And Laurel is welcoming you all. As she says, “That makes them well on track for having 10% of Australians on Facebook by Christmas” (which she has  been saying for a long time would be the case).

Mainstream media loves to spin a “bad” news story on social media, which is unsurprising given how much of MSM’s lunch is being eaten by new media. My enduring favourite is the story that did the rounds in March about how your blog could get you fired. Only a couple of media outlets had the decency to mention that the survey they were quoting actually found that blogging was the reason many people were hired. And of course there was August’s beat up that Facebook was going to destroy the Australian economy by tomorrow.

Compare that to this story in today’s Guardian: One in three Brits back BBC accuracy, i.e. two-thirds of Brit’s do not think the BBC is accurate.

If that were a story about social media, the story would be headlined “Two-thirds don’t trust social media”.

I’m not the only one who thinks Web 2.0 companies could do themselves a favour using grown-up names. The New York Times thinks so, too.

Matthew d’Ancona, editor of The Spectator, has an opinion piece in today’s Guardian paraphrasing US political strategist Joe Trippi as saying that it won’t be long “before the so-called ‘netroots’ spawn their own presidential candidate: a serious contender groomed by bloggers and webheads who would run as an independent or, more probably, be grabbed by one of the two mainstream parties”.

Here in Australia we’ve already enjoyed Kevin 07’s use of Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and blogging; but how long before we see a candidate not just using the blogosphere but selected by it? What do you think?

Rachael Hainsworth, Research and Project Coordinator, Laboratory for Advanced Media Production (LAMP) asked us to mention that AFTRS is calling for submissions for the LAMP Residential Lab VIII:

Presented by Australian Film TV and Radio School (AFTRS), LAMP residentials are a unique opportunity to evolve your projects for broadband, mobile devices, advanced television, games consoles, multi-user virtual environments and beyond.

LAMP is one of the world’s leading emerging media development labs that runs creative hothouse programs designed to get innovative projects off the ground.

The upcoming Lab VIII, supported by the New Zealand Screen Council, will be held in Victoria in late February 2008 - and is set to be an intensive experience with teams and mentors working together across a five day period to produce proof of concept for new media services. Participants will also get the opportunity to present their concepts to industry VIPs on the final day of the residential.

Applications for the eighth LAMP Residential Lab are open now and submissions from project teams in all areas of the media industry are welcome.
Applications close 10 January 2008

For further information go to http://lamp.edu.au/apply/

Big Brother Australia has taken the logical social media plunge in asking the public to nominate potential housemates by watching and voting for videos that hopefuls are uploading to the show’s website.

I saw today that Michael Henderson, one of my Facebook friends, had joined a group called Let’s get Dan Fitzgerald on Big Brother 2008. “Tired of reality TV being dominated by wankers who have nothing better to do with their 15 minutes of fame than sit around in the sun and discuss their genitalia?” asks Dan, before pointing to his BB08 video and asking you to vote for him.

He seems a lot more entertaining than the bogans and nimrods Big Brother invariably picks for himself so I did vote for him and encourage you to do the same. Maybe we can get someone with more brains than turkey bits this year.

You couldn’t make this story up:

John Darwin (right) disappeared while canoing in the North Sea five years ago. A coroner declared him dead and six weeks ago his wife, Anne, moved to Panama, having sold two houses worth £455,000 and cashing in her husband’s life insurance policy.

Last weekend Darwin walked into a London police station, telling the desk sergeant, “I think I am a missing person.” Luckily he remembered his name, address and date of birth.

Shortly afterwards he was arrested on suspicion of fraud.

The police say they were suspicious at the time of his disappearance but it was Google that has added what may be final nail in the Darwin coffin. An anonymous woman simply put “John, Anne and Panama” into Google. Up popped a date-stamped picture of the Darwins taken in their new Panama apartment and uploaded to the website of the relocation firm that had found it for them. The woman forwarded the picture to police and The Daily Mirror newspaper. The police response was apparently, “You’re joking.” Anne Darwin has authenticated the picture, newspapers report.

The pair must surely be up for some sort of Darwin Award, even if their stupidity hasn’t yet “removed either of them from the gene pool” for real.

In the meantime, John Darwin already has a Wikipedia entry.

The most read story on The Guardian online yesterday was an eight-year-old piece about whether astronauts have had top secret sex in space. Someone had submitted the story to Digg. The site allows users to vote for the most interesting items; those with the most votes hit the front page and drive torrential traffic to the site in question.

The source of the story was discredited long ago and the article was written, as its author says,  when the internet was relatively little known. (Now of course he’s writing on a blog.) So it just goes to show that nothing is ever lost on the internet and you don’t know when it might resurface.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has apologised for the site’s implementation of its Beacon “social advertising” service. Beacon allows third party websites — retailers, basically — to send information about purchases you make on their site directly to your Facebook profile where the news can be seen by your friends, e.g. “Steven has just bought a coffee table from Retailer X”.

The backlash came — and Laurel points out it wasn’t that much of a backlash outside the media hype — because it was an opt-out system. And it wasn’t that easy to opt-out or that obvious why you might want to. Then Christmas and other surprises were ruined by statements appearing on profiles like “Steven has just bought an engagement ring from Jeweler Y”.

Laurel writes, Zuckerberg “is one of those rare individuals that can blog just once a year and the world cares”. What’s particularly interesting to me is that Zuckerberg has posted only four times to the Facebook blog and two of those posts have been to apologise for blunders by the company around features it had implemented.

The blunders in question weren’t so much the features themselves but how their functionality and purpose had been communicated to users. Zuckerberg’s soothing blog posts have been oil on troubled water. In both cases they were picked up by the blogosphere (Laurel seems to have had her post up in minutes) and the international media, e.g. The Guardian, BusinessWeek, the New York Times, the Age, and 333 other stories so far according to Google News.

If your company messes up, do you have a similar channel in which to respond directly to customers, their blogging representatives and the media? And will you be able to manage the right tone? Read Zuckerberg’s post on beacon and his post last year about their news and mini feeds for textbook examples of how to use social media to:

• acknowledge criticism
• accept blame
• describe solutions

Then watch as all this dies away as quickly as it flared up.

Laurel Papworth, Australian social media strategist, has today written a fantastic post about the companies who invite consultants like us to come in for a chat. The idea is that we travel to them and, over a friendly coffee, we guileless and passionate social media advocates talk through their needs, throw ideas out, brainstorm and basically save the company in question a lot of time and research. And money. It’s not that they’re checking you out to see if you’re a suitable fit to consult for the organisation: there is from the outset no intention on their part to pay for the insight and experience you bring to the conversation.

Laurel tells the story of one manager who told her he had spoken to around “200″ web 2.0 people and developed pages and pages of notes for strategies through those meetings and asking the consultants to follow up — “Just some top line thinking, it won’t take you long”.

I, like Laurel, was one of the 200 and I think we’re showing just how kind we are by not mentioning the manager in question or his organisation, an organisation that could afford to fly us somewhere luxurious for a week of chatting and not even notice it in the balance sheet. I didn’t even get a coffee.

It’s fair enough to want to establish that a consultant has the knowledge and experience to offer value but it’s dishonest to hope to shoplift that knowledge and experience.

We will always meet with a potential new client to talk and there will be no charge for that initial meeting but, thanks to that anonymous manager, I, for one, am going to be a little warier now.

Read Laurel’s post.