He says that he is innocent but will resign to “avoid distraction” according to the BBC.

Business Minister Ed Davey will replace him, but those in government hope he returns soon.

Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer said that there was enough evidence to bring criminal charges against both Mr. Huhne and Ms. Pryce.

“The essence of the charges is that between March and May 2003, Mr Huhne, having allegedly committed a speeding offence, falsely informed the investigating authorities that Ms Pryce had been the driver of the vehicle in question, and she falsely accepted that she was the driver,” he said.

Both are due to appear in court on February 16.

In a statement, Huhne said that he was innocent of the charge and intends to fight the charges in court. He said that he resigned to avoid distraction to both his duties as energy secretary and his upcoming trial. He will continue to serve his constituents in Eastleigh though.

Prime Minister David Cameron said that Huhne made the right choice in stepping down.

“I want to thank him for the very good work that he has done in government, both in helping to bring the coalition government together and as secretary of state for energy and climate change,” Cameron said.

Hunhe is entitled to a severance payment of £17,207. A prime minister spokesperson said that it was up to Hunhe in regards to the funds.

Of course, the Twitter reaction has varied from support for Huhne to the snark that Twitter is known and loved for.

The Telegraph is reporting that BT has concluded a trial run in Cornwall that offered high-speed fiber broadband to any home or business. They hope to make the technology, and speeds, available to the entire country by Spring of next year.

The current high-speed product is called “BT Infinity,” which upgraded the connection between a local telephone exchange and street telephone. The new process will upgrade the copper wiring between houses and street phones increasing the speeds.

BT makes the hefty claim that their new service has “the potential to transform the UK broadband landscape.” They will be able to offer speeds of 300Mbps to anywhere in BT’s fiber network area.

Those that want the service will have to pony up the upgrade cost for the new hardware. BT is also upscaling their existing broadband infrastructure so that those on BT Infinity will get 80Mbit/s instead of 40Mbit/s.

BT is currently upgrading its national broadband network and claims that two-thirds of the UK will have “superfast broadband” by 2014. With the help of government money, they can make that number rise to 90 percent.

The UK is investing £630 million in public money so that Britain will have “the best broadband network in Europe.”

The research, which polled 3000 adults, revealed that while the average adult freely divulges a string of personal details on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, most would not give friends or colleagues their PIN number.

Despite 86 per cent of adults saying they would never hand over their PIN to someone they know, one in twenty people have their home address visible on a social networking sites.

Similarly, whilst only five per cent of people would let their best mate have access to their PIN number, 50 per cent of respondents have their relationship status visible online. 28 per cent also have their partner’s name visible and 20 per cent have the name of their employer visible online.

Unbelievably nearly two thirds of people also have their date of birth on networking sites which is always a security question when telephoning banks or building societies.

Speaking on the findings Paul Wooding, Head of UK Public Sector for NetApp comments: “It’s ironic that so many people are cautious with friends and family when it comes to security details, yet include really personal data on social networking sites.”

“It’s really alarming that people have so much confidential information like a home address available on their Facebook profile. As soon as you update your profile saying you are off on holiday all your hundreds of friends and now potentially anyone searching on Google, will know your home is empty for the next few weeks.”

The poll also revealed that a blasé seven per cent of people said that the whole point of social networking sites was so people can keep track of you and know what you’re up to.

Although a quarter of people did admit that the amount of information they had freely available on the World Wide Web did sometimes worry them.

But when it comes to our nearest and dearest it’s a different story, with less than half of people trusting their partner with their PIN number for their main cash card.

But it’s not just our friends who we don’t trust – three quarters of people said they do not trust the government with their personal data and more than two thirds also said that they feel that the government acts like Big Brother, and knows far too much about them.

For more than half of Brits (52 per cent) the biggest bone of contention is the government having access to our medical details.

The next big issue for respondents was data records on salaries, which 20 per cent objected to being held by the powers that be. One in twenty British adults were also sensitive about the government holding information on the amount of benefits we receive.

These issues were reflected in the concern around the security of government data shown by the poll. 78 per cent of those polled advised that incidents of public sector workers losing laptops containing personal data on members of the public worried them, with medical information and then salary information being the items they are most worried about being leaked.

A spokesman for NetApp added: “The risks of the government data being leaked or lost is minimal to the risks of security lapses on social networking sites. People need to look after themselves and really think about the information they make visible.”

“Technology today means that organisations are well equipped to be able to store and manage data effectively. The fear is perhaps heightened because of high profile cases of data breaches but in reality many of us are sharing very personal and sometimes sensitive information with the whole world without giving it much thought.”

