So, we're probably all in agreement that jobhunting is not quite as straightforward and delightful as we'd like it to be - and it's for this reason that it gives us great pleasure to announce the launch of Letterbanc, a new service designed to make the whole job search and application process a little quicker and less painful for one of the sectors where it is currently most challenging: academia and research.

Letterbanc is simple. First, it matches your profile information with information about internships, scholarships, and academic funding (it's not a general job site like fish4jobs or Monster, but instead focuses on a sector where available money for posts is rarely advertised on traditional job services). Then, once you've been matched to appropriate opportunities for your preferences, Letterbanc really comes into its own by speeding up the whole application process with its services for requesting and storing the letters of recommendation which are so essential for this type of application.

These letters can then be thoroughly checked (either by you or, if the recommendation letter is confidential, a Letterbanc expert will check it for you) and sent out at a moment's notice. In essence, Letterbanc is a one-stop shop for finding funding opportunities from academic, and other similar or affiliated, organisations, which enables you to store and send out all relevant documents with a few clicks - rather than the traditional process whereby you wait for some random coincidence to discover an opportunity and then scramble around chasing former teachers for a reference each time you need one.

So, if this sounds like it could improve your jobhunting experience, head over to Letterbanc and try it today - it is free to use initially and only becomes a paying service once you are actually storing and sending documents. I would also mention the lovely user interface and clean design - but since we built the thing, that might come across as blowing one's own trumpet, so we'll leave you to be the judge on that one...

Anyway, we'd like to thank all our staff who have worked hard to deliver this project and also our clients, Christopher Omran and  Daniel Zoughbie who is a TED fellow known for his interesting work on using social networks to improve healthcare in challenging environments and a post-doctoral scholar to boot, whose own academic experience has been key in identifying the issues Letterbanc aims to address.

You probably recognise these kind of tweets because they are also common on Facebook as uninteresting status updates proclaiming that the user has just performed some sort of mundane activity, in a mundane and uninteresting way. In essence, there is nothing worth sharing here and, unless you are a super celebrity (with a very devoted following) most other twitter users won't care to receive such tweets. (The other exception is if you are a very talented writer/thinker who can make anything and everything seem interesting - in which case you don't need any advice from me on how to be successful with twitter).

The problem is that new or inexperienced twitter users sometimes don't know what else to tweet - which is why they either look around them, or into the past 5 minutes of their life, in order to find some potential content for a tweet. This is the same as walking around in the street and telling people 'I want some chips' or 'Can't wait for Christmas' - there's nothing wrong with this particularly except for the fact that those statements/utterances, however valid and true, are not likely to interest anyone else (again if you are Madonna or Britney Spears, then that would be an exception to the rule).

So, tip number one is to avoid the mundane statements about doing something mundane. Either the sandwich needs to be interesting - or your thoughts on it do. Both is even better, while neither is a waste of everyone's time.

The next point is to think about why you are communicating on twitter and with whom. If people are likely to follow you for professional reasons, then you might want to focus the majority of your tweets on related matters. If this is not why you joined twitter, then that's fine - but maybe make this clear in your info description (e.g. 'Joe Bloggs, CEO of a major corporation and keen fisherman. Follow me for thoughts about my favourite hobby' or something of the sort).

Finally, remember that if you want to get tweeting, the most interesting results will come from tweets that promote engagement from other users - and that the best way to do this is to offer something interesting or unique. Only users with established public prominence (whether celebrities, politicians, or high-profile companies) can count on getting users simply because of who they are. For the rest of us, here are two very successful twitter users who are good examples of how to either offer a unique concept (@shitmydadsays) or a variety of consistently interesting personal tweets (@stephenfry).

Anyway, as I said in the last post - the best way to get the most out of twitter is to use your intuition and play around with it and see what works for you. Happy tweeting!

1. Ask yourself this question: What do I want to get from my twitter experience? Do you want to use it for purposes of following all the latest news and developments in your professional area? Or maybe to keep up to date with what's happening in relation to your hobbies and interests? Do you want your experience to be one-way (i.e. you only want receive info) or would you like to also participate with your own tweets? If you choose the latter of those last two options, what is the purpose of your participation? For fun and leisure or for professional reasons such as building a social media profile, getting noticed by potential employers, or something else entirely?

You don't of course have to choose only one of these options - and indeed there are far more potential uses for twitter than the few mentioned above. However, one problem that users consistently find with twitter (as we shall also see in the next post) is that their experience is sometimes rather flat and doesn't quite fit with the rave reviews that some other experienced users are espousing. One common reason for this is that users haven't considered any of the above questions at all.

