The British High Court has ruled that content site aggregators who re-publish extracts of content must have a licence for its use. In what could become a landmark ruling for the web content industry, the court decided that headlines and short extracts are in themselves literary work and are subject to the copyright act. </p> <p>The case was being brought by Meltwater, a content aggregator against the UK Newspaper Licensing Agency, a company jointly owned by the major UK newspaper groups that collects content licence fees.</p> <p>The development is yet another signal that the value of content on the web is rising. Clients of Purecontent should welcome the development as their unique content should start to stand out more as republished news and article feeds find their information sources cut off. Purecontent's news is custom written for each client by a network of journalists around the world.

Yesterday, the Online Information 2010 Conference kicked off, with a host of new exhibitors and organisations participating in the event. Key themes for this year include social media, content management and resources, library management, search solutions, ePublishing solutions, and going ?global?.</p> <p>Attracting over 9,000 visitors each year from around the world, amongst other things, the first day of the event saw a series of fascinating seminar sessions on topics related to marketing and social media ? an area in which UK businesses are lagging behind. In one such session, a speaker from Sift Group discussed how social media can be used more effectively as an advertising medium by moving away from banner ads and into community creation ? finding ways and developing content which will help businesses engage in customer interaction.</p> <p>Meanwhile the content management portion of the conference, hosted by Srishti Software, covered topics ranging from an overview of the web content market by a speaker from Real Story Group to monetising content ? strategy and execution, a session led by the Chief Technology Officer from Srishti Software.</p> <p>The Online Information Conference is the UK?s largest event devoted to the information industry. This unique event includes exhibitions of over 200 international exhibitors plus the extensive educational show floor seminar programme.</p> <p>This year, the Conference is being held from 30 November through 2 December at the Grand Hall, Olympia in London. Event sponsors include Europa.eu, ProQuest, OCLO, MarkLogic, Softlink, and Bureau Van DUK. New events highlighted this year include library systems, library security, and RFID solutions.

Amazon recently spent $500 million to acquire Quidsi Inc., the company that operates Soap.com, Diapers.com and BeautyBar.com, sites that do just as it says on the tin, sell soap, nappies and cosmetics.</p>

According to an article in the Washington Post, the US federal government is adopting a ?cloud first? policy, which will require federal agencies to use cloud-based solutions as standard, ?whenever a secure, reliable, cost-effective cloud option exists.? The change in focus is part of wider change that focuses on improving IT procurement.</p> <p>The news comes from Jeffrey Zients, the US federal government?s first chief performance officer, who states, ?Fixing IT is central to everything we?re trying to do across government. IT is our top priority.?</p> <p>Amongst the initiatives planned for launch over the next six months is the re-formation of oversight allowing agencies more budget flexibility in the development of programmes and the establishment of a career path for programme managers. It is expected that a detailed execution plan will be discussed in an open meeting held 9th December.</p> <p>"The government has been trying to do this for a long time," says Zients. "We finally clear out those obstacles and allow agencies to successfully apply the agile, modular development approach."</p> <p>In the meantime, as federal agencies continue in a major push web-forward, there is also a push for a reduction in the number of government data centres, with Vivek Kundra, a federal chief information officer, reporting that they are hoping to reduce the number (currently around 2,100) by at least 40%.</p> <p>Those in favour of the cloud first programme say that the move to web-based computing will make it simpler to consolidate data storage ? making it possible for agents to use networks, servers, and other equipment more efficiently.

Yesterday, Google announced their new personalised online shopping service, aptly named ?Boutiques.com?.</p>

Earlier this week, Facebook announced a new messaging service that it hopes will modernise messaging by allowing users to combine all of their communication channels into one system. </p>

According to a recent mystery shopping exercise conducted by ?the e-tailing group?, an e-commerce consulting company, most online retailers have yet to embrace mobile-friendly design, with counter-intuitive URLs prone to crashing and sites being difficult to navigate ? making it almost impossible to complete a transaction.</p> <p>Using 150 parameters in 13 product categories, e-tailing?s group of mystery shoppers visited 50 different m-commerce sites, with the average score being 4.5 out of 10 marks.</p>

A survey recently conducted in joint effort by Universiti Teknologi Mara Institute of Journalism Studies and Intelectasia, a public relations training company reveals that Malaysian journalists are still not keen on using social media at work.</p> <p>The survey was conducted between April and September 2010, covering the habits of 443 press members.</p> <p> 40.4% of those surveyed said they did not use Facebook for story ideas or research.<br /> 51.9% responded that they had never used Twitter for work purposes.<br /> Only 33.5% and 23.3% respectively of those who participated said that Facebook and Twitter were their preferred venue for discovering ideas and hearing pitches.</p> <p>It was also discovered that social media fared quite poorly as an avenue of communication between public relations professionals and the media ? a result mirrored in a recent UK survey. In fact 71.2% of surveyed journalists agreed that PR professionals did not understand the newsworthiness of social media while 50.4% said PR people have poor media relation skills.</p> <p>In addition to the use of social media, the survey also explored the journalists? use of RSS feeds and found that 48.1% had never used real time updates at all for work purposes. However, surprisingly enough, 68% said they did frequent blogs as an alternative source of news.</p> <p>"The survey concludes that compared to other countries like the United States, Malaysian press have yet to embrace social media tools in their work," said Kaur Dhillon, Intelectasia CEO.</p> <p>This is the first survey of its kind conducted in Malaysia.

Yesterday, Paul Chambers, a 27-year-old-man convicted of ?menace? after making a Twitter joke about blowing up an airport, lost his appeal. As the news from Doncaster reached Twitter, protest rang out, with many high-profile tweeters expressing their outrage. This includes popular Tweet personality Stephen Fry, who has offered to pay Mr Chambers fine.</p> <p>The tweet in question was as follows: ?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!? A woman in Northern Ireland who followed Chambers saw the tweet, found it to be menacing, and alerted authorities.</p> <p>While the Twitterverse has been alive with discussion under the hashtag #twitterjoketrial, Chambers himself has remained silent. However, Chambers friends and associates have not. His partner, to whom the offending tweet was aimed, posted: ?My battery is dying. We are gutted. It?s not the fine; this is stopping Paul getting a job and has ruined his life.? His solicitor went on to write, ?English law relating to freedom of expression is not in a good state.?</p> <p>Other high-profile Brits who found the verdict preposterous include comedian Dara O?Briain who wrote, ?An astonishing, ludicrous result in #twitterjoketrial. A victory for crushing literalism and scaremongering by the judiciary. Horrible.? He later added, ?So that?s the banning of sarcasm, irony, sub-text and any of the other subtleties of language that we use AS GROWN UPS.? Dr Who actor and director Barnaby Edwards brought the point home, tweeting ?30,000 complaints to the PPC: Jan Moir ?not guilty?. One joke tweet: Paul Chambers ?obviously menacing.?

According to a Press Release on PRNewswire, UPMC Health Plan in western Pennsylvania is set to offer its members the ability to interact through social media, including YouTube, Facebook, RSS feeds, LinkedIn and Twitter.</p> <p>"This provides us with another way of connecting with our members," said UPMC CEO and President Diane P. Holder.</p>