Picture this: you’re at a friend’s birthday party, the celebrations are going riotously well and everyone’s buzzing with buoyant sociability. You and other party-goers decide to take snaps of the goings on with your smartphones to preserve the magic and share it with others.

Microsoft and Google are licking their wounds after the two Goliaths took a tumble in the US equities market.

Every now and then, laws paved with good intentions backfire spectacularly and end up somewhere else entirely, as Spain is just about to discover. A new copyright law, which is scheduled to be ratified in January, has prompted Google to pull Google News from Spain: never before has the search-and-advertising behemoth withdrawn the service from a country.

Were there any noteworthy trends in 2014 for those of us immersed in the world of creating digital content? As the year draws to a close and Santa gets ready for his busiest day, Digiday journalist Lucia Moses identifies five trends across the pond:

Well, there’s been a lot of discussion out there in Webmasterland after Google belatedly confirmed that it had indeed pushed out a Penguin update on Black Friday weekend, of all times. But how has this slow, ongoing rollout played out globally? SEO expert Philip Petrescu has pulled some interesting bits of data together.

There’s a big problem emerging for social media companies (and tech firms more generally): they don’t really know how to respond to Government buck-passing and pressure on the one hand, and rising demands for privacy and data security on the other.

You don’t have to be a genius to work out that Tumblr, as the internet’s fastest growing social media platform (November’s Global Web Index revealed its user base had grown by 120 per cent in six months compared to Facebook’s 2 per cent), it’s got A LOT of content to wade through. 214 million blogs and 100 billion published posts, if you’re counting. Which is probably why it’s decided to make finding liked content a lot easier with a new discovery feature: introducing Tumblr’s new “Explore” button.

With diverging views on data privacy emerging between the UK and pretty well the whole of the rest of the EU (Ireland excepted), the market in privacy-focused hardware is beginning to expand. And one example of this is the rise of the Blackphone, the world’s first privacy-optimised smartphone. When it launched earlier this year, it met with sell-out success almost immediately. And now it’s launching another world first: a privacy-focused app store.

There’s a big problem with internet advertising: more and more consumers are getting irked by pop-up ads while they’re trying to concentrate on their news feeds or video entertainment. But internet giants are fighting back with a range of measures, including legal action, to dissuade the rising use of ad blocking software.

The hopes of Google, Facebook and other US internet giants for a single, one-stop-shop data privacy watchdog in the European Union are heading toward the political toilet as several EU states back away from plans to set one up.