2. Avoid excessive noise. Some people/organisations/companies tweet endlessly and these users can quickly clog up your display so that they drown out the full range of follows that you have chosen. For users like this it is especially important to decide whether or not it is worth the bother, since many other tweets will simply get lost by the quick turnover of these very active accounts (news organisations especially function in this way, so if you follow the news using other apps/websites - maybe don't do so on twitter as well unless you're specifically focused on this one area).

3. Avoid duplication. This point is connected to the above and is again aimed to improve the quality of experience on twitter. For example, if you import all your Facebook friends into twitter and follow them all, you will inevitably end up with a lot of crossover between status updates and tweets (many people post the same thing for both). Again, not all users do this but, if you are an active Facebook user, you might want to seriously consider whether it's worth using twitter to connect with the exact same people - and in the exact same way - as you do on Facebook. This is something to be especially careful with when you're prompted to import contacts from other services (Hotmail, MSN, Gmail, Yahoo) upon joining twitter.

4. If you want to get involved by writing your own tweets - and especially if you are doing so from a professional position - then you'll need to consider the way you present yourself on the network. Choose a profile photo and a short description that makes sense to the people you'd like to communicate with. You might also want to limit the number of tweets unrelated to professional matters, otherwise people who follow you for work-related reasons might decide it's not worth the bother (maybe make a separate work account if you are highly active user on this front). Also, remember to add a disclaimer in your description that the views of your twitter account do not reflect your employer's views - it can help save a whole lot of hassle.

5. Remember that most other twitter users are also other people (they far outnumber organisations and companies on the network). The service is therefore at its best when you build connections with people that you otherwise couldn't reach so easily and build a communicative network that you don't have on Facebook or LinkedIn. Twitter is a bit like other social networks, but it also has many unique features which are most evident if you try to use it a bit differently than you would those other services.

Anyway, you might already have figured out that the best way to really get into twitter is just to start using it for yourself. The longer you play around with it, the more logical and intuitive it will seem and you'll probably be better positioned to work out exactly why you're there and how to make the most of it. Next time, I'll discuss the problem of 'I just ate a sandwich' type tweets, why, and how, to avoid them.

The frequency with which scandal erupts around a misjudged tweet or an offhand comment, caught on someone's iPhone and uploaded to Youtube, suggests that social media practically entraps people into such costly blunders with its pretty user interfaces and seemingly inconsequential virtual nature - and then the real world mess catches up with you. Last week for example, an English footballer was sacked by his club after posting a homophobic tweet in response to a TV show he was watching. I picked that example at random from my memory, but there were at least three or four others just from last week here in the UK (Ed Miliband, Diane Abbott, Tom Harris, Wojciech Szczesny etc).

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that we know better than ever what people are thinking - perhaps even to a detrimental degree - wherein thoughtless comments which people might not otherwise say in the company of others, get instantly shared with thousands. I'm not, however, here to debate the philosophical implications of all this. Instead, I'd just like to give a quick example where this insight into public figures' real thoughts can be quite illuminating.

Rupert Murdoch has recently joined twitter and has been using the service to share his views on SOPA (which he supports fully) and piracy (which he doesn't). His recent comments have now been excellently 'storified' by journalist and blogger Jeff Jarvis, who breaks down Murdoch's rants against Google and Barack Obama (in the wake of today's setbacks for SOPA) and illustrates the fundamental problem facing Murdoch in the internet age: he doesn't understand the web.

Ok, so this is hardly news (there was the small matter of Murdoch's News Corp. running Myspace, then the world's most successful social network, into the ground) but nonetheless, since usually his personal views reach us in a highly mediated form via his spokespeople, his media outlets and his press officers, we've never really had as direct evidence of Murdoch's web views as we have now.

The point is that, while we should be wary of reading too much into 140 character tweets, what is clear is that Murdoch personally does not display a huge degree of enthusiasm for the innovation that publishing industries are being forced into by the web and would prefer to merely port existing (but increasingly outdated models) over to the web - and protect them with prohibitive legislature.

Look at those tweets and ask yourself - would you invest in the man who wrote them if he came to you asking for funds for his web start-up business? Does he seem like someone who is gonna do something clever or new online?

The answer probably would be no. Murdoch doesn't need your money anyway (he has plenty of it already in all likelihood), but what his recent tweets illustrate, for me at least, is that he is involved with the web purely out of necessity and hasn't developed a massively sophisticated view of how the internet works. If I wanted some creative ideas and fresh views on the online publishing landscape for example, I probably wouldn't call him.

