The news of Osama Bin Laden's death broke out to millions on Sunday 1^st May at 11:45 ET with the help of twitter, facebook  and youtube, where most people found out through the social networking sites than on actual tv and radio.

The Royal Wedding between Prince William and Catherine (better known as Kate) Middleton is just around the corner. As the Westminster Abbey ceremony on Friday 29 April looms closer, people all over the world are making sure they get involved as well.

So my granma decided to give me a ring the other day, only to tell me to vote on the upcoming elections. I told her that I was planning to vote and that as a sign of my commitment to the elections, I am writing a blog about the importance of political parties to start using digital...

Just a quick question:

Facebook has a lot of users, right? Think I read somewhere that Facebook had 60o million users in January 2011, give or take a million or two. Now would we be wrong to presume that the majority of those users are intelligent people? They have to be. People from all walks of life have FB accounts. From your average Jane and John, right up to doctors and lawyers, and even political leaders. People with degrees. Smart people.

It seems that the most common practiced maneuver of Middle Eastern armies is the Retweet Retreat; except Libya of course, because the Libyan army is not very well practiced.

Populations have a new voice and it is loud! So what now? Now everything changes!

So after the recent news of Gawker Media having their websites hacked, I've received countless e-mails from many other services, all in a flurry and panic that the password that I've used will have been hacked, and that I should change them all immediately.

Now I'd like to think that, as a non-causal user of the Internet, that I have pretty secure passwords (which if I count on fingers, usually pass over the 15-digit value including the use of alphanumerical and non-standard keys) so I'm fairly confident that it would take more than a few years worth of processing power to brute force one of my passwords.

So why is it now, all of a sudden, YouTube sends me a mail to inform me that my account has been accessed by a third party, and that it's been suspended (its not all that much of a biggie for me – I rarely use the site anyways). I just begin to wonder how it's been accessed by a third party – since I know for a fact that my password is roughly 14 characters in length? Methinks this is just more wide-spread hysterics, or the beginnings of a story of how insecure their own IT Infrastructure might be...

Overall, I'm actually rather tired of all this spam I'm getting from different services I've signed up to (which makes me think its time to go on a mass-exodus from these other ventures). The Web's paranoid, methinks. (and what really gets me is that people know they should be using strong passwords, and yet still fail miserably at generating them. Find a pattern, differentiate that pattern between each site – its really not all that difficult to do).

Proof that we are now living more of our lives online Vodacom have become the first cellphone network operator to start a dedicated customer service Twitter account. Their current account, @vodacom became the ad hoc customer service agent which in my opinion at least defeated the point of having a social media presence. The result is now you can address all your customer complaints to @vodacom111 and have dedicated customer service through Twitter.

There is nothing social going on with the social media accounts of corporate brands. Its all one way traffic from their end and it would seem they view social media as just cheap marketing. @TopTV Twitter profile was last updated 28 days ago. For a brand that was launched very recently you would have expected there be more interaction than an update every 28 days. I didn't bother checking to see if there was a Facebook fanpage.