Last year, Virgin Atlantic found employees slagging off customers on Facebook. Last week it was Tesco’s turn. Now, Waitrose has found their staff making nasty noises in the online world.

The insults aren’t particularly great – with comments calling customers pikeys, ugly, mad and smelly – which could be extremely damaging to the brand and its connotations.

Waitrose response was that it is “completely unacceptable behaviour. It goes against our codes of conduct which make it very clear that partners who post this type of material are in breach of their terms of employment….The nature of the internet makes it difficult to get content removed once posted, however we do have teams that monitor website activity and will be conducting an immediate investigation.”

Personally, I think responding favorably offline in this way is a great way of ensuring something online can be brought under control. Social media is notoriously difficult to reign in if negative views are floating around – and by reassuring customers that they’re taking the matter seriously, as well as giving off signs to staff that it won’t be tolerated, Waitrose seem to be dealing with this quite well.

In case anyone missed it, the US intelligence agencies – CIA, FBI, IBM – announced that Twitter means terror.

A rough report that somehow (as usual) found its way onto the internet gives a fun list of online and mobile apps – including MySpace, Facebook and Twitter – that apparently terrorists could be using. (As an aside, if I worked for a security agency, I’d be more worried about how a report like that got out onto the internet).

I won’t deny that social media has been – and still is – used by people to post extremist ideology, racism and the like, but when this happened, it’s totally unacceptable and is more often than not removed very quickly, with often nasty reprocussions for whoever posted it.

I think though, what they’re panicking about is that certain media is practically in realtime, therefore seemingly a great tool for the tech-savvy terrorist. Which, to be honest, is possibly pushing any boundary of common sense; I personally doubt such people would be operating openly on social platforms - and what about all the other technological advances since the carrier pidgeon? Email, SMS - even a phone call - seem more likely to be used by the social-conscious terrorist.

I suppose, for arguments sake, that social platforms could be used for grooming and recruiting into that kind of thing, but I’m fairly sure we’d all notice if al-Qaeda was on Bebo.

Now our wonderful Government seems to be calling for the likes of GCHQ and Mi5 to be able to monitor mobile and internet-based systems, storing details of ALL phone calls made and websites visited for up to two years in some kind of storage-super-computer. The wonderful Jacqui Smith seems to suggested this, but even top anti-terror experts are saying it’s nuts.

At least makes Google’s ideas on data storage look like a nice option, for once.

Found this at Clever Little Pod. It amused me – is this the the future of online networking?!

Ok, there seems to have been some confusion over my opinion that the digital industry will flourish as the economy takes a down-turn.

My original comments related to online marketing.

Alongside my otimistic agency views, I’m also of the opinion that other internet-functioning businesses could be hit pretty hard. Examples:

E-Bay issued a stark warning that profits could be down this christmas – this last quarter saw revenue rise by 12% ($2.12bn) which was lower than analyst predictions. A quick recalculation later and the number-monkeys expect total 2008 revenue to be between $8.53 - $8.68bn (still more money than most people will ever see). 

To be more competitive, Amazon has slashed it’s free delivery qualification costs from £15 to £5. This means that over 90% of their products will be delivered for free. I personally think this is just common sense – leading industry experts have long-advised companies to play around more with free delivery.

Google’s market-share has dipped a teeny-tiny bit. My cynical side says that this explains why they’ve suddenly backtracked on their long-standing policy not to allow gambling advertisements. Now, potentially generating £millions more with this hypocritical move, as we have already seen a quarterly increase on profit this year. I’m sure we’ll see Google beginning to strangle the competition again.

Social networks are struggling to generate viable income. Which is no big secret. Sadly though, this is directly affecting people working in the industry, as they become statistics in the economic downturn. The most recent victim is Hi5, the third largest global network, where it was announced this week that around 10-15% of the workforce would be laid off. Other companies being affected include start-ups and software; again, the most recent casualty being Jive.

When the whole world is suffering economic crisis, it’s obviously going to affect the world-wide-web. But to reiterate my original point; some parts of the digital industry will do well from the misfortune of others. Yes, it will get increasingly competitive, but with decent strategy and user-confidence, those who succeed will be very apparent. Whilst we’re seeing companies collapse every day, I hardly think this is the end of the internet.