothschild family is of German- Jewish origin that established European banking and finance houses from the late eighteenth century and that during the 19th century it possessed by far the largest private fortune in the world. This family, demand the conspiracists, are behind the WikiLeaks facade and have put together a plan to regulate and control the internet.

After all, they say, the House of Rothschild bought Reuters news service in the 1800s and also bought the Associated Press, the two largest wire services in the world. The family is said to own trillions of dollars.

Yahoo!, amongst many other citations, published that on 4th June 1963, President John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order No. 11110 that returned to the US government the power to issue currency, without going through the Federal Reserve, a private bank believed to be in the control of the Rothschilds family.

Kennedy’s order gave the Treasury the power “to issue silver certificates against any silver bullion, silver, or standard silver dollars in the Treasury.” This meant that for every ounce of silver in the Treasury’s vault, the government could introduce new money into circulation. After Kennedy was assassinated, just five months later, no more silver certificates were issued. The Executive Order was never repealed by any US President and is still valid.

If the State Department really felt that the WikiLeaks operation was a serious threat to national security, or even a serious embarrassment politically, why haven’t they shut it down completely? The WikiLeaks affair has become a dramatic story line on the global mass media stage. And the secrets keep being published but nothing decisive is being done.

Reading between the lines some commentators are pointing to a Cyber Terrorism Act along the lines of the “terrorism” acts. In a Google Group on activism, one line goes so far as to say: “Websites will simply be seized, without fanfare, and that’s already been happening, under the logo of Homeland Security.”

WikiLeaks is being dubbed by some as the 9/11 of the internet, and posted on some sites with the words: “The leaks themselves are an inside job, just like the Twin Towers, with the leaks carefully selected to avoid anything really damaging, or anything embarrassing…And just as they didn’t scramble the interceptors, they didn’t close down the WikiLeaks site…Such things are always done for a purpose.”

Well search me as to the truth but surely there is certainly “something” that doesn’t add up.

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Is Wikileaks the 9/11 of the internet with ‘patsy’ Assange duped Jack Ruby-style?

Fittingly perhaps, at Googleplex there is a bronzed T-Rex skeleton nicknamed Stan, which is said to remind them to not become a digital dinosaur. But as EU regulators are set to probe Google for manipulating search results, the Eurozone nears extinction.

Mashable wrote of Googleplex: “One of the most arresting is surely the gigantic T-Rex skeleton — nicknamed “Stan” after a “real” dino found nearby — that looms menacingly at Googlers in Mountain View.” Another account of the gigantic T-Rex ventures that Messrs Brin and Page brought him home as homage to the previous occupants, who were said to have helped Steven Spielberg animate the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.

The story of Stan, the Tyrannosaurus Rex, began 65 million years ago in the heart of what is known today as North America. By studying the earth, along with fossil bones and plants, scientists have pieced together a picture of what life was like when this massive carnivore walked the Earth. In Stan’s world there were crocodiles, flying reptiles, large lizards and small mammals, along with a host of other dinosaurs.

When Stan was old enough, he left the family group and fought many battles. Bringing down his prey afforded Stan not only the opportunity to dine, but also the possibility of injury and competition. And by studying “pathologies” in the bones, scientists surmise that the T-Rex scuffled for territory, fought over food, and engaged in other behaviors similar to today’s carnivores.

Last week, European Union regulators were set to probe whether Google “scuffled for territory” by “manipulating its search results to stifle competition, funnel more traffic to its own services and protect its global stranglehold of the online search market.”

By far the largest carnivore in its environment, Stan was an “apex predator”, preying upon hadrosaurs and ceratopsians, although some experts have suggested he was primarily a scavenger. Tyranno means “tyrant”, sauros “lizard” and the species Tyrannosaurus Rex (“rex” meaning “king” in Latin), sheds some evolutionary evidence on the symbiotic  relationship between Stan’s skeleton and “today’s carnivores”.

The European Commission’s formal investigation into Google’s business practices could potentially result in billions of dollars in fines. In the recent case of Microsoft, Europe’s antitrust slapped the company with around $2 billion, and a further $1.4 billion on Intel Corp, in fines.

The issue could boil down to whether “Google has a right to program its search engine the way it wants or whether it is abusing the market power it has accumulated by processing about two out of three search requests made worldwide.”

But let’s take a look at the EU itself, which is now facing three profoundly disturbing scenarios: fiscal union, debt restructuring and Eurozone break-up. Against a backdrop of discord and hesitation among its most influential members, European Union leaders held a summit last week to deal with the growing threat to their common currency, the euro.