Who, for example, are the Concerned Women of America - and why do they support SOPA so much? What about the mysterious Centre for Individual Freedom? Americans for Tax Reform? Let Freedom Ring?

Well, in case you hadn't guessed from the names of these organisations, they're all US right-wing pressure groups and their presence on the SOPA list of supporters worries me. It worries me because I'm deeply suspicious of why they would invest such extensive lobbying energy supporting SOPA if all they cared about was internet piracy. Movie studios and record labels have obviously vested financial interests in the internet piracy debate and thus it is obvious why they might spend time and (lots of) money supporting anything which might even possibly curb piracy, at least in the US.

Why on earth do these right-wing pressure groups care so much about SOPA? This is the question that worries me in relation to the anti-democratic threat of SOPA (covered in my previous post). In short, I don't have any answers as to why these groups have chosen to get involved with SOPA, but I will provide a list of those signatories that I consider most alarming, and why:

• American Bankers' Association - Powerful lobby group for the financial services industry, representing many of the largest US banks. Anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of how the 2008 financial crisis came about should be deeply suspicious of any effort by finance lobbyists to influence US legislature...
• Americans for Tax Reform - Pressure group who demand economic de-regulation and flat, low, tax rates (so that basically a millionaire pays the same rate as janitor). In other words, people who share the same ideological position as the ABA above, advocating the interests of the financial services industry at the expense of regulation and transparency.
• Centre for Individual Freedom - This organisation claims to be non-partisan, which seems slightly incongruous with the incessant negative coverage of Democratic President Barack Obama, which is obviously anything but neutral or balanced (click over to get a flavour for yourself - my favourite is where they quote an anonymous tweet about Obama's 'corrupt style of governing' - a great way to circumvent the legal obligation to substantiate your stories).
• Concerned Women of America - Another openly right-wing organisation with various shocking statements to its name. My favourite is their defence of Pastor Scott Lively as a man who 'speaks the truth'. Lively is the co-author of a book which claims that Nazism's extremist excesses were actually caused by homosexuals.
• Let Freedom Ring - Another right wing pressure group which advances the level of ignorance on various issues (especially economic ones - in which 'Growth' and Government 'Spending' are shown to be diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive, and George Bush is hailed as an economically successful president, despite presiding over the reckless build-up to, and financial crisis of 2008. Incidentally, Barack Obama, is blamed for the crisis by virtue because he presides over the fall-out).

Anyway, I'll leave it there - I could have gone into more detail with almost all of the organisations above, but there's little need since a quick glance over at their websites will quickly reveal to you their ideological positions. I'll finish on a simple question - why do these right-wing groups, who between them combine traditional American religious conservatism (anti-abortion, anti-gay etc) with extreme economic neo-liberalism (you know, the exact reason why we've had yet another economic crisis - leaving millions of people without homes, jobs, or savings), want to support SOPA so much? Is it because they have suddenly become crusaders for copyright and intellectual property, and decided to expend time and energy fighting to protect it? Or could there be other ways in which SOPA might be desirable for them?

Foodsplore helps users to discover great new restaurants and cafes by combining location based services with social networking. You can see where your friends are eating and what they thought of the food, service, ambience and everything else thanks to Foodsplore's community feedback features. And, with the aid of our new iPhone app (Android and Blackberry versions coming soon), finding a great snack or meal while out and about has never been easier.

Simply fire up the app, see what's available in your area and what your friends (and other users) have to say about it. Or, if instead you're just keen to discover something new to tingle your tastebuds, Foodsplore also helps you find places you'll love in advance - so no more finding out the hard way that a place isn't for you (paying through the nose for a meal you didn't enjoy, having a nice occasion ruined by below-par service, or whatever else).

As well as location based searching, you can also find new eating-out options by food type, deals, or glance at the social calendar feature which shows you where your friends are planning to try in the next month. As well as tips, users can share their experiences with photos and location-based check-ins, all of which are aggregated in a 'Splat' score - which gives you information as to how detailed and successful someone's recommendations are. In short, whether you're a foodie looking to explore new experiences or simply need somewhere decent for lunch in an unfamiliar town, Foodsplore is for you.

The Foodsplore team will head to SXSW Interactive for the 5-day conference in March 2012, along with 33 other hand-picked UK digital start-ups as part of the UK Trade and Investment mission. Here at Etondigital we're very excited for Zainab and Foodsplore and will have more coverage of the conference when it comes around in eight weeks. In the meantime, head over to Foodsplore.com, or check out the iPhone app in the Apple app store, to find out more right now. Sign up with an email address, or simply log in with facebook, and get exploring!

