Yes, my boss follows me on Twitter. And it’s no use denying that this makes a difference to what I tweet. For example, I always feel bad about not tweeting, because I report on digital media and a tacit part of my job description is to maintain an online presence. However, I don’t tweet if I am in a bad mood or am simply too busy. On the other hand, we should examine where the line should be drawn for social media and our private lives.

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A Twitter campaign that rippled through the U.K. Tuesday helped to induce an about-face on a legal injunction that was preventing the Guardian newspaper from reporting on a public parliamentary proceeding.

Bloggers and Twitter users, led by Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger, expressed indignation about a court injunction that called into question the British newspaper’s right to report on a parliamentary debate.

The catalyst was an order filed against the Guardian on Sept. 11 by Carter-Ruck, the London-based law firm representing Trafigura Ltd., an oil-and-gas firm alleged to be responsible for dumping toxic waste in the Ivory Coast.

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Google’s (GOOG) search algorithm works on a simple principle: on the web, sites link to other authoritative sources, and the more sites link to something the more authoritative they think it is. That’s great if you’re dealing with sites that actually follow that rule–as the vast majority do.

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Unless you’re an undertaker, chances are you spend as little time as possible thinking about death. Eventually, however, most of us get round to drawing up a will.

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Its 17 declarations on the future of journalism in the age of the internet have been discussed worldwide.

As soon as it came out, it was spread all over the net: 15 German journalists and bloggers wrote an “Internet Manifesto” on how journalism works today. Shortly after it was announced online, their server went offline. The reaction was overwhelming.

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Is hyperlocal the magic bullet when it comes to fixing all that’s wrong with the news business? That’s the issue up for debate in this month’s Media Talk USA.

Joining Jeff Jarvis in the studio is self-styled queen of hyperlocal, Deb Galant from Baristanet.com, and Jim Willse editor of the The Star Ledger and NJ.com.

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The tech press is full of people who want to tell you how completely awesome life is going to be when everything moves to “the cloud”–that is, when all your important storage, processing and other needs are handled by vast, professionally managed data-centres.

Here’s something you won’t see mentioned, though: the main attraction of the cloud to investors and entrepreneurs is the idea of making money from you, on a recurring, perpetual basis, for something you currently get for a flat rate or for free without having to give up the money or privacy that cloud companies hope to leverage into fortunes.

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The London-based social media firm Headshift is the first acquisition of Jeffrey Dachis’s newly formed Dachis Group. Dachis’s former agency, Razorfish, was a huge success with a value of $5.5 billion at the height of the 2000 bubble. With his new company, the entrepreneur plans to invest in the corporate social networking area and will focus on making customer participation a big business: “Social business is the new way of working, not just new technology.”

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In newspapers’ game of revenue roulette, there’s a lot of talk lately about their trying to create membership plans. The New York Times (NYT) and the Guardian, to name two, reportedly have visions of tote bags, mugs, and events in their heads. And I think that’s a fine idea. No salvation. But a fine idea.

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Yet again, Wikipedia is about to break new ground. The website that has become one of the biggest open repositories of knowledge is due–within the next week or so–to hit the mark of 3m articles in English.

It’s all a very long way from January 2001, when Wikipedia launched. Its first million articles took five years to put together, but the second was achieved just 12 months later.

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In bringing together their search traffic, Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO) are fighting an unwinnable war. Worse, they are still fighting the last war. Now that Yahoo has agreed to send its users’ questions to the Microsoft Bing search engine for answers, the companies’ combined share of the search market will be 7.7 percent in the UK and 28 percent in the US, according to comScore (SCOR).

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We haven’t heard much recently about so-called virtual worlds such as Second Life, in which you move around with your own avatar. Critics must be hoping they have disappeared up their own ether. Actually, they are booming. The consultancy kzero.co.uk reports that membership of virtual worlds grew by 39 percent in the second quarter of 2009 to an estimated 579 million.

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Computers are evolving–literally. While the tech world argues netbooks vs notebooks, synthetic biologists are leaving traditional computers behind altogether. A team of US scientists have engineered bacteria that could solve complex mathematical problems faster than anything made from silicon.

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John Plunkett, reporting for the Guardian last week, in a story titled “Financial Times Editor Says Most News Websites Will Charge Within a Year”:

The Financial Times editor, Lionel Barber, has predicted that “almost all” news organisations will be charging for online content within a year.

Barber said building online platforms that could charge readers on an article-by-article or subscription basis was one of the key challenges facing news organisations.

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The Financial Times editor, Lionel Barber, has predicted that “almost all” news organisations will be charging for online content within a year.

Barber said building online platforms that could charge readers on an article-by-article or subscription basis was one of the key challenges facing news organisations.

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