On Thursday, Spain was forced to offer significantly higher interest rates at a debt auction. Bond markets fell across Europe. So far the EU has failed to halt the spread of the turmoil as its members are expected to raise $2 trillion of debt. Read Germany. Now, Europe risks triggering the unthinkable: the extinction of the euro.

This week the Economist noted that: “Google has been able to afford such flights of fancy thanks to its amazingly successful online search business. This has produced handsome returns for the firm’s investors, who have seen the company transform itself in the space of a mere 12 years from a tiny start-up into a behemoth with a $180 billion market capitalisation that sprawls across a vast headquarters in Silicon Valley known as the “Googleplex”, an area near to where Stan used to live.

But the alpha male of the unorthodox is now faced with two major challenges: the first is to ponder whether Europe will go under while negotiating with the regulators; the second is how Google will address the issue of sourcing new growth as it is still heavily dependent on its search-related advertising model.

In words that Stan would have been abjectly proud of, Steve Ballmer, the boss of Microsoft, “derided” Google for being “a one-trick pony” but whose apologist “two-ageing ponies”, the archaic Windows operating system and Office, are those I am at this moment grappling with on a friend’s PC. I can feel Tourette’s coming on strongly again, I fear.

Microsoft aside, is it then fair to write Google off for its innovative deficiencies when the likes of social networks such as Facebook, which has seen traffic to its site surpass it earlier this year, and when apps are being offered by Apple in search without the use of a web browser? The Economist notes: “Google recently clashed publicly and caustically with Facebook over the latter’s data practices, warning potential users that the social network had become ‘a data dead end’.” Ouch!

Other barriers are being erected too, such as media companies that are now rethinking their policy of licensing content to Google, and television producers now wary of supplying programming to new internet-enabled television services such as Google TV.

While writing this, I came across an interesting comparative I read years ago while working for an African magazine in London. It is a novel by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, “Things Fall Apart”. This is a story of Okonkwo, a great man in his home of Umuofia, who began building his social status by defeating a great wrestler, propelling him into society’s eye.

Because of his great esteem, Okonkwo was selected by the elders to be the guardian of Ikemefuna, a boy taken prisoner. For three years the boy lived with Okonkwo’s family and he grew fond of him. Then the elders decided that the boy must be killed.

Shortly after Ikemefuna’s death, things begin to go wrong for Okonkwo and when he accidentally killed someone at a ritual funeral ceremony, he and his family were sent into exile for seven years to appease the gods. While Okonkwo was away in exile, white men began coming to Umuofia and they introduced their religion. As the number of converts increased, the foothold of the white people grew beyond their religion and a new government was introduced.

Now, with Greece and Ireland under the virtual stewardship of the EU and the IMF and Portugal threatened with a similar fate, there is a growing recognition that policy-makers are running out of options. Spain is also in jeopardy due to unknown losses in its banking system and even Italy and Belgium are coming under pressure in the bond markets.

As the Economist points out, “This is not happening in a vacuum. As Europe tries to sort out its economic problems, China, India and other countries are on the rise, providing tougher competitive challenges. Because of that, the European social model has to be reformed radically to increase competitiveness.”

Across the Atlantic, Google could also suffer from government threats against companies that are perceived to have violated users’ privacy online. If so, it will be more difficult to carry on “minting money from ads”. And this month, America’s Federal Trade Commission said it favoured a plan to allow consumers to choose whether or not their web-surfing habits are tracked by others.

In a statement last Tuesday, Google reiterated its belief that it hasn’t done anything wrong. But if the Commission finds that Google has abused its position it could levy a fine of up to 10 per cent of its revenue, or $2.4 billion, based on its 2009 earnings figures.

During the spring of 1987, amateur paleontologist Stan Sacrison was exploring outcrops near the town of Buffalo, South Dakota, when he came across a large pelvis weathering out of a sandy cliff face 100 feet above the prairie.

During that summer, Stan spent his free time attempting to uncover what was obviously the skeleton of a large dinosaur. One serious injury left it with a broken neck — and probably terrible headaches. But the most interesting wound was a hole at the back of its skull, which is a perfect match for a tooth from the lower jaw of another T-Rex. Although wounded, it  lived to fight another day.

V9 Design and Build (http://www.v9designbuild.com) produce tasteful web design in Bangkok, Thailand, including ecommerce shopping cart solutions, with functionality that allows owners to set up and maintain their online stores.

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Symbiotic relationship between Google, the EU and dinosaurs

In “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” by Charles Mackay, he treated many psychic states as that of the economically hackneyed word of today, “random”; the new bubble meme of demographic herds.

