Wanted: Could You Be Obama's Facebook Guru?

President Obama is looking for a social media expert to take charge of his MySpace and Facebook pages and keep his Twitter account up to date.
But this is not a role for slackers who have honed their expertise spending time on Facebook in the office.

The job application warns the successful candidate must be "ready to work hard; this isn't a 9-5 sort of job".
The job description says the right person needs to have "strong organising and campaigning instincts; you can craft messages that move people to act, and you know what actions will achieve the right impact at the right time".

It is understood Mr Obama's current ghost tweeter is stepping down, so the Democratic National Committee (DNC) wants someone to take on the broader job title of "social networks manager".
They will be responsible for managing pages for both the DNC and the Organising for America group, an organisation that drives Mr Obama's agenda at a local level.

Many politicians use Twitter to engage with voters. Gordon Brown tweets through the Number10 Downing Street page, and John Prescott and Ed Balls are also avid users.
Conservative party leader David Cameron does not have a personal Twitter account, although other members like party chairman Eric Pickles use the site frequently.

Courtesy: Sky News

WordPress outage blacks out millions of blogs

More than 10 million blogs were dragged offline for almost two hours following a massive outage at WordPress.com.
The popular blogging platform was down for 110 minutes due to a problem at the company's data centre. The outage downed 10.2 million blogs and cost them more than 5.5 million page views, according to Wordpress.

"We are still gathering details, but it appears an unscheduled change to a core router by one of our data centre providers messed up our network in a way we haven't experienced before, and broke the site," reads a post on the WordPress site. Read More

Courtesy: RTE News

Microsoft adds Facebook to Outlook 2010

Outlook 2010 will be able to pull in feeds and contacts from Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace using its Social Connector.
The Outlook Social Connector (OSC), announced at the end of last year, brings in content such as contacts and social networking into Microsoft's e-mail client.Microsoft said the LinkedIn beta was now available, and announced new deals that would see Facebook and MySpace follow suit. Microsoft's own Windows Live will also integrate with Outlook

LinkedIn for Outlook lets users view details and photos of contacts from the site right in the e-mail system, as well as pull in updates from the social networking site to keep contacts up to date. Read More

Courtesy: RTE News

Website that cost State €4m shut down

THE GOVERNMENT spent more than €4 million developing an ambitious citizen and community information website that was shut down in December.

The Mobhaile project (www.mobhaile.ie) was launched in 2004 for local authorities to use as a portal for citizens to access a wide range of local information.

It cost €4,001,319, according to documents obtained by the technology consultant and blogger Damien Mulley under the Freedom of Information Act.

The documents show Mobhaile’s software development costs ran to €1,482,092 and a further €1,275,878 was spent on computing hardware and data storage. Associated salaries are listed as €431,418 and the total hosting costs between 2006 and 2009 came to €291,302. Read More

Courtesy: Irish Times

Facebook hits 100 million mobile users - puts chat on all IM clients

Social-networking player Facebook is now being used by more than 100 million mobile phone users around the world. The company today unveiled a new feature that allows people to use Facebook chat within various instant messaging (IM) clients using the Jabber protocol.

Facebook has reached the 100-million mobile device milestone just six months after it revealed that 65 million people were using it on their mobile devices.

Chamath Palihapitiya, VP in charge of user growth, said that the usage is occurring on almost every mobile carrier in the world. Read More

Courtesy: Silicon Republic

You want Wi-Fi with that?: Burger King offers web access

DUBLIN FIRM Anacapa Holdings has won a contract with Burger King which will see it provide a free Wi-Fi service in 2,200 restaurants in 12 European countries.

The roll-out of the service has already begun in Germany and it is expected the service will be available in Irish branches of Burger King by the end of March, according to Joe Brunoli.

Mr Brunoli is managing director of the trading entity which Anacapa operates as Free-hotspot.com.

It offers free internet access in 4,000 locations in 21 countries in Europe. It currently has 76 locations in Ireland which are primarily cafes, restaurants and bars. Venue owners typically pay for the installation of the hardware and have to provide a broadband connection. Read More

Courtesy: Irish Times

The plight of the blogger and how to protect them

The protection of the free press in the West is a given, but who protects a blogger arrested under a repressive regime?

WHEN THE local correspondent of a Western newspaper is arrested or intimidated under a repressive regime, a huge machine grinds into action.

If the newspaper chooses to pick a fight, the correspondent has the public support of the newspaper’s editorial and the case has the ear of its readers. If the newspaper chooses a quieter route, the political department of the newspaper almost certainly has some sort of working relationship with their domestic government, and at least the attention of politicians. Read More

Courtesy: Irish Times