Then you’re certainly not alone. In tough times past Hollywood, fiction writers and the entertainment industry as a whole have tended to do rather well as people seek to escape the harsh realities of life.

This time round folks are flocking to the internet to help forget their troubles, according to a recent study out of America.

The report entitled The Internet and the Recession published by The Pew Internet and American Life Project, a not-for-profit research organisation in the USA, shows that three quarters of Internet users have been going online to relax and take their minds off pressing economic issues.

To read the rest of this, my last ever weekly Tech Talk column, click here.

Related articles by Zemanta

• ISPs End Anti-Piracy Talks With Entertainment Industry (torrentfreak.com)
• Online Video Watching Doubled Since 2006? (viralblog.com)

But today, as I booted up the old desktop I suddenly remembered…I’m not doing that anymore.

That’s right. Next week will be my last weekly Tech Talk newspaper column; I told the editor a few weeks ago that I’m not going to be able to continue to  contribute each week.

I’m just too busy these days and with some recent changes at Strive PR, keeping the column going just doesn’t make sense.

It’s not that I haven’t enjoyed it.  Writing is the best part of my job, and often the weekly column is the only writing I get to do these days (which is probably why I’ve kept it up as long as I have).  But something has to give.

The good news is that I’ve agreed to continue to write the occasional contributed column going forward. So I’ll not be disappearing from the pages entirely.  Watch this space!

Two-thirds of teen respondents admitted to inserting information straight from the internet into school work without actually reading or changing it.

Perhaps even more worryingly, almost a third (28.5 per cent) deemed this as acceptable practice despite recognising that such behaviour is considered plagiarism.

Commenting on the results, Andrew Kakabadse, professor of international management development at Cranfield School of Management said: ‘Our research shows that technology obsession hinders spelling skills, implicitly encourages plagiarism, and disrupts classroom learning.’

Click here to read the rest of this Tech Talk column.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Tech addiction ‘harms learning’ (news.bbc.co.uk)
• Internet and mobile phones are ‘damaging education’ (telegraph.co.uk)

Even though the pint-sized megalomaniac meant it as an insult, if he had been around today he would have probably harangued the Isle of Man for being nothing more than an island of e-tailers.

But how hard is it to set-up an online shop?

The answer is: not very.

‘But Sherrilynne’ I hear you ask yourself, ‘is it wise in this economic climate?’

Quite simply: yes. Online retailing, or e-tailing, is a growth industry in the UK, even in the depths of this icy recession.

Click here to read the rest of this Tech Talk column

Related articles by Zemanta

• Dead – the manx high street! (nickop.wordpress.com)
• Tesco to Launch Online Fashion Website This Fall (shoppingblog.com)

A newly published report projects that mobile advertising spending worldwide will grow by 74 per cent this year to $913.5 million and will accelerate in 2011 when advertisers are expected to boost mobile advertising spend as part of an overall shift to digital channels.

Media industry website Mediapost.com reports that by 2013, Gartner expects mobile ad spending to surpass $13 billion, with the Asia-Pacific region leading the way, followed by North America and Europe.

Click here to read the rest of this Tech Talk column.

Related articles by Zemanta

• iPhone users browse the net the most, look at ads the least (thisisherd.com)
• Mobile advertising – CPMs, CPCs, CTRs and CPAs – #mweb09 (mjelly.com)

This is the Facebook status line recently published by one not-so-motivated employee after a hard day’s toil.

Unfortunately for the staff member in question, the following comment is posted below hers.

‘Hi there, I guess you forgot about adding me on here? ….that **** stuff is called your job, you know, what I pay you to do? …you seem to have forgotten that you have two weeks left on your six month trial period. Don’t bother coming in tomorrow. I’ll drop your P45 in the post.’

This is a powerful example of ‘how not to behave’ for workers and employers alike.

Click here to read the rest of this Tech Talk column.

Related articles by Zemanta

• To friend, or not to friend: That is the workplace question (seattlepi.com)
• Head Hunting; a brand new way to recruit top talent (fonicmonkey.net)

What actually happened is that Twitter suffered from a malicious attack, it is said, by Russian hackers who were keen to silence a pro-Georgian blogger.  And Twitter wasn’t the only social network to feel the impact of the attack, Facebook and Livejournal were both a bit jittery from the onslaught.

This type of aggression online is nothing new.  Known as a ‘distributed denial of service’ (DDoS), hackers have been carrying these attacks almost since the birth of the Internet.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Georgian Targeted In ‘Twitpocalypse’ Attack Vows To Blog On (wired.com)
• Attacks on social networks are on the rise, report says (seattlepi.com)

Researching EU regulations, speaking at community events, choosing domain names for clients.

These are just three things that have been keeping this PR busy over the past week.  It’s the variety that keeps the job interesting.  I’d not been involved in domain names for quite some time, so it seemed prudent to review the basics.

I thought I’d share the learning here because in this day and age just about everybody in business, whether you are a baker or a banker, should own a domain name.