Will Self postured in an article for the New Statesman in 2009 that the word “random” has become a “nonce phrase” and ventured that ever since the credit crunch it registered with him that the word “random” has insinuated itself into British vocalisation by responding to the universal, but imperfectly acknowledged, awareness that it was bankers’ willingness to accept systematically flawed calculations of risk that led to the near-collapse of the Western financial system. “Random,” he asserts, has resurged like a talismanic word in a form of prayer.

While European banks are busily extending loans to bankrupt states on the basis that “they cannot go bankrupt”, bailouts have been issued to European governments like the burgeoning underclass of celebrity; as Greece and Ireland receive their billions, Portugal and Spain are under pressure to request even more.

And this has led some observers to note that the whole financial system seems to be tottering on the precipice, with Bloomberg predicting that as the global financial crisis moves on to Spain, the “big elephant” will spell Europe’s conclusive financial chapter over.

At the same time as the random meme takes hold of the instability in the Eurozone, it is causing the value of silver to spike, according to CNBC. A Manhattan coin dealer admitted: “This is probably the strongest demand there’s been in the last 25 years for silver,” as gold is now so expensive.

There is also talk of Belgium and Italy “being in danger”, and that if France and Germany continue to extend these “guarantees” they’ll get sucked into the maelstrom of the damned.

In “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” there is a history of such national follies, such as England’s South Sea Bubble and Holland’s Tulip Frenzy. The Scottish historian Charles Mackay observed: “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.” And that “money, again, has often been a cause of the delusion of the multitudes. Sober nations have all at once become desperate gamblers, and risked almost their existence upon the turn of a piece of paper.”

These words take on their own peculiarity when one looks at the Dutch tulip mania of the early seventeenth century. At the time, the Dutch aristocracy was extremely wealthy, while the average Dutch worker in the 1600s made about 150 florins annually; a rare tulip bulb, however, could easily be sold for 1,000 florins. Tulips were worth more than gold.

But then the market crashed because the unregulated futures market or derivatives market for tulip bulbs had skyrocketed. Tulip bulbs had bubbled and the market abruptly collapsed. It was decreed that futures in tulips could no longer be traded as an investment, but only as an actual product in the marketplace. How strangely familiar.

Among the crowd syndrome of bubbles and financial manias, as described by Mackay, are the South Sea Company bubble of 1711–1720 and the Mississippi Company bubble of 1719–1720.

Bubbles had all seem so rare at the turn of the millennium, but the first recorded bubble case in England was that of the State Lottery in 1569. The South Sea Company had a monopoly in trade with South America, which underwrote English National Debt, which stood at £30 million. Shares immediately rose to 10 times their value; the country went wild and vast fortunes were made.

Then the bubble burst; stocks crashed and people all over the country lost all of their money, mostly the moneyed clergy, bishops and gentry, who lost their life savings. The whole country suffered a catastrophic loss of money and property. Suicides became a daily occurrence and the gullible mob, whose innate greed had lain behind this mass hysteria for wealth, demanded vengeance, much like it is today towards bankers in particular and elected governments (some unwittingly like the Obama’s inheritance of the global ponzi scheme) in general. Socially, the South Sea Company bubble caused frantic bankers to throng the lobbies of parliament until the Riot Act was read to restore order.

Will Self referred in another of his articles to The Stockholm Syndrome. When landing at the airport one day he observed guys with mobiles phones that were “either talking to Wotan or were schizophrenics”. He could not tell which. What is it nowadays with civil society, he mused, that anyone with a portable phone now believes they have an inalienable right to “yatter on in public, at inordinate length and as loudly as a trombonist”? As an antidote to this random meme, when “deranged persons” begin to “Samsung-soliloquise”, he tries to bring them to their senses by reading aloud from Schopenhauer…” The mobile bubble; the communications centre of the insane.

About a year ago I read, dubiously now, that the only country ever to go bankrupt was Newfoundland. Now I see that Spain defaulted on its financial obligations seven times during the 19th century alone; Argentina’s bankruptcy in 2001 was caused by a run on the banks following a collapse of the country’s national currency; Germany has the dubious distinction of having gone bankrupt not once, but twice in recent memory, the first during in the 1920s as a result of losing World War I; Britain was bankrupt after World War II; and Russia went bankrupt in 1998, when the former communist country suffered the “ruble crisis”.

