Well, it’s finally happened: as more and more publishers navigate the tricky path toward digitalising their content, and more and more consumers indulge their obsession with tablets, smartphones, online shopping and social media, the UK is poised to become the first country on the planet to divert over half of its advertising spend to digital media.

It couldn’t be true, could it? Google couldn’t really have pushed out a Penguin refresh that hit on Black Friday weekend of all times, could they? They’ve repeatedly insisted that they refrain from pushing major updates during busy holiday periods. So the strange search patterns that webmasters were noticing over the weekend must have been down to something else, right? A mistake or some peculiar bug maybe?

The Social Media Examiner recently reported that 92 per cent of marketers consider social channels crucial for their business. That’s a lot of people. But in our age of big data, ad-retargeting, in-app purchases and automated ad buys, are they in danger of overlooking something vital about social media? Like humans, maybe?

Now here’s an ironic turn of events: consumers who bought iPads so that they could access their news feeds and other digital content on a larger, easier-on-the-eye screen are reverting to iPhones in droves. Is Apple about to bring about the extinction of a newer product line via an older one?

According to The Verge, Microsoft will unveil the consumer features of its long-awaited new Windows 10 platform in January. Can we expect the issues that have plagued Windows 8 to be rectified?

The 193-strong Human Rights Committee of the UN General Assembly has approved a landmark resolution demanding internet privacy protection and urging governments to offer redress to people targeted by mass surveillance.

Now here’s a little something to blow your mind: Google has developed new image recognition software that doesn’t just represent an object in the image as text (e.g., a motorcyclist) but actually tells you in a sentence what’s going on in any piece of image content it processes. Actual example: “A person riding a motorcycle on a dirt road” to describe an image of … you guessed it, a person riding a motorcycle along a dirt road). Its added verbs to the standard (and not especially useful) repertoire of nouns.

Don’t panic. This isn’t about Terminators taking over the world. But it is about a radical new form of computer architecture that has the potential to be a major game player in how we all access our digital content: HP’s (Hewlett-Packard’s) forthcoming new hardware platform, the Machine. And HP’s HP Labs Director, Martin Fink, has just announced that the first prototype could be operating by 2016.

There’s an interesting divide opening up about information privacy. As the UK Home Secretary Theresa May vows to re-introduce the ill-fated Data Communications Bill, pole-axed by her Coalition partners the Liberal Democrats because of its “chilling” reach into citizens’ privacy, the European Union and many ordinary US citizens are calling for greater privacy protections.

From its humble origins in 1994 as a kind of punk print magazine from Montreal, Vice Media is extending its digital repertoire even further via a new partnership with Live Nation which will see the creation of a new digital content platform straddling TV, mobile and the Web.