The government has rowed back from its commitment to spend £50m over three years educating the young people of Britain about sexual health. There is a quiet epidemic of chlamydia amongst the young people of Britain. The UK has one of the highest infection rates in the world, with over 1% of 16-19 year olds being infected. Untreated chlamydia can cause infertility in young women. This decision not to spend Continue reading →

Nathan Gilliatt, writing in his Net-Savvy Executive blog reports on a recent case where Hasbro’s tracking of Amazon product reviews alerted them to a choking-danger from a popular toy. The product was swiftly withdrawn. The article observes that the level of monitoring required to stay across Amazon reviews is high, but that the intelligence can be vital. Gilliatt comments that without RSS feeds from the review pages, monitoring Amazon reviews Continue reading →

A good piece by Andrew Gumbel in the Independent shows how the US mid-term elections have highlighted how scrutinised politicians are.  The scrutiny is no longer the job of the media pundits on TV, but of bloggers and commenators pointing at clips on YouTube.

TV executive Andy Duncan yesterday pointed out that if Google continues to generate the same proportion of its revenue from the UK (it generated a massive 15% here in the first six months of its current financial year) it will net $1.57bn this year alone and will overtake ITV as the single largest recipient of advertising dollars within two years. These numbers are extraordinary given the slenderness of most brands’ Continue reading →

Reuters reports that US Intelligence is using wikis for knowledge sharing. “The office of U.S. intelligence czar John Negroponte announced Intellipedia, which allows intelligence analysts and other officials to collaboratively add and edit content on the government’s classified Intelink Web.” It sounds like a spook version of Wikipedia.