In J.P. Chaplin’s “Rumour, Fear and the Madness of Crowds”, on 24th August 1926, one of the worst riots in the history of New York erupted, with between sixty to eight thousand people involved. And the cause of these unruly legions in the heart of New York City was the dead body of Rudolph Valentino as he lay in state.

It is said that it was an outbreak of mass hysteria in an era celebrated for excess and exhibitionism. In his words: “There seemed to be no limit to human ingenuity in contriving masterpieces of sheer stupidity.” The riots today seem so redolent of this one event.

Similarly, the exaggerated newspaper reports of wild grief and the long delay between the actor’s death and his departure for Hollywood added fuel to the fires of madness in conjunction with panic and fear.

Today, the financial auditorium, the false sanctity of grief, is fuelling another random meme. And in the words of Shakespeare, “the blind monster, with uncounted heads, the still discordant, wavering multitude” social media would do well to abandon its interactions on this subject lest it actively drives dialogue into fear and panic into the random meme.

John Sylvester is the media director of V9 Design & Build (http://www.v9designbuild.com) and an expert in search engine optimization and web marketing strategies.

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Twitter ye not, Europe is but another random meme

#twitterjoketrial is one of many currently trending topics on Twitter, on how the UK justice system is convicted people for tweeting. The Guardian wrote last week that arrests, convictions and libel claims look like tweeting has lost its innocence.

First up is a conviction passed to Paul Chambers, for “menace” after he made a joke on Twitter about blowing up an airport. This is what he said: “Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!” This was sent to a mother in Northern Ireland he met online. It was said to be a “menacing threat to security”.

For those that don’t know, Robin Hood is a heroic outlaw in English folklore, known for “robbing from the rich and giving to the poor”. And no, there is no airport named after him. To my knowledge Sherwood Forest, where he is supposed to have lived in Nottinghamshire, is far too remote to warrant an airport. He may have been a menace to the Sheriff years ago, but a threat to national security?

Then earlier last week, the high court in the UK was uncomfortably discombobulated with the question of whether a tweet about match-fixing in cricket was defamatory. Libel judge Mr Justice Tugendhat was said to have “needed the help of two experts” to understand what a tweet actually is, how it is “distributed” and exactly what to call “individuals who have received in the jurisdiction a direct and automatic communication of the tweet from the defendant”, which is long-winded legalese for “followers”.

In this case, an influential man in Indian cricket accused a New Zealand cricketer of match fixing. He was sued and the Indian cricketer argued in court that “the case could not proceed because no one in England had actually read his tweet”.

In the former case, Stephen Fry was first on the scene to decry the verdict of Paul Chambers and tweeted the offer to pay his fine, which stands at £3,600 when combined with prosecution costs. “My offer still stands,” he said. “Whatever they fine you, I’ll pay.”

Again, early last week, a Conservative councillor tweeted what he only admits to as “a glib comment”: “Can someone please stone Yasmin Alibhai-Brown to death?” This was in response to the writer’s criticism of Prime Minister David Cameron’s performance in China.

A party spokesman then said the rogue councillor had been “suspended indefinitely” over the alleged tweet and that “language of this sort is not acceptable and as a result Gareth Compton’s membership of the Conservative party has been indefinitely suspended pending further investigation.”

For the rather timid joke about Robin Hood airport, a comedian was said to be “rendered gag-less” at the news and commented: “An astonishing, ludicrous result in #twitterjoketrial. A victory for crushing literalism and scaremongering by the judiciary…So that’s the banning of sarcasm, irony, sub-text and any of the other subtleties of language that we use…” Another comedian said of the trial, with which I agree: “Flippancy is important”.

Now this is where it all gets very messy. While freedom of expression groups, like Index on Censorship, say the law is being used to “stifle [online communication] through unsuited legislation”, the legal profession is sending its senior lawyers to a “Tweet School” where they can learn how to use it. Alibhai-Brown said she regarded the “stoning” comments as incitement to murder.

Meanwhile, back in the “real world”, The Sun newspaper published a story about “fanatical Muslims” burning a giant poppy in an Armistice Day “outrage” when a 40-strong radical group Islam4UK screamed insults about Britain’s war dead during the nation’s two-minute silence last Thursday, demanding Sharia law be imposed in the UK.

And that’s the point where flippancy, libel and lawyers attending “Tweet School” all get lost in the legal haze of Twitter trials — the alleged innocence of the lost.

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#twitterjoketrial: Stephen Fry defends Twitter joke in the innocence of the lost

Google is to give $5 million dollars to organisations trying to find innovative ways to continue the practice of journalism, while estimates of traffic to News International sites’ front pages has declined by 43% and the number viewing stories by 88%.