Don't worry though, the feature is not compulsory so your profile will still look the same as it did when you last left it. At the moment, if you wish to enable timeline you need to head over to the intro page and click 'get timeline'. This will then take you to a preview of your timeline profile which is only visible to you for the first 7 days (while you work out what the hell is going on) before then going live to everyone else. Alternatively, if you're already happy with how things look, you can click the 'publish now' button and send it live immediately. (Anyone struggling with it should check out this little screenshot-featuring guide).

Moreover, there's also the mobile version to contend with which is accessible for Android 1.8.1. users and also through the mobile HTML5 facebook site. It's almost the same as the 'normal' version except that there's no activity log (and hence no privacy control for posts etc). For mobile users keen to get a little intro, I recommend this handy guide over at Techcrunch.

Personally, my initial thoughts on timeline are these:

1. It's a huge great big mess (or at least it is when you first enable it). The main problem is this two-column design which feels awkward to me at least, although maybe I'll get used to it. I'm sure once you take the time to edit things and decide what you want displayed it'll all look much better. Right now though I'll just say exactly what I'm thinking - I haven't seen such a messy, 'scroll-y' and chaotic social networking profile since the old days of Myspace custom profile editors...

2. The Activity Log is really quite good for giving you an accurate overview of how you actually use facebook (which the old profile didn't do very well). Plus, it's also quite good for managing your facebook use in terms of privacy since you can easily set the controls for who sees what in terms of your activity. That's actually a first for facebook - making privacy controls easier to understand and use - so well done for that.

3. Did I mention it was scroll-y? It really is quite scroll-y... and not in a good way.

4. With the whole concept of timeline, Facebook might actually get users to commit even more info to their profiles - namely stuff from their pre-facebook days. Consider it an invitation to 'back-fill' into facebook all the stuff you did before the network was around. This could obviously work out very well for the network and their potential financial profits from delivering advertising etc.

Anyway good luck with it. I'll leave it there for now since I'm sure everyone is too busy fiddling around with it to read too much now. Let me know what you think once you've had a little gander at it.

After a couple of days it was proving so successful in driving fan engagement that the team's owners asked the fan to hand over the account in return for courtside season tickets. Then they reconsidered - courtside season tickets and a job as social media manager for the team.

Now that's not a bad return considering the total time expended by the creative fan totalled only a few hours and cost him him nothing financially. And it's not only social media roles that get filled with the aid of social media activities. It's all kinds of roles...

Since 89% of employers claim to use social media in their recruitment efforts (up by 6% on last year) it is increasingly essential to have an 'employer-friendly' social media presence if you're looking for work.

The there's the concept of the 'twesume' - the 140 character twitter-based resume. There's a great post over at Mashable giving tips on how to maximise the potential of this idea - something which might only take 10 minutes to do but could be key in finding leads on the kind of jobs that would suit you.

Finally, in this little round-up of social media based job hunting tips and resources, there's some very handy analytics from Linked-In doing the rounds at the moment which reveal the most over-used words that users describe themselves with on their profiles (in English-speaking countries 'creative' came top of the list for example).

This can give you a good idea of how much your profile and CV actually stands out from the crowd (without having to stalk 100 other users to get an impression) and also an idea of what employers are looking for - i.e. what works.

Anyway, I'll leave it there for now but will return to this subject at regular intervals in the future as it becomes an increasingly prominent manner in which social media is shaping the world of work, even for those who don't work anywhere near the IT sector. Plus, in these cash-strapped and job-anxious times it's probably useful to have all the help we can get...

Overall there is something disconcerting about looking at the picture in that it's hard to connect the two people in question (the one in the photo and the one created in your mind by all their later success and fame) and really believe that they are indeed the same person.

Or perhaps it's like seeing a baby photo of someone like Cl. Gaddafi or George Bush (either, take your pick) - men who have so much blood on their hands, to the point where sometimes it's hard to remember that they once too were also children. Well, this is a bit like that. A bit.

Basically, this lengthy pre-amble is all geared towards sending you off to look at a Mashable gallery of the launch versions of the sites which now dominate the web (Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon etc).

It's an interesting and quite wierd experience (not only for the reasons above) because it reminds me of the fact that not so very long ago these absolute tech giants were just young start-ups or student projects, with super limited functionality and sometimes pretty shoddy UIs (although in those web 1.0 days this was less of a sin than it is today).

You are also reminded of the fact that there is little in those original projects that guaranteed they would become the successes they are today - the journey from there to here was not prefigured by some Eureka invention but instead required constant work and sound decision making (not that they've never made mistakes).

