According to Greenlight BP has bought-up big on Google and Yahoo search terms in an effort to improve its public relations after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

There is a woman that haunts the Stones Corner Hotel, my local watering hole. She is a blow-up doll version of Marilyn Monroe. Not to be taken seriously. Perhaps even pitied. In the old days of search engines, the blow-up doll versions of Marilyn Monroe could get equal ranking with the real Marilyn Monroes, because the search engines believed whatever was in their advertising, otherwise called metadata.

One of our client sites was recently hacked to promote pharmaceuticals – the so-called “pharma hack”.

The Internet is forcing its way into the mother of parliaments with both sides in the UK proposing to require parliamentary debates on epetitions which gain more than a certain number of signatures.

Accountability and transparency means that most government agencies are fastidious (at least in theory) at recording as much as they can of interactions between them and the public. Ideally you will have detailed and accurate records which are readily available to the client citizen. So social networking sites pose a particular challenge.

We’re big fans of open government at Internet Thinking, but I don’t think we’d advise any of our clients to go as far as they have in open.alabama.gov.

Australia ranks fourth in the world for business Internet service after USA, Japan and Singapore, but before Hong Kong, England, Canada and Korea according to a survey by serviced office providers Servcorp.