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In what many are calling a victory for free speech and social media Carter-Ruck have backed down and removed their injunction against The Guardian.

From The Guardian:

The existence of a previously secret injunction against the media by oil traders Trafigura can now be revealed.

Within the past hour Trafigura’s legal firm, Carter-Ruck, has withdrawn its opposition to the Guardian reporting proceedings in parliament that revealed its existence.

Labour MP Paul Farrelly put down a question yesterday to the justice secretary, Jack Straw. It asked about the injunction obtained by “Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton Report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura”.

The Guardian was due to appear at the High Court at 2pm to challenge Carter-Ruck’s behaviour, but the firm has dropped its claim that to report parliament would be in contempt of court.

Full Article

Trending TopicsI don’t like or normally use the term “monetise”, but it is the big question hanging over Twitter; how are they gonna make money from this thing?

We saw last week that Twitter have secured another found of funding described as “significant”, and so we assume that at some point these investors are going to want to see a return.

Many ideas for how Twitter might monetise the service have been put forward: paid accounts, premium accounts for brands and companies, advertising on the page, advertising in Tweets etc. But I have another thought about how Twitter might be planning to integrate advertising or paid content.

In the sidebar of the of a Twitter user’s homepage is a trending topics panel which shows the topics, keywords or hashtags being tweeted about most at that point in time. Clicking on one of these takes you to a search for that term or keywords which can be updated as new tweets appear.

Clicking on the trending topic ‘iPhone’ this morning I went to the usual list of tweets but then noticed this new, at least to me, content at the top explaining why ‘iPhone’ was a trending topic:

Results

I’d not really got why Twitter had added trending topics to the site as it just seemed to be a tool for spammers to piggy back upon, but once you see this explanatory content it starts to make a little more sense. I can see this easily becoming advertising (Google keywords anybody?) or paid for content: each use of the word iPhone could be a link to Apple.com for example. This would allow Twitter to start to generate revenue from the service and without a negative impact on the user experience. Interesting…

Of course this would make trending topics even more of a spam magnet and doesn’t address the large number of users accessing Twitter via other clients and applications, but it does point to a potential approach for Twitter to start making money.

What do you think?

I love Twitter, and I’ve tried to spread that love far and wide. A question I’ve been asked by many is “what is Twitter?”. It’s not an easy to question to answer as it can be many things to many people, and what it is to you really depends upon what you want from it.

But I have now found, what for me is, the perfect description; from Chris Hardwick in an interview with Lifehacker.com:

Twitter is a guy you can always elbow in the side and say, “Hey, look, a guy in a clown suit just threw up!”

I’m using that from now on – marvellous!

Sadly I am now no longer able to attend IBDG’s Digital Insights event to chair my roundtable on social media. Instead I’ll be at the House of Lords at a launch event for a charity I am involved with.

This is not representative of my normal life I promise.

I’m not sure who will be replacing me; I suggested somebody that I thought would be great but to no avail.

Earlier today I mentioned on Twitter that I was going to sell my Samsung NC10 as I’ve bought a MacBook Air. I wasn’t really expecting a response, but within minutes I had an email from somebody interested in it; a few emails later the funds are in my PayPal account and my Samsung is ready to ship.

This feels like quite a significant moment; selling via social media rather than “traditional” channels. Who’d have thought that we might regard eBay as old hat so quickly. In the time it would have taken me to list my notebook on eBay I’d sold it via Twitter with no hassle and no fees.

It’s doubly interesting to me as over the last year eBay seem to have been systematically dismantling the community aspect of their site with changes to process and most importantly feedback which now favour the buyer rather than the seller. It was this community rating of both buyers and sellers that was eBay’s USP I felt, and the thing that gave people the confidence to trade with unknown buyers and sellers. eBay is becoming an online shopping mall rather than a community powered site.

Social Media is all about connecting people and it shows in how many different ways those connections can work for us.