Received my first social network spam, a mail through Bebo’s internal messaging system..
‘hey gareth i just noticed ur profile.. i might be visitin friends where ur from… i have more pics on my cam site.. its ‘homepagecam.us/cutie223′ …im ussually online. msg me sometime on there…’
Social networks are in one sense eminently spamable (hell in a sense they are spam generators), and in another – permissions, implicit trust networks, reputations, tagging – are highly spam resistant. It will be interesting to see how simple spam, and far more sophisticated potential networked …

The omnipresence of broadband, combined, at least in Trinity, with a paucity of computing resources, have resulted in a massive increase in student ownership of laptops, combined with resultant student familiarity with the web; ditto the use of email as a communications tool. Five years ago you’d never have arranged a party with an email – you couldn’t have been sure if any of your guests would check their messages that month, never mind the geeky stigma clinging to the medium. These days, you can post an event invitation on …

Simon McGarr of Digital Right Ireland fame, asked me to write a piece explaining the hideously compelling phenomena that is Bebo, for his webzine ‘Tuppenceworth.ie. You can find the article here.
Also DRI have finally gotten around to sticking up a video of the talk that Suw Charman of the UK ‘Open Rights Group‘ gave on digital rights in TCD several weeks ago. She’s a fascinating speaker, and was kind enough to come on Technolotics the following day. You can find the video of her TCD talk here.