Has the world gone mad....and when I say world I mean the British media? I'm not condoning the actions of Russel Brand or Jonathan Ross, what they did went beyond an innocent prank and simply wasn't funny, but this morning I've woken up the front page outrage aimed at the pair. What's more, Gordon Brown has jumped into the furor blasting the pair, and Sky News informed me that the issue was likely to come up during Prime Minister's Questions this afternoon. With two wars, an economic crisis, an entertaining yet globally relevant US election, Tory sleaze etc is the outrage caused by this practical joke really reflective of its severity? I can't help but think it's all gone a bit to far a la Princess Di (oh no he di'n't). Perhaps Elton John should dust off his songbook. While I'm on the point of the media: On Sky News this morning, after Noel Gallagher blamed the decline of Top of the Pops for youth crime, its newspaper critic responded - "I don't know if it's true but it's a good point!" A good point indeed, particularly if you step out of the realm of reality. As the old saying goes...why let the facts get ...

So some of you will have noticed that the old blog hasn't been in its best state recently. Between work, a holiday and work I really haven't had time to show it the love and tenderness it deserves. But I am still here and remarkably have found 10 minutes to myself and thought I would post a note around a topic I was discussing yesterday on Twitter - The Great Drain Robbery, or, in non-Sun speak, the fact that Starbucks has been caught wasting millions of litres of water every day. I won't go into the story itself, you can read it here. What is interesting though is how quickly the flames of such a potentially damaging story have been doused. Yesterday this was a front page story and appeared across a number of nationals and online publications. Today though, not a whimper. More than that though, a quick search on Google News reveals less than 30 articles. On BlogPulse and the various Twitter trend trackers the story barely raises a squeak! I'm not going to judge Starbucks on this as I don't know the ins and outs of the issue however given how prevalent environmental issues are within today's media, their ...

This is a guest post by Alex, part of Hill & Knowlton’s Digital team in the UK. In Revolution Magazine this month Nike’s marketing director Simone Pestridge claims that “being prepared to take risks is the only way to create truly successful digital campaigns”. I couldn’t agree more. With every new business brief coming in asking for “digital” the online space is becoming more and more saturated with campaigns therefore to create cut through risks need to be taken which unfortunately for the client might not always be the cheapest. Nike have frequently taken huge risks in their campaigns but can be said to be one of the pioneers of digital marketing campaigns; from Nike id customising shoes online to the Joga Bonito campaign (consumers were asked to submit videos of them receiving the ball from one side of the screen and passing on to the other). A recent Facebook poll has shown that Nike are associated with football then either adidas or Umbro despite their very high profile sponsorship campaigns. I also think it’s fair to say that traditional PR campaigns need to take larger risks as well. By pushing the brand outside of their comfort zone they can gain huge ...

BT, Virgin, Orange, Tiscali, BSkyB and Carphone Warehouse have all signed up to a new deal with the music industry in a bid to tackle piracy online. For now this means that thousands of ISP customers suspected of sharing music will receive letters asking them to stop. A small step in the right direction but in reality telling people to stop sharing music does nothing. People don't do it because they don't know it's wrong - they do it because the music industry has seen fit to charge consumers extortionate amount of money for music over the past 25 years! I refuse to pay for albums and singles but get around it by using the very good Napster (flat fee for unlimited listening). And with the likes of Pandora and Last.fm becoming more mainstream the music industry is fighting a losing battle. The solution is not to wag the finger at consumers or switch their internet connection off, which is what the music industry is pushing for. The crux of the issue is that the music industry has not adapted to changing consumer needs. Why pay £15 for an album when that same amount will give me to listen to unlimited music and ...

Friction.tv has today announced a two-way syndication deal with ePolitix.com to share news feeds, political analysis and online video debating (will video debating ever take off?) According to the press release, Friction.tv has over 600,000 monthly visitors, not bad given the state of British politics. This deal is a further attempt to spice up the halls of Westminster as they continue to be eclipsed by the remarkable mud-slinging we have seen in the race for the Whitehouse. Andy West, co-founder and Head of Partnerships and Content at Friction.tv commented: "Although Politics is among the most heavily debated topics on the site, we find that much goes unnoticed simply because people are often unaware on what's going on in Westminster. ePolitix has always been totally focused on reporting on the UK political agenda and so its news feeds and analysis are a great resource for our politically hungry audience. The aformentioned mudslinging reached new levels (or is it lows) today after The New Yorker published what it called a satirical (seriously) cartoon of Obama in full muslim dress fist-bumping his "terrorist" wife. Whilst I commend any effort to bring British politics to the masses, unless Friction.tv releases a video of Brown and Cameron engaged in a sadomasochistic Nazi orgy, politics here ...

In an act of unimaginable mercy, Viacom has bowed to public pressure and scaled down their request for personal information from Google/YouTube. Google can now provide anonymous but unique identifiers about their users rather than specific IP addresses. Good news for privacy advocates and those that scrambled manically to delete any evidence that they once watched South Park in the office.

So as I mentioned earlier I wanted to touch on the recent iPhone 3G launch which many are dubbing iPocalypse. I've gone with iPhocalypse (see what I did there). So Friday, the much hyped (rightly?) iPhone 3G hit UK shores and saw the inevitable queues outside O2 stores across the country. So far so good but remarkably Apple failed to deliver on the day, the problem was not so much stock (although they ran out within hours of stores opening) but the fact that those that did manage to get hold of them couldn't activate them due to a glitch on the iPhone website. This has largely been fixed now and the iPhone 3G can now be seen attached to ears near you. But what damage has this done to Apple and specifically the halo sitting above the iPhone? Well the immediate affect is very little, the iPhone is still being hailed a revolution in communication and those that have one are reaching new levels of smugness. Those without (me included) having to deal with the inevitable <br/><!--<br/> /* Style Definitions */<br/> p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal<br/> {mso-style-parent:"";<br/> margin:0cm;<br/> margin-bottom:.0001pt;<br/> mso-pagination:widow-orphan;<br/> font-size:12.0pt;<br/> font-family:"Times New Roman";<br/> mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";}<br/>@page Section1<br/> {size:612.0pt 792.0pt;<br/> margin:72.0pt 90.0pt 72.0pt 90.0pt;<br/> mso-header-margin:36.0pt;<br/> mso-footer-margin:36.0pt;<br/> mso-paper-source:0;}<br/>div.Section1<br/> {page:Section1;}<br/>--> jealousy. However longer term, Apple may feel the backlash. The ...

What a week for Apple and Google! Fresh from Viacom-gate that put the search giant at the heart of a privacy storm, Google this week was lambasted by none other than the Daily Mail for planning to roll out its Street View service in the UK. This is the extension to the widely used Google Maps that allows users to view maps at street level. Google hasn't admitted it plans to introduce Street View to the UK but vans with "Google" splashed across them carrying 20 external cameras driving around our major cities kind of gives the game away. What's interesting about this is the press reaction to Street View compared with when it launched Google Maps. That launch was vaulted as further online innovation - a step in the right direction, one that will benefit millions of people. So what's changed? Why hasn't Google's face blurring technology quelled any unrest around this forthcoming launch? Well for one the Viacom story has caused people to question just how anonymous they are online, soon our personal viewing habits (legal and illegal) will be picked over by a media giant. But also it shows how consumers are becoming much more aware of how far the ...