This week online

Twitter logoIt was announced on Wednesday that Twitter raised $200 million in a new round of funding from venture firm Kleiner Perkins raising its valuation to $3.7 billion.

“Sources said the San Francisco microblogging service is also adding two new board members: Flipboard’s Mike McCue and David Rosenblatt, whoran DoubleClick until a bit after it sold to Google” writes Kara Swisher from AllThingsD.

What will Twitter do with all of its new found wealth? One idea might be to figure out how to leverage its 175 million (and growing)  user base to make some money.


wikileaks logoOver on the other side of the pond Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, was granted bail in a London court on Thursday. Judge Duncan Ouseley agreed to release him under strict

conditions including wearing an electric tag, a  daily call in to the police, a 10:00 pm curfew and surrender of his passport.

Unless you don’t give two hoots about the news you know the purpose of Wikileaks is to expose the secrets of governments worldwide, in particular those of the United States.

According to CBS news, “Assange will be staying with [Vaughn] Smith on his 650-acre estate in a Georgian Mansion, called Ellingham Hall leading many to label his current internment ‘mansion arrest’ over ‘house arrest’.

Assange has been declared both exhaulted hero and terrorist-villain. After his arrest a worldwide group of activists-anarchists calling themselves Anonymous disabled a number of large websites in support of Wikileaks and Assange. These sites included some biggies – Mastercard, Visa and Paypal each of which had denied services to Wikileaks’ contributors.

Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow sent a tweet on December 3rd declaring the first infowar had begun.

To that Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram says, Let’s Be Careful About Calling This a Cyber-War.


mark zuckerberg time magazines person of the yearOn Wednesday Time Magazine announced Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg their 2010 Person of the Year and the always civil citizens of the web went ballistic. ‘NO!’ they cried on Reddit, Twitter and Youtube. ‘Not Zuckerberg! The person of the year award should go to [you guessed it] Jullian Assange.’  Assange even won Time Magazine’s public poll.

The Guardian’s Josh Hallidy and Matthew Weaver said, ‘Zuckerberg beat a string of notable personalities to the accolade – including WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange and the president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai. The 33 rescued Chilean miners and the rightwing US Tea Party movement were also named as runners-up,’

At 26, Zuckerberg is the second youngest to receive the nod from Time (Charles Lindbergh was 25). On his Facebook bio he states, ‘I’m trying to make the world a more open place.’ In doing so he has unleashed the ire of millions who accuse him of severe invasion of privacy. Still his gang of 500 million plus marches on with millions of ‘likes’ here and million ‘status updates’ there.

So was it wrong of Time to elect Zuckerberg as person of the year ‘for changing how we all live our lives’? Would Julian Assange have been a better choice? They are both certainly changing the world in mighty big ways. I’m just not too sure if it is for the better.