Now here’s a phenomenon worthy of a little reflection: Ello, the new advertising-averse social network that sank without trace after its launch in March is suddenly attracting signups faster than the chomp-through rate in a glutton’s doughnut-eating contest. How come?

It seems that the big players in cyberworld are becoming very twitchy about public perceptions of their somewhat lackadaisical attitude to personal security: last week, Google announced that its new Android “L” OS will feature automatic data encryption built-in just a day after Apple announced that its new iOS 8 shields users data with passwords that Apple can’t decrypt (even if they’re confronted with a court order).

If you’ve got a massive software line but find that its historic success doesn’t fit easily with new mobile trends, what do you do? Answer: make it fit. Well, to be more precise, provide the hardware that’ll make it fit. Like a physical keyboard for mobile devices.

Wall Street has just witnessed the biggest stock market launch in history in the form of the Alibaba IPO. The Chinese internet behemoth (a mixture of Amazon and eBay) raised a record-breaking $25 billion (£15 billion) and saw its share price catapult by more than 38 percent: bankers set the initial price at $68 but by Friday, clamorous investor demand ensured that this zoomed to $92.70. It slipped to just below $90 on Monday, but that was still 35 percent above the initial price.

Having the right keywords and phrases incorporated into your website is of vital importance, as they maximise the chances of individuals finding your website via a search engine. An optimised website not only uses well targeted keywords that capture and reflect back the visitor’s search terms and language, but also groups those keywords intelligently, making the best use of groups of keywords to create extremely topical, on theme sections of a site.

On 1^st September, we reported that the UK’s most senior judge (Supreme Court President Lord Neuberger) was making dark intimations about a major overhaul of privacy law. He said we needed to keep up with the ever-shifting dynamics of information exchanged on the internet.

Google Authorship is dead. Long live Google Authorship. That may sound like pure flapdoodle, but claims of Authorship’s literal death may be premature.

There probably aren’t many webmasters and content creators out there who would regard a new Penguin as a good Christmas present; but the signs are that the nervously anticipated Penguin 3.0 will be with us before Santa boards his sleigh this year.

Are the days of organic reach on social media coming to an end? A growing brigade of digital marketers are leaning toward this view, and not without reason.

If a picture paints a thousand words, how come it’s such a drag to send a jovial GIF to your friends? You know the drill: you get a message from a friend asking if you’d like to meet for a Starbucks and you want to reply with a quirky GIF. Then the hassle begins: you have to open your browser, hunt down the GIF that fits best, copy it, then paste it to mail or message. You might just as well text “Yep” in words.