Law firm Reed Smith is helping businesses to navigate the legal ins and outs of social networking with a new task force and the publication of a 10-chapter whitepaper aimed at preventing problems before they start.

The white paper can be accessed for free. It looks at the legal problems businesses and non-profit organisations can encounter when using sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube for marketing and advertising purposes and how they might be avoided.

Racist comments celebrating the abuse of ethnic minority flower sellers on dedicated pages of popular social networking sites have been condemned.

The ability to retweet on Twitter was already available and has been mostly of use to those in business situations who could take advantage of their followers retweeting their promotions. This has been drastically changed with the retweet feature now being in a simple to use button under any of your feeds tweets.

What kind of technology does the modern multimedia reporter need to master – and where is the boundary these days between the professionals and amateurs?

Note that mobile advertising was such a small part of total advertising, that by any analyst, for 2008, mobile ads delivered less than 1 percent of all global advertising revenues. It is a tiny fraction even when compared to the interactive advertising budets – massively overshadowed by internet advertising – roughly speaking 10 times bigger. So if we are moving from such a small base, it is 'relatively easy' to grow at a high annual growth rate. Still, mobile advertising has been having a 'coming out party' this year.

Over the past decade, Amazon.com and eBay have continued to dominate the online retail market in the United States. However, there have been signs that more social and distributed forms of online shopping are gaining traction. eBay, in particular, is beginning to lose ground.

Social media wouldn’t be social media without people and Ged Carroll sees 2010 as a time when more people start thinking about how we deal with the trust-based issues that social media throws up. Social media allows people to be more connected, but also affects the fabric of society as we relate to each other in different ways.