INFORMATION PEOPLE DIVULGE ON NETWORKING SITES
 
Full name: 92 per cent
Hometown: 62 per cent
Date of Birth: 59 per cent
Relationship status: 49 per cent
Secondary school: 40 per cent
Marital status: 33 per cent
University/College: 30 per cent
Partners name: 28 per cent
Employer: 20 per cent
Job title: 18 per cent
Parental status: 17 per cent
Primary school: 16 per cent
Children’s names: 9 per cent
Full address: 5 per cent

Comments

Now before going into this and making comparisons between the two reports I think it only fair to share a comment from one of our readers to the report regarding the USMC policy. Commenter Jason said

This ban has slowly been implemented across all Department of Defense systems. This is not just a Marine ban. This is strictly for government systems and in no way affects the systems used for morale. They are not saying the Marines cannot access Facebook or MySpace or Twitter on their time. They are saying that Marines cannot access these Social Networking sites while at work.

While deployed there is plenty of access to morale systems that can be used when off duty. I suppose it is one of those things where you have to be there to understand. This is being overhyped.

All service members are allowed to use any social networking site they choose. This article simply states that on government systems they will be blocked. It’s the same as your office blocking access to chat or porn or any other site that is NSFW. Or that they deem a waste of company resources or a threat to the security of the business.

Admittedly, I do not know the credentials of our commenter but it does sounds reasonable that the initial reaction to the ban may have been overstated or at least misunderstood.

According to the Telegraph the British military’s take on Twitter at least is quite different. Once again this is not a ‘critique’ of what is right or wrong in the use of social media by the military anywhere. What we look to explore is how social media is viewed and its ultimate impact on how we communicate which eventually impacts how we do business online.

So the British policy is categorized as a liberalization of the use for British troops which apparently had been tighter until now.

Ministry of Defence (MoD) said that British troops are no longer required to seek permission to use the sites but asks personnel to use common sense over the amount of detail revealed.

The MoD said it would actively sponsor soldiers who are willing to tweet or blog about life in the military, with tips for engaging an online audience.

“This about troops having a little more freedom, a little more autonomy. The MoD’s new common sense guidance allows service personnel to talk about themselves and their work online, within limits and with advice to protect their security, reputation and privacy”.

That does read a bit differently than the USMC’s policy for sure. Some might argue that it gives too much autonomy to each soldier but we would need to learn what the guidelines are in detail before saying that the British military is truly providing complete freedom. It doesn’t seem that British troops have social media ‘carte blanche’ when reading between the lines of their statements. Policies are only good as they are enforced so we’ll need to see this in action before a fair assessment can be made.

What are your thoughts on this and social media policies in general? How do you suggest that each organization arrive at the rules and regulations that can make social media effective while simultaneously ‘keeping the peace’?

Comments

The IAB and PricewaterhouseCoopers research demonstrates that mobile advertising has experienced an impressive and steady growth in the UK in an overall declining market. In 2008, as more brands trialed and embraced the medium, spending increased by a whopping 99.2% to $44 million. 

Mobile display advertising, which includes banners, in-game, text links and pre/post roll formats, and paid search,  accounted for around half ($22 million) of the overall spend.

"This study is a UK first and means the IAB can accurately prove and track how much marketers are spending on mobile," said Jon Mew, head of mobile at the Internet Advertising Bureau. "The sector is in its infancy but is considerably bigger than the market was expecting.  Thanks to these landmark figures we know the real value of the mobile advertising industry, and will now be able to chart the medium’s growth with confidence."

The study highlighted several factors as key drivers of the growth in mobile advertising: a bigger audience, a better mobile user experience, increased mobile internet and mobile socnet usage, better handsets, and a growing number of mobile marketing departments in media agencies across Britain.

"Over the past 12 months the marketplace has been buzzing with anticipation about this exciting new channel," said Guy Phillipson, chief executive of the IAB. "Now is the perfect time for brands to dip their toes in the water, to see for themselves how effective and complementary mobile advertising can be."

With the growing numbers of mobile marketers comes an increased demand for information and industry statistics. To meet this need the IAB is soon to launch a ‘How To’ guide on briefing, planning and executing campaigns and conducting research into the effectiveness of mobile advertising.

Email communications from Britain’s largest high street retailers were analyzed by dotMailer to see which company delivered the most effective campaign. Despite increased competition for share of consumers’ dwindling spending power, overall performance was disappointingly down on last year’s findings.

Marks and Spencer and jewelers H.Samuel jointly topped the leader board for the first time with scores of 81, moving up from fourth and 15th positions respectively. In second place came Ethical Superstore followed by Argos. Last year’s top placed store Topshop ranks joint fourth with John Lewis this year with 78 points.

Somerfield and H&M jointly replace Lidl at the bottom of the dotMailer’s leader board with just 48 points, followed by Schuh and Tog24.

