The badly spelt tweet was a sure giveaway but any how I clicked on the tweet with it's too good to be true offer. An iPad, for free, why certainly I'll sign into this survey using my Twitter account. Bad move.

After entering my details into this survey, all my followers were bombarded with the rogue tweet. And if they too were foolish enough to enter their twitter details they too would pass on the message to their followers. Luckily I have only around 40 odd followers soo not too many people were affected.

I don't quite understand how the scam worked. I think maybe it might be aiming to gather sensitive information. I don't know but I immediately changed my password and tweeted a shame-faced tweet to my followers admitting to be a naive idiot.

But it raised an interesting point about how we put ourselves in jeopady of being defrauded by putting our implicit trust in services like Twitter. The message being be vigilant on Twitter even if are messaged by a friend and never let a site log you via your Twitter account unless you are completely certain it is legitimate

The Philips Livable Cities Award is an initiative designed to generate practical, achievable ideas for improving the health and well-being of people living in cities. Individuals, community or non-governmental organizations and businesses are eligible to participate in the Award program that comprises a total prize fund amounting to 125,000 Euros.

With the aim of developing simple solutions to the complex challenges faced by the residents of cities today, the program consists of three distinct award categories:


Well-being Outdoors: initiatives that will help citizens feel safe in public spaces or help create city identity and foster a sense of belonging;
Independent Living: initiatives that will help the growing number of elderly people living alone to feel secure and comfortable in a city, with appropriate access to healthcare;
Healthy Lifestyle at Work and Home: initiatives that will support a healthy body and mind, whether through a person’s surroundings or via other essentials such as exercise, sleep and diet.

Bet she wish she had an iPhone on her

However much I love the convenience of technology I have a nagging worry that it is actually making us stupid. Think of how much we depend on spell checks, GPS, Outlook calender, phone books to organise our lives. As we rely more and more on technology to sort out the simplest aspects of our lives, potentially we might forget vital skills.

For instance think about the time before you had a mobile phone, scary right. Now I bet you could remember your home phone number, your friends' numbers, your parents' office numbers along with alarm codes and lots of other numberical strings. To this day I can recall at least 3 or 4 of my secondary school friend's land line numbers. These are numbers I haven't dialled in 10 years. Yet I know none of my friends mobile numbers, I barely remember my own. I am dependent on my phone memory to keep these numbers safe. Every time I lose my phone I lose access to all my contacts. This can be particularly tricky. When I lost my wallet in a festival recently I was very nearly stuck in Suffolk as I didn't know any number I could ring for help save 999. Luckily my phone had the tiniest bit of battery left due to a fortuituous decision to use it sparingly.

This is a particular instance of how technology can make us dumber. But I think it is the general expectation that technology creates which is more dangerous, our very mindset. With a smart phone constantly linked to the internet, any question can be answered, any fact can be retreived. This access makes us complacent and intellectually lazy. Why bother to study anything, why bother to learn because any fact can be easily retrieved at the flick of a thumbnail. This raises a paradoxical situation whereby we are hungry for facts but unable to remember them because our short term memories are shot die to over-dependence on technology

Dibbing.com is a sort of backwards auction whereby participants reduce the price by 'Dibbing' an item. When a user 'Dibs' an item, the price is revealed to them for 10 seconds. The more people 'Dibs' an item the cheaper it becomes and you might even find yourself a bargain, especially if an item is popular.

The advanatage of 'Dibbing' is that prices on the site are in line with some of the best online retailer sites, so you are bound to find a bargain.

So what are you waiting for, get 'Dibbing'.

There are a couple of lessons to be learned from the fallout of Coke dropping Lean Mean Fighting Machine as their digital agency for making references to porn on their Facebook page.

No matter how edgy social media strives to be and the boundaries it tries to push, the people paying the checks are by and large very conventional, and generally don't like their brands being associated with infamous scat videos. People can be so square! Brands are even less likely to find it amusing if underaged kids are exposed to  said explicit references and go searching the internet to understand them.

Social media is completely unpredictable. The very openess of it, the way that consumers and brands interact mean that it is hard to forsee and prevent such catastrophes. Mistakes cannot be contained and before you know it, the whole world knows about what's gone down.

This is the risk inherent in using social media for promotion and the very fact that I can think of two other scandals resulting from social media errors (Vodafone and Habitat) proves how careful brands have to be

I first stumbled across amplify through one of the bloggers I was working with. To look at it, it looks rather like a microblogging platform such as Tumblr or Posterous. But in actual fact the concept is far more clever.

Amplify's aim is maximise the impact of our daily social media wanderings. With Amplify, you can share your content across the social media world, allowing users to update their Twitter, Facebook, blog, or micro blog in one-fell-swoop. It is like Hoot Suite on steroids.

And how do I know this fact because I read it in the Guardian online for free. The Guardian and The Times are both facing the same cataclysmic decline in sales. The Times reacted by trying to claw back as much money as possible from its most popular area by charging to access the site. This strategy truly is trying to close the door after the horse has bolted, or trying to squeeze the genie back in the bottle, any number of futile similes to state the fact, it's too late.