Welcome to Porter Novelli’s sometimes weekly digital news post.

How do we tackle a media landscape in which troubling advertising returns and economic uncertainty are causing inevitable cuts to local news? One answer is hyperlocal websites, which cover their areas in detail and are based on a more sustainable business model than a traditional newspaper tasked with granular local coverage.

Hyperlocal is made possible – or at least easier – by the growth of the social web, and the people behind them tend to be very adept at using this to aggregate content about their beats and engage the communities concerned. Of course, despite traditional media being largely unable to get under the skin of local news in the same detail as a Utopian hyperlocal site would, the occasional war of words ensues between the two.

Most recently, I read Judith Townend’s account of a spat that took place thanks to a blog post about one hyperlocal by David Ottewell on the Manchester Evening News website. The post certainly carried a disdainful undertone and as such was picked up by a number of the UK’s leading hyperlocal innovators.

Philip John is the man behind the wonderful Lichfield Blog, and points out that his hyperlocal work has led to probable collaboration with Trinity Mirror publications and suggests that TM is interested in hyperlocal for a reason. Presumably, that reason is that it has potentially huge value.

LinkedIn hits 70 million users

Professional social networking website LinkedIn announced at the end of last week that it has reached 70 million users worldwide. It’s been a year of change for LinkedIn, with its continued growth matched by amendments to the functionality of the site (some of which work nicely while others don’t).

The fastest growth, says CEO Jeff Weiner, is international, which opens up some interesting avenues for LinkedIn over and above the inevitable commercial decisions to be made by a growing, profitable company.

As TechCrunch writer Leena Rao indicates in the post linked above, there is also a lot of wriggle-room left for LinkedIn in terms of using the masses of data it can collate from its large user base. Watch this space.

Not convinced about the social web?

During a quick glance through one of my favourite blogs, Hypebot, I read about some Nielsen research which spelled out just how important blogs and social networking sites are – or should be – to the PR industry.

In a nutshell, 22% of all time online is spent on blogs and social networking websites, equating to a staggering 110 billion hours a month. The most popular sites, of course, are Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia.

Firing squad death announced on Twitter

Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff tweeted his announcement that the execution of murderer Ronnie Lee Gardner would go ahead – yes, tweeted. Sometimes the ways people use social media amazes me. Here’s the tweet:

“I just gave the go ahead to Corrections Director to proceed with Gardner’s execution. May God grant him the mercy he denied his victims.”

Wow. I certainly hope the news was shared elsewhere first.

Digital licen[c]e plates for California?

Advertising gone mad or an innovative economy booster? The state of California has floated the idea of switching cars to digital licence plates which show the licence details when the car is moving and allow companies to buy advertising space (alongside a shrunken version of the licence details) for when it’s stationary. From Crunchgear:

Currently, the plates would only display ads while the vehicles are stopped, and the license number would be displayed (admittedly smaller) on the plates at all times, but this still sounds like a terrible idea to me. Light up advertising on a license plate? This just seems like an incredibly annoying idea that should die in the California legislature.

What’s your verdict?

Welcome to Porter Novelli’s not-very-weekly digital news post.

Twitter is big, and it wants your links. Those are the two big pieces of news from the micro-blogging zeitgeist hogger this week, and of course they fit perfectly together.

According to 140Char, Twitter now gets 190 million unique users a month and they create an impressive 65 million tweets, 75% of which are contributed, via API, through third-party apps.

With a huge and growing userbase, Twitter is continuing to look at possible methods of monetisation, and one such method might just be possible thanks to the forthcoming launch of its own link shortening service. One of Twitter’s most valuable functions is the sharing of news and content and is carried out through links – lots of them – and due to the 140-character limit they are routinely shortened.

By bringing this in house, Twitter (as Patricio Robles of Econsultancy points out) owns those links and all the data that comes with them. Clever.

Bletchley Park records to go online

Bletchley Park, the crucial WWII code-breaking centre and darling of the English social media set, has been the focus of a lot of attention – and indeed affection – in recent years. The important part its technology and the brilliant people using it played in the Allied war effort hasn’t been forgotten and many 21st Century techies are keen supporters of the Buckinghamshire site.

Now, with some help from HP, millions of documents at Bletchley Park are going to be scanned, digitised and made available online. Such is the volume of documents involved that I think the most interesting point here is that the task of combing through this previously impossible amount of information will now be faced collaboratively rather than by a few hardcore enthusiasts.

Foursquare blocked in China

There was interesting news at the end of last week from Caroline McCarthy at The Social. According to first-hand suggestions, Chinese users of the location-based gaming app Foursqaure (if I were Mashable, these brackets would surround a smiley face) have been blocked from using its check-in function:

Foursquare is still looking into the issue, co-founders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai told CNET. Namely, they aren’t sure whether this will be a permanent block or temporary. But it appears to be linked to the 21st anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, the 1989 incident in which the Chinese military attacked and arrested thousands of pro-democracy protesters. Chinese users of Foursquare appear to have been using the service as a protest vehicle.

They’ve been doing so by checking in to Tiananmen Square and posting protest messages as ‘tips’, says co-founder Naveen Selvadurai. Although unconfirmed, it has been speculated that this might be the reason for the block, so no mayorships of Merton Park Tram Station for Foursquare users in China anytime soon (sad face).

Daily Mail hates the internet, #382,399

Get this. Did you know that some brands know what the internet is? And some even listen to it and use analytics for their own evil ends?! Our old pals at the Daily Mail have (deliberately?) whipped up another storm with yet more web-hating, claiming that some brands “admitted” to listening in on disgruntled conversations online – spying, as the Mail puts it. Next we’ll be hearing that some of them try to act on those conversations and actually try to fix problems!