The study revealed that basic elements of the retailers’ campaigns were letting them down. Incredibly, nearly three-quarters failed to personalize messages in the opening salutation, and over half neglected to incorporate any viral or forwarding element. Amazingly, just two retailers out of the 41 analyzed included social network links.  Enabling emails to be shared with a recipient’s network of friends not only increases already low forwarding-rates, but can help boost mailing lists as more people are exposed to a campaign.

Perhaps more crucially, some email messages were prone to be mistaken for spam, reflected in the overall low average scores in the technical category of ‘Renderability and Coding’. According to the study, as many as 19% of email recipients will assume email that hasn’t rendered properly in their inbox to be spam, making it essential that the coding and design of templates be tested in all relevant email clients.

“In the current economic climate and with marketing budgets being tightened, companies can reap dividends by focusing on their email marketing strategies and execution,” said Tink Taylor, dotMailer’s Business Development Director.

“Email offers a highly cost-effective, trackable and accountable way of communicating with prospects and customers. Spending more time investing in email best practice will reward retailers both now and long after the recession is over.”

All the areas highlighted above can easily be improved upon, resulting in better deliverability, open rates, click-throughs and, ultimately, improved ROI. If the recipient of an email can easily answer the following three questions, concludes the report, then the email marketer’s battle is already half won:

- Who is it from?

- What’s in it for me?

- What do I do next?

I’d like to add a fourth question:

- Who else do I know that would benefit from this?

dotMailer’s full report can be downloaded for free (registration required).

Rhys Blakely of the Times Online describes the UK as Facebook’s fastest-growing market, so the move is probably a wise one.  It may raise a few eyebrows, though – Facebook will apparently inhabit the center of Soho, which, if Wikipedia is to be believed, used to be more of a whore’s alley than a Silicon Valley.

Meh.  It looks like there are now plenty of places for Facebook employees to grab lunch and dinner, anyway.

Also, this expansion comes right as there’s word that Facebook could enter another round of financing (indeed, I owe a hat tip to Kara Swisher for both stories).  And by “enter another round of financing,” I mean “collect bags of money from the hundreds of firms and investors throwing them Facebook’s way.”  Land in London isn’t exactly cheap, so that aspect of the deal may work out nicely.

Whether or not having a London office will help Facebook’s UK market share simply remains to be seen.

Google and Oliver Williams, that is; Williams, who works for BBC Berkshire, constructed a Google Map to track the flooding.  “We’re trying to keep it updated around the clock with the latest flood warnings for Berkshire alongside photos, video and audio from visitors to the site and our own reporters,” he wrote following Ed Parsons’s coverage of the map.

Parsons acts as Google’s “Geospatial Technologist,” so maybe it’s not too surprising that he would deal with this development.   But bigmouthmedia and the Guardian Unlimited, which are based in the UK, have also taken note of Williams’s map.  Bobbie Johnson called it “a powerful example of how data can be pooled online and added to by individuals.”   Similar creations have since been made to show where safe drinking water can be found.

So Williams certainly deserves a pat on the back (as do the other maps’ authors).   As for Google’s role in all of this . . .  “May I say the Google Map is holding up remarkably well and serving exactly the purpose I had in mind – very flexible and brilliant for illustrating exactly which rivers are in trouble,” Williams wrote.

“My only gripe . . . is that there’s a limit of 100 markers before you get a second ‘page’ of them,” he continued.  “Then you have to move between pages to see the markers and that’s less than ideal, so I have to keep the number below 100.  But you can’t have it all, especially when it’s free!”   And especially, perhaps, when Google Maps was never designed to be a crisis-management tool.

Best wishes to Britain.

“[W]e profiled Google Image Search, the top website visited after Google in the UK,” announces Heather Hopkins, Hitwise UK’s vice president of research.  “More than three-quarters of UK visits to Google UK Image Search come from the Google search engine.  The website ranked #18 among All Categories of websites and it has ranked among the top 20 websites each week in the past year based on UK visits.”

Hopkins’s findings make sense – the average user isn’t likely to use different search engines for specialized purposes.  Heck, even the true technophile should find it easier to stick with just one engine (assuming the engine works well).  But Google’s dominance is always an impressive thing to behold.

“As you would expect, Google Image Search dominates the Graphics and Clip Art category, ranking #1 every week for the past two years,” the Hitwise VP continues.  “Google UK Image Search received 60.48% of UK visits to the Graphics and Clip Art category.  Combined with the dot com site, Google Images captured 69.09% of category visits.”

And there are no indicators that the trend will turn against the search engine giant; people seem content with its Image Search.  “Consumers spent an average of just over 10 minutes on the website last week, indicating that they are spending time viewing multiple images,” reports Hopkins.  Multiple images getting viewed, multiple sites performing well – it’s smooth sailing for Google in the UK.