The recent row over Facebook’s proposed new terms of service illustrates why catch-all ‘rights grab’-style terms are wholly inappropriate for the era of open collaboration and portable data. A huge, rapidly-co-ordinated backlash by users and privacy campaigners forced Facebook to throw out plans to make its (already unpopular) terms apply in perpetuity, even if users [...]

A recent survey of 950 HR professionals and business managers reveals almost a third check up on employees and job candidates by looking at what they post on social networking sites. About a quarter say they have been put off hiring someone because of what they’ve found, with drunken photographs and use of obscenities wrinkling [...]

In my last blog, I raised questions about the potential or otherwise of managing crowdsourcing activities in Web 2.0 internal and external organisational environments. Last year a Demos study suggested that companies should not assume that networking on Facebook, Bebo, and Myspace was a waste of employees time. Demos noted that firms are increasingly using [...]

Tim Weber is business editor of the BBC News Online site, possibly the most popular news source on the Internet. He has been blogging recently from the World Economic Forum in Davos, and I thought the Exchange audience might be interested in an article he just posted on Friday.
Tim’s article is a great overview of [...]