Google, having strained relations with many US newspaper publishers, has donated $US5 million to encourage innovation in digital journalism. Today Nielsen estimated the number of UK web users going beyond News International’s front pages to their paywall in order to access subscription content is around 362,000 362,000 monthly users. They also estimates that before the paywall went up, content from Murdoch’s papers averaged 3.1 million unique monthly visitors. It is now only 1.78 million with just over 20% going on to access subscription content.

TechCrunch published today that Google executives have felt so bad about the newspaper industry’s malaise and blaming itself for all that’s gone wrong, it intends to give away $5 million dollars. But on the proviso that only those finding “innovative ways to continue the practice of journalism” will receive the funds.

Google will be giving away $2 million to the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, with $1 million going to the Knight News Challenge and $1 million going towards continuation of US Journalism grant making. The remaining $3 million will be spent internationally.

I can’t really see that Mr Murdoch will be one of the many beneficiaries and he has in the past accused them of “stealing” his content and having announced: “The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content. But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators — the people in this hall — who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph.” Google, content kleptomaniacs?

It is worth quoting Google in full on Techcrunch’s donations story: “Journalism is fundamental to a functioning democracy. So as media organisations globally continue to broaden their presence online, we’re eager to play our part on the technology side — experimenting with new ways of presenting news online; providing tools like Google Maps and YouTube Direct to make websites more engaging for readers; and investing heavily in our digital platforms to enable publishers to generate more revenue.” Not to mention the $5 million dollar tax write-off.

And while in this guilty frame of mind, Google has plans to release a micro-payment system later this year that links to paid newspaper content directly from search results called Newspass, in another attempt to save the newspaper industry. Newspass will provide news organisations with micro-payments for direct links to their properties from Google News.

Basically the system works by Google News providing both paid and unpaid results. If a user chooses to click on the paid results, they will be charged a fee via Google Checkout; if they don’t want to use Google checkout they won’t be able to read the content.

In a report by CNN, Italian newspaper La Repubblica is reporting that Google is already piloting the service with publishers in Italy and has been contacting Italian newspapers. Henrique de Castro, a Google vice president, said in a translated statement, “Google wants to be partners, not competitors, with the newspaper industry.”

Google will launch “an integrated payment system” allowing users to buy news content with just “one click” and Newspass would allow publishers to use a single infrastructure for web, mobile and tablet computers to monetise their content. Consumers will have a single log-in across a multitude of news sites that would be flexible enough to accommodate various kinds of payments, including long-term subscriptions and one-time micropayments.

Murdoch’s paywall initiatives seems to have had a predictable result: that of falling subscribers. The BBC argues that the number of people buying online subscriptions at The Times is very low, meaning much of the audience behind the paywall, that 362,000 of which Nielsen says it is confident, are either print subscribers or people who have free access, and “if only a fraction of people are paying online, that suggests that the 362,000 could be off and that the real number is far lower.”

Murdoch’s paywall idea for news sites has been highly controversial and there has always been justified scepticism about its ability to work: only a handful of specialist financial publications around the world have got it more or less right, but for mainstream, general news, paywalls have not been a success.

In the early 2000s many online publishers tried to put their content behind a paywall, but were forced to retreat in the face of what became known as the “web 2.0″ era, which saw a tidal wave of user-generated content and blogging.

Now, driven by a slowdown in advertising, a financial crisis and an inability to make real money out of online advertising, the paywall debate has resurfaced with vigour, with much of the noise coming from Rupert Murdoch. The Times controversially implemented its paywall earlier this year and ever since the reports talk of plummeting readership figures.

Google’s initiative does not follow the Murdoch’s approach, which involves individual publications creating their own bespoke paywall and payment system. This, it is argued, contributed to the failure of multiple paywalls because it constitute a barrier to entry for users.

The Times’ solo paywall attempt was just repeating the mistakes of the past, it seems. Google’s Newspass is a no-brainer: it proposes a one-stop solution and, as a neutral service, offers the best chance of a paywall system working as it is one of the few internet players able to implement such a broad-ranging initiative.

Google argues that it drives traffic to newspaper websites and newspapers can easily prevent the web search engine from accessing their content if they choose to do so. This unprecedented charitable donation will not be going anywhere near News Corp’s bank account though.

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V9 Design and Build (http://www.v9designbuild.com) produce tasteful web design in Bangkok, Thailand, including ecommerce shopping cart solutions, with functionality that allows owners to set up and maintain their online stores.

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Google’s $5m charitable donation to the newspaper industry will surely not include Murdoch