The irony – as pointed out by my friend Tim Hoang on Twitter and Stephen Waddington on his blog – is that the Mail is rather good at web analytics, understands SEO and has mastered certain aspects of linkbaiting. In fact, that’s just about all many web users will give it credit for, and how’s it all done? By tracking, understanding and monitoring web users.

Greencoat Boy in LBGT Labour row

I’ve my own negative memories of the Greencoat Boy pub near Victoria Station, but they’re not worthy of the kind of uproar caused by its manager over the weekend. LBGT Labour held its AGM nearby and turned up to honour its booking at the Greencoat Boy, bought some drinks and apparently put up a small banner.

Long story short, not through laziness but because I’m going to link to someone who can tell the story better, the group were eventually thrown out because of their sexuality and told that the booking would not have been accepted if the pub’s manager had known it was made by a gay group.

PR blogger Ade Bradley was there and was rightly mortified by his experience, and decided to use his social media nous and following to whip up a bit of noise. Here’s his account of the events and their aftermath.

World Cup in two days! Hurrah!

Welcome to Porter Novelli’s weekly-but-sometimes-not digital news post.

A while ago, on a long-derelict blog, I wrote a post entitled “Facebook’s PR: walking the blade”. In it, I argued that Facebook’s public relations approach was one of ‘do first, think second’, allowing Mark Zuckerberg and co to put in place controversial and potentially game-changing elements without consultation with Facebook users. If the resulting storm is big enough, Facebook might then react well and pull the new feature.

In short, Facebook walks a PR tightrope with a key difference: in a competitive social networking industry that has already seen some major players discarded in favour of the next big thing, one major slip and that tightrope might just cut Zuckerberg’s balls off.

Sure enough, Facebook’s gung-ho outlook on change (for its own benefit) has created significant public outcry once again and this time it could be the beginning of a general public scepticism. After tweaking away, Facebook found itself on the end of criticism from both users and politicians when it became apparent that nobody actually knows how private or public their data is.

This time, the challenge has begun. “Ambitious upstarts”, as BBC News called them, are lining up to take down the long-serving social networking monster. There’s no doubt that privacy will be high on their collective agenda, as it is now on the agenda of Facebook – reactively, of course. The usual story rings true, as Facebook tweaks first and then admits that it “missed the mark”. Still, simpler privacy controls are forthcoming at last so I’m sure the company will live to fight another day.

Boris 2.0: more Wi-Fi than wif-waf

He may have been an entertaining, powerless charmer once upon a time, but I tend to keep my opinion of Boris Johnson to myself since his election as Mayor of London. I really like this though: Johnson wants London to have city-wide wi-fi. Speaking to a crowd of the converted at a Google Zeitgeist event, the Mayor spoke of his desire to set up a hotspot at “every lamp post and every bus stop” by the middle of 2012.

As a digital enthusiast, I have to say this is quite an exciting prospect. The proliferation of mobile devices – from your standard smartphone right through to the iPad and its inevitable competition – means that city-wide wi-fi would have a genuinely revolutionary effect on how we consume information and content. And it means I can watch football everywhere, which is a terrifying thought.

Icing

Although it would be much better to see frat boys pushed in front of lorries, I must admit to being mildly entertained by ‘icing’, a web phenomenon in which the consumption of Smirnoff Ice, the disturbing green alcopop, becomes a game of strategy. Or, more accurately, of carrying a Smirnoff Ice around at all times.

The rules: when you’re out and about, you give your friend – “Bro” – a bottle of said evil beverage, and he must get down on one knee and drink it in one no matter where you are or who’s there with you. The pictures are then put online, at sites like the brilliantly titled Bros Icing Bros. It shouldn’t be funny, but it is.

Of course, you can always stop your bros from icing you. If you’re handed a bottle, you can block it with a bottle of your own and you bro (biological or otherwise) then has to drink both. Far from a clever strategic blocking tool, I like to think of shy frat boys carrying around a bottle as they would a cross to protect themselves from vampires.

And they say the internet cultivates stupidity! Bring back ghost ridin’ da whip, that’s what I say.

British Airways strike talks blocked by Twitter

Well, not quite.

If UK social media use is up 159%, public awareness of what should and shouldn’t be said or done within those channels hasn’t budged a single percentage point. A number of British Airways cabin crew are currently on strike in controversial circumstances, despite reasonable hope of a last-minute reprieve.

Twitter, or rather the use of Twitter by the Unite union’s joint secretary Derek Simpson, has born the brunt of BA’s criticism as strike talks broke down. A BA spokesperson criticised Simpson’s tweeting from a meeting that was eventually interrupted by protesters, calling it “irresponsible and disgraceful”. At best it was incredibly unwise.

RescueTime hi-jacks Pac-Man buzz

If you want an example of brilliant hi-jacking, look no further than software firm RescueTime, which has this week reaped the benefits of being creative and quick off the mark when a short-lived web phenomenon entered its turf. Last week, Google’s famed changing doodle was turned into a playable version of the gaming classic Pac-Man, to celebrate its 30th anniversary.

Cue Twitter going mental over the game, and people playing the mini-game in offices up and down the country and beyond. RescueTime quickly did some sums, and decided that almost five million working hours were lost, costing a total of $120,483,800. It’s flawed logic, of course, because it’s a gimmick. But it’s a gimmick that was always going to succeed in picking up coverage, and it made it onto the BBC News homepage (linking to this article) and, of course, the likes of Mashable.

Incidentally, the game’s still there if you fancy a go.