Anyway, the final thought is one that returns a little to the rambling opening paragraphs of this post. The reason the launch-versions seem so odd to look at (particulalry twitter and Amazon) is down to the fact that we're so used to seeing them in their succesful later form almost every day that we probably forget how instantly recognisable their UIs and brand logos are to us.

The odder the launch versions, with their (generally) lumpy ugly UIs, look to you - probably the more ingrained is your association of Google with the white screen, search box and multi-colour logo - or Facebook with the blue and white colour combo and that lower case font... Soon you might realise that you spend longer staring at that UI than your parents' or childrens' faces...

(N.B. That last bit isn't meant to sound dystopian or anything, it's just an observation).

The confusion was a nightmare for journalists and judges and ultimately benefited nobody. Arguably the biggest victim was Ryan Giggs, although considering some of the details of his alleged extra-marital activities it's hard to feel too sorry for the man.

But there's a similarly confusing scenario playing itself out over in the US at the moment, which is far more troubling. First off, check out this blog post over at the bankruptcy corruption blog. Done it?

Good. Now consider this: that post is looking set to cost its author $2.5 million after an Oregon Judge decided it was defamatory and that blogger Crystal Cox should pay this ridiculous sum in damages.

Fair enough you might say - some of what she writes is pretty strongly worded, and not exactly flattering of its subject Kevin Padrick and Obsidian Finance. You might say that, until you learn on what grounds this fine has been issued.

The problem apparently is that Crystal Cox's writing in this post has a very factual tone. If these negative statements were presented as trolling or simply wacko conspiracy opinion then that'd (probably) be fine according to the law. In fact, a number of other posts in the case were thrown out of consideration by the judge for precisely this reason - they weren't as factual in tone.

Here's where the problem arises: Cox's blog is factual in tone precisely because it's based on research and insider sources - she didn't simply pluck these fantasies out of her head. A key aspect of why she has access to such information is that she protects her sources anonymity, something which many journalists of all types will recognise as standard practice. Those who work for a local newspaper would have done things exactly the same as Cox did - and would hence have faced no punishment from the very same judge. 

The problem for Cox is that, since the judge ruled her not to be a 'real' journalist, she couldn't enjoy the same privilege that journalists enjoy of reporting factually based on evidence from sources without naming them. Cox must reveal the identity of her sources in order to prove her justification for writing so negatively about Obsidian finance in a factual manner - or she must pay damages for defamation.

So here are a few questions I have for Judge Marco Hernandez who presided over the case:

• What if Crystal Cox wrote for a group edited blog like Techcrunch? Would she then be considered as affiliated with a media organisation, thus a 'real' journalist and 'thus' legally protected to do her work? If the answer is yes, then at what point does a blog become a media organisation? Is it a matter of pageviews? Or number of authors? Number of posts?
• What if Crystal Cox reveals her earnings from such work, and the fact that her main income is from such activities? (n.b. I don't know whether this is or isn't the case). Is she then a journalist?
• What if Crystal Cox tries to dress more 'journalisty' - could she then be considered a journalist?
• What about the personal blog of a technical support worker employed by a major newspaper? They are 'affiliated' with an organisation, where does their blog stand? What about the personal blog of someone whose day job is to be a newspaper (or TV, or whatever) journalist? (Here's an interesting example of this)

Ok so this is kinda flippant - the point is that to use a definition of 'journalist' that essentially belongs in the 1980's is clearly not going to be workable in today's media environment. And in the meantime people like Crystal Cox get fined ridiculous sums like $2.5 million for having the honour to do what a professional journalist would do - protecting a whistle-blower's anonymity. Interestingly, Cox would probably have not received the fine had she been based in many of the other states of the US, since this legislation is put together at state level (perhaps a policy requiring re-consideration since the internet is a little bit less confined by state boundaries than abortion clinics are).

Until legislators catch up with how the web works today and not in 1999, it seems this potential confusion and chaos is here to stay for now. If you are a blogger, the best you can do right now is to try and inform yourself on the current state of play and hope you're covered by good practice (since in law you possibly won't be). If you are a US blogger your situation is unfortunately a little more perilous since libel and defamation laws are generally tighter than here in the UK. Here's a great resource from the Electronic Frontiers Foundation which should help you inform yourself of the current legal state of play. Some of the points will also be useful for UK based bloggers, as will guides such as this one. (I am not very well informed on non-English language resources I'm afraid, Sorry for non-UK/US bloggers). Good luck!