Click here to read the rest of this tech Talk column.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Compare Domain Prices Before You Buy With Domparison (techie-buzz.com)
• Rivals bid to snatch green domain (news.bbc.co.uk)

Related articles by Zemanta

• Mobile Coupon Users Want More Junk Food (marketingvox.com)

She was quite sure that no one could have access; no one knew her password. So how did it happen then? Had someone used some sophisticated software to break the code to get in? Probably.

I asked her a few questions and the likely cause quickly revealed itself. She posts her email address on Facebook. Her date of birth is also posted on Facebook. She’d been on Twitter on her recent birthday discussing the celebrations. Her password was her date of birth. So you can see how the hacker got the information required to get into Hotmail.

It could have been worse when you think that people often use the same password on multiple sites, such as their bank, credit cards and shopping sites. Thankfully my friend did not use her date of birth on any other account. But her innocent participation in two of the most popular social networks left her, and her contacts, at risk.

It could happen to anybody really, and the ramifications to both an individual and the employing organisation can be profound. However, here are some simple steps you can take to protect yourself, your systems and your business.

Here are some tips on keeping your passwords safe:

-Pick a password that is meaningless. Not your address, your mother’s maiden name nor the name of your dog. A hacker can find this information almost effortlessly, especially if you’re on Facebook, MySpace or Twitter.

-Use a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, symbols and numbers. This complicates things for hackers.

-Choose long passwords. The longer, the better, because it’s more difficult to crack.

-Don’t use the same password forever. One good idea is to make a routine of changing it the first day of each month.

-Never use the same password on multiple accounts. Use a different password for each online account.

-Never write your passwords down and never give them out to anyone.

On the surface these last two points, combined, might make the task seem somewhat unmanageable when you consider that today it’s not uncommon to have 20-30 or more website accounts.

But you don’t have to commit to memory dozens of constantly-changing passwords. There are some very clever software products out there, many of them free, to help you generate random passwords and remember them.

I like Roboform. Developed by Siber Systems Inc. it’s available for many web browsers, but mainly supports Internet Explorer, Firefox and Netscape and there are versions for many hand held devices too. It does not yet support Apple Macintosh nor Linux system, but there are lots of products out there which do.

Thinking back, I wrote my first ever article on avoiding hack attacks way back in 1992, when I was producing a staff newsletter for a large corporation. The advice has changed little since then. You just need to use good common sense and avoid succumbing to human nature.

But if your Hotmail or other email account is compromised, the very first thing you should do is change your password to something stronger.

Then you should immediately run both virus and spyware scans to make sure the hacker hasn’t left anything nasty or malicious behind. Check that your auto responder and email signature have not been tampered with and no spam messages have been added. Then don’t forget to let your email providers support team know about the problem.

If yours is not an isolated incident, they might need to take steps at their end to plug a security hole. And, no matter how tempted you are to find out who has victimised you and your contacts, don’t click through to the site the spammer is flogging.

You already know it’s not legitimate; there is no need to risk further viruses or give spammers a good payday.

So people expect Virgin to provide quality, innovative products and services and when Ryan Air hinted that they’d consider charging for the use of the toilet on their aircraft, people might have laughed at the suggestion, but no one was surprised.

Branding problems start when the companies behind successful brands do something that goes against the grain.  So when British Airways’ launch of Heathrow Terminal Five was such a fiasco, people were surprised and lost confidence in a brand they’d previously trusted.

And when social network Facebook issued news terms and conditions there was an immediate outcry among users, a flood of negative media coverage and a somewhat embarrassing climbdown by the company which quickly reinstated the original terms of use. The problem for Facebook was that they’d greatly misjudged their community and indeed, this is surprising.

That Facebook’s fundamental mission is to empower individuals to communicate and build relationships, makes it difficult to understand why company executives tried to impose new rules of engagement without consultation of their key stakeholders, their millions of users.  Click here to read the rest of this Tech Talk column.

Luckily enough, part of the proposal was that I try out a new iPhone!  So off I ventured down Strand Street to call in at the Manx Telecom shop to pick up a loaner.

And as soon as I had it my hands, I was already developing a crush. Click here to read the rest of this Tech Talk column.

Last year there was an increase in the adoption of all social computing technologies, and now brands are moving beyond the experimentation stage and are employing new strategies focused on delivering real business impact for 2009.

Click here to read the rest of this Tech Talk column.

Related articles by Zemanta

• How to Reach Baby Boomers with Social Media (readwriteweb.com)

THE United States Patent Office was established in 1790 and the very first patent was issued to a gentleman named Samuel Hopkins who patented a process for making potash, a type of potassium compound used to make soap.  The patent was signed by President George Washington and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson.

Since that time the US Patent Office has issued millions of patents and it’s no coincidence that when it comes to the most patents achieved, IT brands top the list.

The first organisation to break the 4,000 patent barrier, IBM Corp is at number one.

Samsung holds the number two slot followed by Canon at number three. Microsoft is fourth and rounding out the top five is Intel.
Protection of innovation is their stock in trade.

Click here to read the rest of this Tech Talk column.