Worldcrunch
BEIJING – Recently, pharmaceutical company Renhen Pharmacy went through a public relations nightmare after a doctor wrote on the popular Chinese micro-blogging site Weibo that its children’s cold medicine was dangerous. Could better preparation and response on Weibo have substantially mitigated the damage to Renhe’s image? On Jan. 21, a Weibo post about Renhe Pharmacy […]
President Kirchner lets loose on Twitter…
SYRIA WILL ATTEND 2ND ROUND OF GENEVA 2Syrian state television announced that the government will participate in the second round of the Geneva 2 peace conference, due to start Feb. 10, quoting Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad. The announcement came as a first group of 200 civilians is about to be evacuated from the city […]
CLARIN (ARGENTINA), EL NACIONAL (VENEZUELA) EL PAIS (Spain) Worldcrunch MADRID – Spain’s most widely circulated newspaper El País was forced Thursday to retract a story and image it had claimed showed Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez undergoing surgery. With information scant on the Venezuelan President, who is in Cuba for cancer treatment, the front-page story was […]
In his native Germany, Mr “Dotcom” is called by his real name, Kim Schmitz; but Germans joined with the rest of the world to see the roll-out of his new outsized Internet file-sharing site.
BBC, THE GUARDIAN (UK) Worldcrunch NEW YORK– Dan Brown, the bestselling author of the Da Vinci Code, is set to release a new novel on May 14. According to The Guardian, Dan Brown’s dapper, tweed-suited symbologist Robert Langdon, the man who cracked The Da Vinci Code and found The Lost Symbol, is about to embark […]
CHINA MEDIA PROJECT, SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST (Hong Kong), REUTERS Worldcrunch GUANGDONG– Journalists at the Chinese newspaper The Southern Weekly (also known as the Southern Weekend) have gone on a rare strike, claiming in an open letter that a New Year’s editorial calling for political reform and protection of individual rights was censored and re-written […]
GOMA – While the Congolese government was keeping the public in the dark about the fall of Goma to the M23 rebels in mid-November, here the news had already gone viral on Facebook. Soon after the rest of Congo was checking in on a variety of social networks to follow news updates and the latest […]
GENEVA – To distinguish themselves from Facebook and Twitter, new social networks are trying to find a different economic model. A trend is emerging – the return to paid subscriptions. From App.net to Diaspora, here is a short review of these new actors. App.net, the paying Twitter “We are selling our product, not our users.” […]
XINHUA (China), VOICE OF AMERICA (USA), REUTERS Worldcrunch BEIJING – Chinese legislature has passed a law that includes mandatory real-name registration for Internet users, Xinhua reported on Friday. The new rules were announced by the official Xinhua news agency on Twitter: Rules approved Friday in China to enhance protection of personal info online and safeguard […]
LONDON- We’re at 70 Lower Clapton Road, northeast London, where David and Eleanor are manning the register. While the clock approaches noon, the machine passes the 500-pounds mark (more than $810). It’s been ages since the two owners of independent bookshop “Pages of Hackney” managed to tally such amount, all done without any special marketing […]
BBC, LONDON FIRE BRIGADE (UK) Worldcrunch LONDON – Are you already getting Twitter alerts from the subway company? Football results? Movie listings ? Now it’s your turn to do your city a favor. The London Fire Brigade is now recruiting the Twitter army to spread information on fires and incidents around the city. Tweet your […]
Worldcrunch VATICAN CITY – It’s been a long time coming, but Pope Benedict XVI has finally graced the world with his first few tweets. Two weeks after establishing his Twitter handle, @Pontifex (Latin for “Pope”) in eight different languages, he finally sent out some 140-character blessings Wednesday morning : Dear friends, I am pleased to […]
LES ECHOS, METRO, 20 MINUTES (France), BBC, THE TELEGRAPH (UK) Worldcrunch Facebook has been forced to deny reports that private messages have been appearing publicly on the social networking site, as millions of users panic and company share prices plummet. France’s leading business daily Les Echos reports that the French government has summoned Facebook managers […]
PARIS – If you go by its website, Mars Kebab is the only fast-food restaurant in Paris that delivers sandwiches to the planet Mars. In the real world, Mars Kebab doesn’t exist, but that doesn’t keep it from having an excellent reputation on the web. Its promotional video has been viewed 105,000 times on YouTube, […]
JAKARTA GLOBE, ANTARA NEWS (Indonesia), AAP (Australia) Worldcrunch JAKARTA – A new Islamic social networking site will be launched in Indonesia in November, and will offer “better protection” for young Muslims from “harmful content” reports the Jakarta Globe. According to the Indonesian newspaper, the Beta version of the site is currently being tested by 1,000 […]