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The majority of people now have a Facebook or twitter or my space account set up (and if you haven’t then you must have been living under a rock) so on Facebook you want to make friends with everybody you know to make yourself look more popular. But what happens if one of your colleagues or your line manager requests to be your friend and then you write something on your wall that could lead to you getting in trouble.

Facebook makes a note of the time that you post anything online, from messages to friends, pokes, uploading pictures or commenting on your friends status. Therefore you need to be extremely wary of when and what you post online because in the worse case scenario what you post on Facebook could lead to you losing your job and even the police getting involved.

I work in the technology industry and I also use Google everyday and it just makes me wonder; where would we be without Google?

• People use Google to complete everyday tasks such as using the search engine to find something out.
• Google Product Base allows people to buy online and you can also see what reviews people have left online, making the purchasing process more transparent.
• Google Maps allows people to find out where they are and also get directions on how to get somewhere else by just entering a postcode!
• Google Earth is a fantastic tool which allows you to see images from space.
• Google Street View is amazing, Google sent their people out with a camera and they took pictures of streets and peoples houses!
• Googlemail – is a email inbox which gives you lots of space and ability to attach and send huge images.

Keep up the good work Google!

In this day and age there are a vast many way to keep in touch with friends and the people you care about.
There are the old fashioned ways like face to face, telephone, or by letter.

However, there are also lots of ways to communicate online through social networking websites. The most popular of these are; Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace.

My personal favourite is Facebook, this social networking site is perfect for keeping in touch with friends. You can send personal messages, instant messages, notes on peoples personal profile walls.

Facebook also allows you to upload your own personal photographs.

However be wary because your need to set your privacy settings correctly so that you can allow only people you want see your photographs rather than random strangers. Just make sure it is just your friends who can see your pictures.

Depending on how old you are, you might remember a time when the wealth of information was not just available at the touch of a button or the click of a mouse.

What did we do before the internet was invented? It is scary to think that before the internet we had books and libraries and encyclopaedias to find out information.

When children are doing home work now it is really easy for them to just go online and copy and paste information to get the answers to their homework questions or essays. But is there too much information available? Children will find data that might not be relevant to answer the question so they need to be sure they have got the correct stats.

In my previous post I mentioned about the importance of being wary of what you post online because people can read that information and use this against you.

To overcome this problem, Facebook have given you the ability to set your privacy settings so that you can be friends with people (ie. your boss) but restrict the kind of information that they can see on your profile. For example, you may have had a really messy and drunken night out and there may be lots of incriminating photos that your friends have taken and then tagged you in. These pictures need to be blocked so that your boss doesn’t see them and you can do this by changing your privacy settings.

The cyber age brings with it its own set of problems. Being Googled before you start at a new job is the least of your worries. There has been a sharp rise in the amount of reported Cyber stalking and bullying cases. Although from an outside point of view it must seem quite easy to switch off from the weirdos, but in reality people rely on technology to keep them connected to the people they do actually want to speak to. Therefore it is very hard to cut themselves off from the technology that is allowing the stalkers and bullies into their lives.

Does anyone else think the recent spate of sport celebrities grumbling about their jobs and managers on Twitter is slightly dumb! I don’t think it’s possible to get a more public forum than social media sites (especially when you are famous and probably being followed by thousands of people!!) to slag off your boss! Silly is quite clearly a massive understatement! Any normal person would probably have been given a warning by their boss about their misconduct but not a celebrity, just a very public apology! It leads to you to consider what else can social media sites lead to!

With the recent increase in the use of social media, and the increase in mobile phone technology since the last election, the question has been asked many time – was the recent general election an Internet election? For me, the answer has to be an overwhelming no. Although there was great fervor around the use of Twitter and Facebook during the run-up to the election, it did not really do anything to influence voters, nor the politicians themselves. In fact, the only affect this had was to get social media addicts bickering amongst themselves online.

There was one thing that made me believe that the next general election (assuming that we can get out of being ‘hung’ without another election this year) might be more online. The disgusting fact that so many people were unable to vote at local voting stations leads to one obvious conclusion – allow people to vote online. We can currently do everything extremely securely online from shop, send videos and contact old friends, so why can’t we vote. This is something that must be in place in the future to avoid the debacle of queues of people past 10pm on election day!

Well, who would have though it? Google has recently changed the structure of its search results by including its search options in a bar on the left hand side of the screen. This has annoyed many people (see how many results you get by searching for “remove Google sidebar”!) and is even more annoying for users of iGoogle – with limited screen space, the forced inclusion of search options has proved to annoy most users.

This change has come as a direct copy of the Bing search structure. Bing have shown their search options to users since launch. Google has taken this and duplicated it in their latest version. I think that this shows one thing – that people fear change. Users of Bing have quite happily accepted the sidebar quite happily as it has always been like this. However, those Google users (who obviously number in their billions!) have reacted badly to a change in the appearance of their search engine of choice. The lesson here – if it ain’t broke….!

The austere and antiquated approach by the organisers of the US Masters Golf tournament means that most viewers cannot watch any coverage of the event until well into the day’s play. The restriction has been annoying me immensely for many years, with my excitement for one of the greatest tournaments in the world (most American’s would probably say THE greatest) being curtailed by the fact that I cannot watch every ball.

However, if the approach to television rights may be slightly antiquated, the approach to online coverage certainly isn’t. For a number of years we have been able to watch coverage of ‘Amen Corner’ live on the BBC website. However, this year I noticed that the official Masters site was allowing users to watch key moments very shortly after they happened live. They also offered the chance to follow certain players live around the course. All of this means that the various online teams should be applauded for doing their best to provide that which we have been missing for many years!